Page 26 - FCW, November/December 2019

Public Sector Innovations
10x
General Services Administration
The General Services Administration’s 10x program is a four-stage process that funds federal employees’ ideas to use technology to modernize the customer experience. The effort, begun by GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, is modeled on the methods venture capitalists use to uncover and grow promising ideas and technology. With financial support ranging from $20,000 to over $1 million, the program allows agencies to avoid formally tapping their budgets for development, modernization and enhancement.
The process begins when a federal employee submits a three-sentence suggestion that encapsulates a problem and his or her idea for fixing it. The solution grows from there based on input from experts in the federal government and academia. If the research shows that a solution is viable, 10x will fund it and search for ways to bring in other federal funding sources with the goal of having governmentwide impact.
Since 2015, employees at 27 agencies have submitted over 500 ideas to 10x. The program has funded 104 projects for a variety of products and services, including highly specialized open-source
tool development and investments in high- profile governmentwide technology.
Two programs — the Eligibility APIs Initiative’s shared web services for human resources and the U.S. Data Federation project to collect and share data across
the federal government — were the first to reach the fourth stage of 10x funding, which means they’re excellent candidates to scale up for wide use across the federal government and have an enterprisewide impact.
Access Boston
City of Boston
Two years of work, three tools and 22,000 employees added up to one new identity and access management program. Called Access Boston, it centralizes reliable access to information and technology resources while increasing security.
The city’s cybersecurity team combined SailPoint’s IdentityIQ, Ping Identity’s suite of tools and Radiant Logic’s RadiantOne FID into a self-service portal. City employees can now access many central applications that the Department of Innovation and Technology runs, such
as intranet and building maintenance requests, with a single sign-on — in other words, “all those things that were disparate and in various places,” said Gretchen
Grozier, the department’s project manager. In addition, Access Boston works on any device, a boon to the many employees who
rarely see an office. For instance, parking inspectors, who are in the field all day, can use mobile devices to request a day off, change their personal email address or update their marital status.
“It’s been really helpful for people who aren’t hardcore computer users” to be able to access city applications and data without making a trip to the office, Grozier said.
Access Boston, which went live in April, relies on a stronger password policy that features multifactor authentication, role-based privileges and automated termination of access when employees leave their city jobs.
“We secured our technology systems, but we also provide convenient and reliable access for end users, which was really important to making sure that everything is really, really secure,” Grozier said.
AI-Able Data Ecosystem Pilot, Clinical Trial Matching System
Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Health and Human Services, General Services Administration
Gil Alterovitz, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ director of artificial intelligence, wanted to match veterans with clinical trials that would address their health concerns, so he decided to create a data ecosystem using patient information, diagnoses and lab results pulled from multiple databases in government and industry.
“This work would involve not only open datasets, but also small, closed ones with standardized use agreements for AI in
the right format so tools could be scaled quickly later,” Alterovitz said.
He added that “a voluntary incentivization framework” was designed to encourage participation and create
an ecosystem of usable and reusable components.
24 November/December 2019 FCW.COM