Page 11 - GCN, June/july 2017

NASA’s newest employee isn’t human
BY MATT LEONARD
One of the newest employees at the NASA Shared Services Center can copy and paste text, move folders and many other tasks. That might sound routine, but the new hire, named Washington, isn’t a person — it’s a bot.
Much like a human employee, however, Washington has its own computer, its own email account, its own permissions within applications and its own role within the organization.
“These \\\[bots\\\] are doing work that any employee can do today,” Jim Walker, a shared services portfolio manager at NSSC, told GCN.
“We’re really thinking of it as a digital employee.”
The Washington bot went live
in May with its first application — helping with human resources tasks. It takes information from email messages sent to its inbox, copies the information and uses it to populate files in an HR case management application.
“When someone in NASA wants
to hire a new employee, they need
to see if that person meets all of the requirements for suitability within NASA,” Walker said. The automated data-shuffling frees up HR staff time for more complex, higher-value tasks.
NSSC plans to release new applications in the coming weeks, including one for the chief financial officer’s team that will distribute funds received from Congress into different accounts. An application for the CIO’s office will automate purchase requests.
“We looked for really low-hanging fruit,” Walker said, adding that officials wanted to make sure the automation
worked well before moving on to bigger projects.
NSSC plans to extend the use of the bots to the rest of NASA later this year. Other parts of the agency have already expressed interest in the technology, Walker said, including security officials who want to see if bots could be used to monitor security logs in near-real time.
The bot’s vast potential to take over administrative tasks from humans makes it the next word processor
or spreadsheet, said Marc Mancher, principal for federal strategy and operations at Deloitte. He and his team helped NSSC with the pilot phase of the project and Washington’s deployment.
Walker added that even as governments seek to slim down, their responsibilities are constantly growing. Bots can help NASA by taking on time- consuming, manual tasks and allowing people to engage in higher-level work. •
editor’s note
Submit your dig IT nominations today!
Time is running out to submit nominations for this year’s dig IT Awards — GCN’s showcase of discovery and
innovation in government IT.
The awards
celebrate leading-
edge technologies
and the pioneering IT professionals who are driving them forward in five distinct areas of government IT:
• Cybersecurity
• Cloud and Infrastructure
• Big Data, Analytics and Visualization
• Mobile
• Robotics and Unmanned Systems
The innovation can lie in a new technology or in the ways established technology is being used to make governments
function better. Nominations can be submitted in multiple categories, as appropriate, because convergence is
often critical to the mission.
There’s also an “other” option
for the disruptive technologies that are
emerging so quickly that they don’t fit into any of the categories above.
Nominations will be accepted through June 30, and winners will be honored this fall in the pages of GCN and in person at the GCN dig
IT Awards Gala.
So please help us identify the best in innovative government IT. To learn more, go to GCN.com/digIT.
— Troy K. Schneider tschneider@gcn.com @troyschneider
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