Page 46 - FCW, November/December 2019

Public Sector Innovations
myStudentAid Mobile Application
Federal Student Aid, Department of Education
As hard as it is to get into college, finding the money to pay for it can be just as tough. The Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office receives about 20 million applications for financial aid each year, representing about two-thirds of graduating high school seniors.
To streamline the complex process and make it more accessible to students and families, FSA created a mobile app for submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The data from the FAFSA form is shared with colleges and helps determine students’ eligibility for need-based loans, grants and work-study programs.
The myStudentAid app customizes
the experience based on the user’s role
— whether student, parent or preparer. Applicants can also switch seamlessly between the mobile app and the web-based application as they complete and submit a new application or a renewal FAFSA form.
The mobile app interfaces with a number of federal systems, including the IRS’ Data Retrieval Tool, which populates users’ FAFSA applications with information from their federal tax returns. Once a FAFSA form is completed, parents can use the app to transfer information to a FAFSA form for another child. The data can also be sent to financial aid applications in participating states.
The myStudentAid app was built using standard, open technologies and connects to a back-end environment hosted in a FedRAMP-approved cloud that provides initial validation of the mobile application and supports the transmission of the FAFSA data to FSA’s data center.
To date, myStudentAid is approaching 1 million downloads, bringing the Education Department closer to its goal of having
all college-bound high school students complete the form.
Navy Total Force Manpower Management System Modernization
Department of the Navy
The Navy’s Total Force Manpower Management System helps track the hundreds of thousands of Navy personnel stationed around the world and provides the data processing power necessary to prepare those individuals for their missions. The TFMMS modernization effort has enabled leaders to manage their current and future manpower requirements more efficiently and quickly.
It was a massive undertaking. TFMMS encompasses over 760,000 billets and
9,500 organizational activities, and
the legacy system was a hodgepodge of document repositories, manual processes and custom applications that hindered enterprise collaboration and compliance.
A team of Navy personnel and contractors, coordinated by Navy Project Manager Gregory St. Julien, overhauled TFMMS from top to bottom, moving from a mainframe
to a three-tier service-oriented architecture and mixing commercial, open-source and custom government software to deliver
an easily adaptable system that pulls all manpower business processes, policies and documents into one enterprise system.
TFMMS is the Navy’s first system to combine classified manpower data and redacted unclassified data in real time.
It uses a Defense Information Systems Agency cross-domain enterprise solution to deliver constant, global access — a notable improvement over the previous once-a-day schedule for data transfers.
St. Julien praised his colleagues and
the many TFMMS stakeholders for
driving change at such a scale. He added that progress in 2019 far exceeded his expectations and has changed others’ beliefs about what’s possible. As a result, still more enhancements are likely in 2020.
PSC Work Smarter
Program Support Center, Department of Health and Human Services
The Department of Health and Human Services’ shared-services provider, the Program Support Center, fielded an automated tool that learns how to help acquisition workers move more quickly through some of their jobs’ repetitive activities.
The PSC Work Smarter tool binds business process modeling with robotic process automation to create a platform
that can automate tedious tasks across
a range of software systems. With some applications, the tool can do in seconds what it would take a human worker an hour to
do. Employees then review the automated work to ensure its accuracy, security and adherence to privacy rules.
Ultimately, PSC officials hope the platform will also provide real-time acquisition data, such as pricing and contract terms and conditions, so that workers won’t have to track down the information.
Although the tool was first used within PSC to assist with contract closeout initiation and re-creation for assisted acquisition, the center wants to make the platform available throughout HHS as an all-around workhorse. The finance team has successfully tested Work Smarter for travel card and operational reconciliations, and several HHS components are adapting the contract closeout automation to their workf lows.
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