Page 28 - FCW, March/April 2021

Teaming Up on Emerging Technologies
Executive Viewpoint
A conversation with
PAMELA ISOM
PAMELA ISOM
Deputy CIO for Architecture, Engineering, Technology and Innovation, Energy Department
An innovation leader talks about how DOE develops and deploys new technologies to solve the department’s biggest challenges
What are some of the key challenges that DOE’s technology innovators are tackling?
The biggest challenge we’re tackling is the enterprise scale of the solutions. We are building platforms that will accommodate the entire complex at DOE, which includes all the national labs.
We also have to think very carefully about the rollout and the rollout strategy. We need the experience to be very
good for our customers, and for some solutions that are necessities but also innovative, sometimes customers don’t really understand the tools and the value proposition they bring to the table. That’s why the whole organizational readiness piece must be part of the technology innovators’ roadmap.
Currently, we are expanding our
scope across federal agencies, and
our technology roadmap will include extensibility beyond the DOE complex in the future. It’s definitely something that we need to address, and we are improving each day.
Which emerging technologies are you particularly excited about as possible tools for addressing those challenges?
We’re excited that cloud service providers are starting to integrate intelligent
automation capabilities, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, into their solutions.
I am also the senior agency official for geospatial information, so I’m definitely excited about the geospatial data aspect.
At DOE, we have made great strides in geospatial data management strategies and enabling capabilities so that we’re able to share and exchange geospatial data assets. We’ve also done a great job of thinking holistically about geospatial data management.
For instance, we’re establishing what we call a dynamic data fabric that will rest on top of various geospatial data assets so that we can enable better aggregation and curation of information to support some of the advanced analytics that we’re doing and some of the AI and ML capabilities.
How does DOE’s Innovation Community Center support the development and testing of new technologies?
The ICC was established in 2019, and I’m the thought leader for it. The ICC inspires innovation by providing a collaborative capability to discover the mission challenges and the supporting platforms and then to develop, test and conduct quality assurance on the delivery of production solutions.
At DOE, we have made great strides in geospatial data management strategies and enabling capabilities so that we’re able to share and exchange geospatial data assets.
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