The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is recommending for the Department of State to involve more agencies in the development of a new bureau focused on emerging technologies and cybersecurity.

The State Department informed Congress of its intent to create the Bureau of Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) in 2019 to better address foreign threats to the critical infrastructure and trade operations of the U.S. and its allies, GAO said in a report published Tuesday.

CSET is also meant to streamline international cyber policy resources while promoting government coordination, the watchdog noted. According to GAO, representatives from six agencies that coordinate with the State Department on cyber diplomacy issues reported that the department “did not inform or involve them” in the planning process for CSET.

The watchdog said that the State Department must obtain the views of these six agencies to better identify risks in the establishment of CSET. 

“Without involving and communicating with agency partners on its reorganization plan, State lacks assurance that it will effectively achieve its goals for establishing CSET, and it increases the risk of negative effects from unnecessary fragmentation, overlap, and duplication of cyber diplomacy efforts,” the report states.

Federal agencies covered by the report include the departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, Commerce and the Treasury.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has created a cloud practice to make informed telework decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the cloud practice, OPM facilities spent two to three hours a day scraping data on COVID-19 cases from state and federal websites. 

The time it took to scrape data caused delays in consolidating and analyzing data on the COVID-19 pandemic. OPM called upon the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Cloud Adoption Center of Excellence (CoE) to develop a faster solution for the facilities team.

“I really jumped on that with the help of the CoE team because I just thought it was such a great, tangible use case to drive business value,” said Akanksha Sharma, senior advisor to OPM’s chief information officer (CIO). “So within three weeks, we were able to create a dashboard for them.”

With the help of GSA, OPM custom-developed an open-source Python application, as opposed to commercial off-the-shelf solution, to expedite development. The dashboard has been displayed using JavaScript and HTML libraries.

To make the dashboard easily accessible, OPM procured a cloud instance, which is currently in the process to be integrated agency-wide. The agency has also planned to configure the instance to enterprise settings. 

OPM has also worked with its cybersecurity team to streamline the authority to operate processes and create a playbook for adding additional apps to the cloud in the future. Since the dashboard only contains publicly available information, OPM will next work with its security and privacy teams to clear Federal Information Security Management Act. 

“The next major step is for us to create a procurement strategy that allows us to actually scale the cloud,” Sharma said. “Since we needed something quickly, I think we did it on a purchase card, so you really can’t put too many high-performing applications on there.”

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) has asked small and medium sized companies for feedback on how the government should work with the private sector to advance commercial AI innovation. A request for comments posted Wednesday on Federal Register says NSCAI will use the responses as it works on a final report slated for release in March 2021.

The commission wants the companies to share the challenges they face when doing business with the government and changes that could be made to reduce or address them. It is also seeking insights on how the government could better communicate national security challenges to industry and opportunities to demonstrate potential platforms.

NSCAI also requests input on obstacles to carrying out temporary talent exchanges and ways to address such challenges; how the government and industry can improve collaboration on product development to protect against bias in AI systems; and how the government can “incentivize responsible AI development through acquisition.”

Responses are due Oct. 23.

The commission issued an interim report in November 2019 to provide its initial evaluation of AI with regard to national security and recommend initial steps for the government to advance AI adoption.

Federal officials said they think lawmakers will someday incorporate the Technology Business Management (TBM) framework, a data-driven tool that could help show the impact of information technology investments on agencies’ missions, into future Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act scorecards, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

David Shive, chief information officer at the General Services Administration (GSA), noted about the parallelism between the FITARA scorecard and TBM.

“They’re all about increased transparency, whether it’s transparency in how an IT shop is delivering against the business mission of the agency it’s serving or it’s cost transparency, where you’re assessing the value of IT investments relative to the business value derived out of those investments,” he said Wednesday at an AFFIRM event.

Shive noted that the use of TBM could help boost employee satisfaction since the framework's data-driven nature allows personnel to see the impact of their work on the agency’s mission.

Chi Kang, deputy director for operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) cybersecurity division, has said that segmentation and software-defined, wide-area networking (SD-WAN) can support the implementation of zero-trust concepts.

Kang told Federal News Network in a prior interview that SD-WAN has the capacity to ensure visibility and control across disparate networks and multiple endpoints, the publication reported Tuesday.

He noted that NOAA has already taken steps to implement approaches such as virtual private networks (VPN) for day-to-day operations before the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the prevalence of telework settings.

“Micro segmentation allows you to get a little bit more resolution in what you’re accessing,” said Kang. “Depending on your privilege management, or depending on where you’re coming from, or wanting you to access, you have a higher degree of resolution of what are the appropriate resources for you to access.”