Tag Archives: GovEvents Blog

DoD’s Efforts to Make Emerging Technology Established Technology

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The U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) shift from a focus on counterterrorism to one of near-peer rivals has highlighted the need to incorporate emerging technologies into the DoD faster than ever before. To keep up with the technological advances of peer nations, it is critical that the DoD speed the time to the field of technologies that can give our troops an advantage in terms of intelligence, data sharing, and visibility. But in this need for speed, the security and the reliability of these solutions cannot be ignored.

DoD is successfully striking the balance of speed, innovation, and reliability with several recent implementations of emerging technology. Continue reading →

Department Spotlight: Veterans Affairs

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Beyond its important mission of "caring for those who have served in our nation's military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors," the work of today's U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is guided by a strategic plan that lays out agency goals to be achieved through 2028. The projects the VA initiates over the coming years will support the following goals:

  1. Consistently communicate with customers and partners to assess and maximize performance, evaluate needs, and build long-term relationships and trust
  2. Deliver timely, accessible, and high-quality benefits, care, and services
  3. Build and maintain trust through proven stewardship, transparency, and accountability
  4. Strive toward excellence in all business operations--including governance, systems, data, and management

Several recent programs illustrate the commitment that the VA has to meeting and exceeding these goals by 2028 and beyond. Continue reading →

The Government Case for Generative AI

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Generative AI is a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that produces content. That could be a story, an image, or an audio file, and is a shift from traditional AI usage, which is focused on completing a task based on predefined rules. Generative AI utilizes existing data to produce this new content based on a prompt such as "write a blog post on government use of generative AI." Disclaimer: generative AI was not used in the creation of this blog post.

Balancing Act of Generative AI

Like traditional AI, generative AI holds great promise for automating highly manual tasks in many areas of government. A recent report found that three-fourths of agency leaders said their agencies have already begun establishing teams to assess the impact of generative AI and are planning to implement initial applications in the coming months. Continue reading →

Cloudy Days are Here to Stay

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Cloud services have allowed federal agencies to meet the demands of quickly scaling digital government initiatives while maintaining a high level of security. It's also been a huge money-saver. The government has yielded $4.7 billion in savings by closing data centers and relying more and more on cloud. The federal government spent a total of $12.3 billion in FY22 on cloud goods and services, a 30 percent increase from the previous year.

To ensure agencies continue to see savings amidst increased spending, there are several initiatives in place to modernize how government procures and pays for cloud services. Continue reading →

FITARA’s Sweet 16 Shows One-Third of Agencies Making Gains in Modernization

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Since 2015 the government has bi-annually taken the pulse of IT modernization efforts with the FITARA scorecard. Created as part of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), the scorecard provides a glance at how agencies are managing seven key IT activities:

  • Agency CIO authority enhancements
  • Transparency and risk management
  • Portfolio review savings
  • Data center consolidation
  • Modernizing government technology (MGT)
  • Cyber
  • Transition off Networx contract

The latest report unveiled at a roundtable event rather than the traditional hearing, showed three agencies achieving As, 16 Bs, and five Cs. Education and Labor received their first overall A score, joining the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had previously scored an A. Of those Bs, six were improvements from Cs - Agriculture, Energy, Homeland Security and Interior, Office of Personnel Management, and Social Security Administration. Continue reading →