Page 36 - FCW, November/December 2019

Public Sector Innovations
have been serviced, and during a six-month pilot test, drivers documented more than 25,000 times they were unable to service a location and why. All the data that drivers and managers log is immediately available to other city departments.
“The biggest monetary benefit has been in the fleet management side of the program,” Dias said. “Alerts to the fleet managers
and drivers allow us to address problems before they cause significant damage to the vehicle.“
The effort is part of the city’s “overall plan to replace traditional pen-and-paper charting with digital documentation,” he added. It “is much more cost-effective, time- saving and accessible in public records.”
Consolidated Budget System
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Health and Human Services
Budgeting $1.3 trillion in federal funds for health care entitlements and administrative costs is, unsurprisingly, a heavy lift. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Budget and Analysis Group found a way to lighten the load through a modernization project called the Consolidated Budget System.
CBS has shifted the previously labor- intensive process into a modern budget building and program execution management application. It automates the time-consuming, manual work to track down information from multiple sources and enter it into a database. The system also eliminates human errors, provides a single place for formulating and executing budgets, and integrates with the president’s budget and operating plan.
CBS improves accuracy and operating efficiencies and provides greater visibility into performance to inform management decisions. In addition, the system automatically tracks historical data to improve analyses that help the agency estimate and plan future budgets. It’s a crucial element for achieving the Office of Financial Management’s strategic goals by 2020.
CMS launched the system earlier this
year, and benefits include standardization across budget accounts, less reliance on spreadsheets and increased reporting capabilities. This fall, the agency plans to go live with the budget formulation piece of the solution.
Crowdsourced Flight Testing
59th Test and Evaluation Squadron, 53rd Test Evaluation Group, Air Combat Command 53rd Wing, U.S. Air Force
The Air Force’s 59th Test and Evaluation Squadron is responsible for test instrumentation management and data validation for a wide range of aircraft and weapons systems, but its work on a new system for data collection and analysis for the F-35 is particularly noteworthy.
The new system’s Quick Reaction Instrumentation Package (QRIP) eliminated the need for a bulky legacy data pod and reduced the data collection instrument from 1,200 pounds to a 12-pound device smaller than a loaf of bread. Equally impressive is the fact that the per-aircraft installation cost dropped from $30 million to $100,000.
Those improvements dramatically increase how many aircraft can collect and disseminate data, enabling the Air Force to move from individual testers to more of a crowdsourced approach. More than 2,000 test flights have been conducted to date. And the Air Force
can now optimize the download and analysis process so that the data crunching that once took hours now only takes 20 minutes.
Faster data processing allowed the squadron to uncover an anomaly that caused the F-35 to register as if it were grounded when it was actually flying at 30,000 feet.
“This malfunction would have potentially caused an air disaster,” said Erin Horrell, chief growth officer at Intelligent Waves. “This information helped the Air Force catch the problem early and replace the malfunctioning sensors, which potentially saved the lives of future F-35 warfighters.... What would have taken three to five years to discover — or ever — can now be done in a matter of days.”
Department of State High Availability Disaster Recovery
Department of State
Diplomacy relies on dependable communications, and today, that means email. So when the State Department suffered numerous email outages, it got the attention of agency leaders and prompted an overhaul of five mission-critical applications to improve their availability and resiliency.
Working with Dell Technologies, State’s Information Resource Management Systems and Integration Office moved aging IT systems to a converged system that spans a three-site high-availability disaster recovery (HADR) architecture.
State officials abandoned a legacy data center that housed equipment and software from several vendors at various life cycle stages in favor of a platform engineered for stability. The HADR technology provided automated failover for applications during upgrades, maintenance, and unplanned hardware and network failures. As a result, users could work with no interruptions to their ability to access important information.
After the technology worked successfully on the department’s unclassified network, it was deployed to the classified network.
The program has saved the State Department over $10 million in infrastructure costs and supported users through two data center moves with zero application and system downtime. When several power and network outages hit the department’s East Coast data centers, there was no impact on the mission.
The technology has also formed the baseline for the department’s on-premises data center infrastructure as it moves to a hybrid cloud environment.
34 November/December 2019 FCW.COM