The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued a memo that updates the government’s shared services strategy in an effort to enhance service delivery and accountability, reduce duplication and costs and improve customer satisfaction.

The strategy directs the government to come up with interagency standards and priorities for shared services, develop shared governance, centralized capabilities and performance expectations as well as continue to accelerate the adoption of existing quality services, according to the memo.

OMB Acting Director Russell Vought wrote in the document that the office will designate agencies to serve as quality service management offices. QSMOs will have several responsibilities such as overseeing a marketplace of platforms for common services and technology, guiding the long-term sustainability of services and establishing a customer engagement and feedback model.

The strategy requires the General Services Administration’s office of government-wide policy to carry out initial evaluation of QSMO implementation plans and serve as the central office for overseeing the governance process.

“This Memorandum requires agencies to begin planning the new approach for delivery of mission support services by shifting resources to higher value work and reducing duplication across agencies,” Vought wrote in the memo. “Parent agencies of those providing impacted services should conduct human capital planning activities for implementation in the next 24-36 months.”

FedScoop reported that OMB designated the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as one of the four QSMOs.

“By designating CISA as QSMO for cyber services, the federal government will be able to leverage their expertise, contracts and solutions to offer a robust marketplace of cybersecurity capabilities that will benefit all agencies,” said Suzette Kent, federal chief information officer and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient.

About The Wash100

This year represents our sixth annual Wash100 Award selection. The Wash100 is the premier group of private and public sector leaders selected by Executive Mosaic’s organizational and editorial leadership as the most influential leaders in the GovCon sector. These leaders demonstrate skills in leadership, innovation, achievement, and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2020 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2020.

Maj. Gen. Michael Guetlein, deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, said the NRO is working on new interface standards to facilitate the flow of data to warfighters through the Department of Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control system, C4ISRNET reported Monday.

“The data that we are collecting and the data that we are processing, we are distributing it more widely than we’ve ever done before, and we are partnering with the standup of JADC2 as well as a couple of other C2 systems to make sure that as those systems come online, our data can seamlessly flow into those C2 systems and be able to make it directly from the sensor to the shooter,” Guetlein said Friday at a Mitchell Institute-hosted webinar.

The Air Force and the Space Force are building JADC2, a data architecture that will allow systems from all service branches to get and integrate data from sensors in support of warfighters’ operations.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the Federal Communications Commission fully implemented 85 out of 136 recommendations for resolving security deficiencies in the FCC’s platform for processing public comments on proposed rule amendments.

GAO said in a report released Friday that the FCC fully implemented 63 percent of the recommendations for the Electronic Comment Filing System as of November. However, the latter only partially implemented 10 recommendations and is yet to implement the remaining 41.

The watchdog noted that it issued a report to the FCC in September detailing its recommendations for ECFS’s improvement after 22 million public comments disrupted the interface in 2017. Among the vulnerabilities that GAO cited are deficiencies in core security functions as well as detection, response and recovery procedures.

According to GAO, the FCC has since “bolstered the capacity and performance” of ECFS and implemented technical controls and information security programs. FCC is slated to implement GAO’s remaining recommendations by April 2021, the report states.

The U.S. Census Bureau has published a data resource page designed to support organizational decision making amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

CB said Thursday its new resource page features demographic, business and economic information that federal agencies, commercial firms and local communities may use to address the effects of the crisis.

The data hub’s features also allow users to search across dashboards, leverage statistical content for mapping, access detailed mapping data and navigate through categories of census datasets.

The agency consolidated data from the County Business Patterns program and the American Community Survey into the resource page that also provides access to content from the Centers for Disease Control.

Periodical updates of the page will occur as the Census Bureau gathers user feedback and observes changes related to the pandemic. Environmental Systems Research Institute or Esri helped the agency create the data hub.

NASA has completed a critical test of a high-pressure ventilator designed to treat individuals suffering from the COVID-19 disease. Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed the Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally in an effort to address the scarcity of traditional ventilators in the country, the space agency said Friday.

"When people at JPL realized they might have what it takes to support the medical community and the broader community, they felt it was their duty to share their ingenuity, expertise and drive," said Michael Watkins, JPL's director.

The critical test took place at New York's Icahn School of Medicine. New York is a COVID-19 epicenter. Watkins added his team specializes in non-medical technologies but excels in engineering, rapid prototyping and testing.

VITAL is designed for easier maintenance and faster construction compared to traditional ventilators. Caltech's Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships is looking for manufacturers to produce VITALS with a free license.