Two members of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) Board said today that the group is prioritizing shareable playbooks so all of the Federal government can benefit from agencies’ modernization projects.
Sheena Burrell – chief information officer (CIO) at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and TMF board member – said that each of the fund’s awardees create a playbook for their TMF project that then becomes publicly available for other agencies to follow.
“One of the great things about the TMF,” Burrell said during the GIST24 conference in Washington today, “if there are other agencies that need [guidance], each group does a playbook, and we give out that playbook and it becomes available.”
Burrell noted that many Federal agencies have challenges with timely access to data, and said that theme is central to a modernization project the TMF granted the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) more than $16 million for last summer.
The $16.2 million TMF investment will enable the NTSB to build a unified digital experience that makes it easy to find, understand, and use information related to investigations and safety recommendations, is backed by comprehensive data sets, and includes all related content.
“We have investigation data in a lot of different places and because of that it’s not easily accessible, exploitable, and we need this information, especially when there’s a current or emerging threat,” NTSB CIO Michael Anthony said today.
“If you come to our site, you could probably find four or five different ways to search information. None of it’s intuitive, and none of it probably yields the information you’re looking for,” the CIO said. “With TMF, we believe we can improve all of these areas … by putting all of our information in one central secure repository” as well as getting the information mapped out appropriately and cleansing the data, he added.
“With that, we believe we can reduce the duplication of entry within the investigation process, streamline the process, provide each and every one of you a simple, intuitive search, access to information, proactive notifications for family members or other interested parties in accident case updates,” Anthony said. “And then finally, more modern and secure ways to share information with other Federal partners.”
NARA’s CIO said her agency struggles with comprehensive data search too, and when NTSB is done with its TMF project, NARA will be able to leverage that playbook to jumpstart its own modernization journey.
Burrell said, “If I now need to understand, ‘Well, how did you do search? And is it something that I can do?’ Even taking it even a step further, looking at it from an AI perspective, and saying, ‘How can we reuse that code? Or how can we make these things better?’”
“How do we look at it, maybe do cognitive search or semantic search or something like that,” she continued, “and for all agencies, not just that one person with an agency. I think that’s the great benefit of the TMF.”
Harrison Smith, the acquisition innovation advocate at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and a TMF board member, said that the playbooks are an “incredibly important part of what’s going on.”
“The availability and the shareability and the reuse and expansion, of not only technologies and code, but also the approaches to the projects,” Smith said. “I find that within the Federal space … the fastest way to get somebody more comfortable with an approach that you’re recommending is saying, ‘Hey, go talk to this Federal person somewhere else, they’ve got an artifact that procurements approved, that finance already approved, that the CIO has already approved.’ So that’s being packaged and provided to folks writ large.”
NARA’s CIO noted that the TMF playbooks will be critical when it comes to agencies adopting AI tech.
“From an AI perspective, why should we reinvent the wheel if somebody’s already done it? Let’s figure out, how do we just leverage that,” Burrell said. “And I think that’s going to be one of the things that the TMF board really leans in on as we continue in the future.”
