Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has issued a memo detailing reporting requirements and deadlines for agencies in fiscal year 2021 in compliance with the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014.

Vought said in the Nov. 9th memo the updated FISMA guidance directs agencies to report to OMB the status of their data security programs and requires inspectors general to carry out independent reviews of those programs on an annual basis. 

“At a minimum, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Act agencies must update their CIO Metrics quarterly and non-CFO Act agencies must update their CIO metrics on a semiannual basis,” the memo reads. 

The document requires senior agency officials for privacy to report annually and submit documents separately via CyberScope. Those documents include an agency’s privacy program plan, breach response plan and a privacy continuous monitoring strategy. 

For the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, the memo states that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “will maintain a fully operational Federal Dashboard to provide, in aggregate, situational awareness of the Federal Government's overall cybersecurity posture.” 

The CDM program management office and non-CFO Act agencies will collaborate to set up information exchange between the federal dashboard and their dashboards by the end of the fourth quarter of FY 2021, according to the memo.

The Office of Management and Budget on Thursday released a memo providing guidance for agencies to start accepting digital requests for disclosure of records protected under the Privacy Act of 1974.

“Modernizing these processes across the Federal Government is important to facilitating transparency and enabling access to Federal programs through seamless and secure digital service delivery,” the memo states.

The document, which was issued in accordance with the Creating Advanced Streamlined Electronic Services for Constituents Act of 2019, directs agencies to offer a digital service option for individuals to request records within a year.

Under the memo, agencies should facilitate remote identity-proofing and authentication process for individuals requesting access to records, publish the templates for access and consent forms on their websites’ privacy program pages and accept the consent and access forms from people who are authenticated and identity-proofed remotely via digital channels.

“Agencies are responsible for modernizing supporting information systems and digitizing any existing processes to ensure that a digital service option is offered in addition to paper-based or in-person options,” the memo reads.

Stuart McGuigan, chief information officer at the State Department, said a new “reimagine taskforce” completed a 90-day sprint to explore ways on how the agency could apply lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic to address information technology challenges, Federal News Network reported Friday.

“We can’t lose our agile and iterative approach to learning and continuous improvement,” McGuigan said Friday during an ACT-IAC event. “What things do we find remain barriers to effective flexible workforces that, with a little focus, we can remove and prioritize those more than maybe they’ve been prioritized in the past.”

The State Department had invested in cloud platforms prior to the pandemic and McGuigan said the move enabled the agency to improve identity management, provide remote employees access to emails and virtually onboard 430 personnel.

Michael Mestrovic, deputy CIO at the State Department, said the agency’s bureau of information resource management adopted an Agile approach to develop and field 10 applications during the pandemic’s early phases, which helped the agency repatriate U.S. citizens overseas.

The U.S. Navy plans to conduct tabletop exercises and implement artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of efforts to centralize the service branch’s information operations under a single component, C4ISRnet reported Saturday.

Vice Adm. Jeffrey Trussler, director of naval intelligence and deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told attendees at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event that the Navy needs to take advantage of the radio-frequency spectrum as well as physical environments before losing the information advantage.

He noted that the Navy is rethinking its distributed maritime operations in response to authority delegation needs.

“Windows of opportunity might be very short. The ability to take advantage, when we talk about the information age, it’s all about speed, it’s about the precision of information you get,” said Trussler.

“It also requires the speed of decision. It’s not just accumulating a lot of great information. If you don’t act on it in an appropriate amount of time, that decision advantage you may have with the information … it may just go away,” he added.