Weekly Roundup December 18-22, 2023

The amazing public servants the public doesn’t know. Tom Temin from federalnewsnetwork.com will be presenting a series of interviews with a sample of Rank awardees in the coming days. People doing good without cynicism or hope of riches — how’s that for the holiday season in a year when all the news seems bad? The Rank people, members of the Senior Executive Service or its equivalent in technical and scientific fields, do get rewarded with a substantial bonus. As a long-ago boss once remarked, “A pat on the back without a showing of the green is meaningless.”

TMF’s 2023 IT Impact Report Counts $177M of New Fundings. The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) has issued its fiscal year (FY) 2023 Impact Report, offering a detailed look into the fund’s investments over the past year and a look ahead to what’s in store for 2024. The fund received a $1 billion cash infusion from Congress in 2021 through the American Rescue Plan (ARP). Notably, the new report says all TMF projects in FY2023 were made with ARP funding, with a grand total of $177 million invested in 18 new projects across 17 agencies.

Report: Agencies Trending Toward More GenAI use in 2024. Federal agencies will increasingly use emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (AI) to augment their work in 2024 and beyond, according to a new Deloitte report on government technology trends. The forecast – which examines “the accelerating technology trends most likely to cause disruption over the next 18-24 months” across the government – predicts that officials will push to embrace new tools and services, even as they remain focused on shoring up their existing IT systems and expanding their tech workforces. 

Chief data officers focused on accelerating AI adoption across government. Chief data officers across the federal government see their work as the key to accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence tools across the federal government. More than half of federal CDOs who took a survey conducted by the Data Foundation and Deloitte said they’re already using basic or advanced AI tools. Nearly all CDOs who took the survey said they expect their agency to adopt AI tools next year. In a 2022 survey, 45% of CDOs said they had no responsibility for AI tools at their agencies.

Year-in-Review: Top Federal AI Moments of 2023. 2023 was the year of artificial intelligence (AI). With the emergence of ChatGPT, AI came to the forefront of the federal government’s policy decisions. From the administration’s long-awaited executive order (EO) on AI, to Capitol Hill’s race to regulate the emerging technology, here are some of the top 2023 Federal AI moments – in no particular order – that you should care about as we head into 2024.

Meet the new chief scientist at the government’s premier oversight agency. The Government Accountability Office, the chief oversight arm of Congress , has a new chief scientist. He joins the agency after having been chief scientist at Noblis, a nonprofit research and consulting institute with many federal clients. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin  spoke with Dr. Sterling Thomas.

Q&A: IRS’ Kaschit Pandya on CIO, CTO Journey.  With the IRS collecting more than $4.9 trillion in Federal taxes for fiscal year 2022 – totaling 96 percent of all government funding for that year. Central to the agency’s ongoing modernization efforts is Acting Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Kaschit Pandya, who has been hard at work on helping to engineer IRS’ biggest technology face-lift in two decades. MeriTalk sat down recently with the acting CIO – who will continue as the agency’s CTO when IRS welcomes Rajiv Uppal as CIO early next year – for the latest snapshot on the continuing modernization work at the agency.

THIS WEEK @ THE CENTER 

NEW BLOGS: Along with releasing our new book, Transforming the Business of Government: Insights on Resiliency, Innovation, and Performance, we began a blog series that excerpts the 15 chapters that compose this book. This week we posted the Chapter Two - Cybersecurity and Chapter Three - Supply Chain  on the Center blog. 

ICYMI – Ensuring a World-Class IT Experience for DoD Leadership:  A Conversation with Danielle Metz. This week Michael Keegan welcomed Danielle Metz, Director, Information Management & Technology (IM&T) directorate and CIO, Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for an engaging and insightful discussion on the work she does and the directorate she leads. They explored such topics as the OSD’s IT priorities, its modernization strategy, and the innovatively ways it is enhancing the digital experience for senior DoD leadership.