The Air Force Materiel Command is slated to conduct a virtual industry day on July 30 to seek input on the government's digital campaign strategy.

Speakers will provide information on each campaign line of effort, while participants will be given an opportunity to submit queries and feedback during the event, the U.S. Air Force said Thursday.

AFMC will stream the event via Microsoft Teams' Commercial Virtual Remote platform.

“We need to streamline the design, development, acquisition and testing to get technology to our warfighters faster," said Gen. Arnold Bunch, commander at AFMC.

Interested participants from industry and the academia have until July 28 to register for the event.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that each Office of Inspector General (OIG) reported “varied” results on the quality of their respective agencies’ spending data.

GAO said in a report released Thursday that it studied OIG audits on agency data submissions for the first quarter of fiscal year 2019 in compliance with the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act).

According to GAO’s report, 44 out of 51 OIGs provided recommendations to improve their agencies’ data quality and that 37 OIGs reported a less than 20 percent error rate for FY 2019 agency data submissions.

However, the watchdog noted that 10 of those submissions had missing data.

Thirty-seven OIGs said their agencies had higher-quality data, while 11 reported that their agencies’ data were of low to moderate quality.

The OIGs recommended that agencies establish procedures for implementing corrective actions, develop controls for ensuring the accuracy of submitted data and implement systems that incorporate automation.

They also recommended that agencies work with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Department of the Treasury and other external parties to resolve data-related issues.

The Trump administration has announced on Thursday that it will finalize regulations that ban the United States government from working with contractors who use technology from five Chinese companies: Huawei, ZTE,  Hikvision, Dahua and Hytera Communications. 

The ban was first introduced as a provision in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The regulation will prevent government agencies from signing contracts with companies that use equipment, services and systems from the companies, its subsidiaries and affiliates due to national security concerns.

The government contracting (GovCon) workforce has cited challenges regarding the ban, noting that the banned companies are global market leaders in their respective categories, making it harder to find alternatives. 

Huawei and ZTE are two of the largest telecom equipment providers in the world; Dahua and Hikvision are two of the biggest providers of surveillance equipment and cameras; and Hytera is a market leader for two-way radios.

The Trump administration will require agencies to conduct a national security analysis before they grant any waivers. The new regulation will also aim to limit the companies’ influence on the U.S. economy companies a choice: do business with the U.S. government or with the Chinese firms.

In a previous announcement in May 2020, the Pentagon noted that under the new regulations, chip makers using U.S. equipment are now required to have a license before the suppliers ship components to Huawei or any of its subsidiaries. 

Xiaomeng Lu, China practice lead at technology consultancy Access Partnership who previously worked at Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), noted that the U.S. restrictions could "shoot American companies in the foot."

Lu stated on Friday that the restricted regulatory change will cause U.S. chip companies to lose significant sales to the Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese and Japanese competitors. As the revenue stream continues to rise, foreign chipset companies will secure new investments, research and development in the next generation semiconductor technologies without the U.S. as a major competitor. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service that collects data from the plant floor, structures and labels the data and generates real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) to help industrial customers make data-driven decisions, the company reported on Thursday. 

“With SiteWise, industrial customers can now use the power of AWS to collect, organize, and monitor their industrial equipment data at scale. SiteWise will help industrial customers move beyond data collection and enable them to visualize and monitor all their equipment, so they can focus on their main job of optimizing their operations,” said Dirk Didascalou, vice president of IoT, AWS.

AWS SiteWise will monitor operations across facilities, compute industrial performance metrics, create applications that analyze industrial equipment data to prevent costly equipment issues and reduce gaps in production. 

The solution will enable customers to collect data consistently across devices, identify issues with remote monitoring more quickly and improve multi-site processes with centralized data. SiteWise will simplify data collection from the plant floor, structure and label the data and generate real-time metrics. 

SiteWise will automatically compute customers’ metrics at the interval defined by the user. All uploaded data and computed metrics are sent to a fully managed time series database, which is designed to store and retrieve time-stamped data with low latency, making it significantly easier for customers to analyze equipment performance over time. 

In addition, customers will be able to create custom web applications to visualize metrics across end-user devices in near real-time to help users monitor equipment performance on web-enabled desktops, tablets or phones to identify anomalies, help reduce waste, make faster decisions and optimize plant performance.

SiteWise will also provide interfaces for collecting data from modern industrial applications through MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages or its Application Programming Interface (APIs). One of AWS’ customers, Volkswagen Group, has been developing the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud to further improve the efficiency of its manufacturing and logistics processes. 

“With SiteWise we are able to easily ingest manufacturing shop floor data into the cloud, model and organize those different machine assets within our plants, and then visualize operational data from our cylinder production line in a web application," said Dr. Roy Sauer, director Enterprise & Platform Architecture, Volkswagen Group.

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