The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is set to publish a report later this year to outline the results of its recent assessment of three field portable gas chromatograph/mass spectrometers used to chemically analyze substances. 

DHS S&T’s System Assessment and Validation for Emergency Responders Program developed the evaluation to assess the field instruments’ capabilities and help emergency responder organizations decide on which instrument is best suited to their needs and requirements, the department said Tuesday.

During the assessment, a group of seven first responder evaluators operated the chemical identification devices and tested their capabilities to analyze samples from common, non-toxic, consumer products. 

The evaluators, which included policemen and firefighters, rated the affordability, deployability, usability, capability and maintainability of each instrument based on their needs in the field.

DHS S&T collaborated with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on the assessment, which took place at the Seattle Joint Training Facility in Washington. 

The Naval Information Warfare Systems Command’s engineering division has completed the template for a ‘scorecard’ system, which can measure the levels of cybersecurity of various organizations, for data comparison and decision-making purposes.

An organization’s cybersecurity’s effectiveness in sensing cyber attacks, countering negative effects, and performing post-attack recovery procedures will be evaluated by the scorecard Cybersecurity Figure of Merit scorecard, the U.S. Navy reported Tuesday.

The Tactical Networks Program Office, or PMW 160, used these items, which were taken from the recommendations of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cybersecurity framework, to conduct a pilot study of the CFOM at the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services.

“Cybersecurity Figure of Merit is a powerful tool to assess the impact of your cybersecurity investment,” says Capt. Kurt Rothenhaus, program manager at PMW 160. “For the CANES program we were able to use the tool to articulate to our senior stakeholders how resourcing areas of the network would improve the cybersecurity resiliency in a measurable and consistent manner.”

NAVWAR’s CFOM team intends to investigate the possibility of extending the scorecard’s capacities to be capable of assessing Navy risk possibilities and budget choices.

Katie Arrington, special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition for cyber, said the Department of Defense’s new cybersecurity certification model seeks to help small businesses comply with cyber controls through a tiered rating system depending on the platforms they are asked to protect, Fifth Domain reported Tuesday.

Arrington stated that the new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification seeks to strengthen the security of small businesses, which are being targeted by nation state-backed cyber attacks, and level the playing field when it comes to cybersecurity.

In September, the Pentagon issued a draft version of CMMC, which establishes cyber practices and standards meant to help the defense industrial base reduce exfiltration of controlled unclassified information.

The draft CMMC v0.4 has five levels ranging from basic cyber hygiene to highly advanced practices and each level has specific practices and activities that need to be implemented by stakeholders to achieve a capability.

Veronica Villalobos, principal deputy associate director of employee services at the Office of Personnel Management, said OPM plans to launch a program to help federal employees who graduated from the government’s reskilling academy further build up their skills through interagency rotations, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

“So you can imagine the vision is they’ll have the three months of training and then they’ll have nine months of the rotations program where agencies can be exposed to their work, and we figure out how they can be a productive fit within the different CIO shops,” Villalobos said during a panel discussion Tuesday. “So there is still hope and we are going to figure out how to do this very agilely and be as quick as we can so that skills don’t go stale.”

The White House unveiled the federal reskilling academy in November 2018 to provide hands-on cybersecurity training to government employees. Participants of the academy’s first class completed their training and the Trump administration started accepting applicants in April for the second set of reskilling activities.

Accenture Federal Services and the Partnership for Public Service have published a report with the intent to help the U.S. government meet customer expectations and address service delivery challenges.

The document contains a series of profiles detailing how people experience assistance from eight federal agencies that receive high volumes of direct contact with the public.

Agencies featured in the report are as follows:

• Bureau of Consular Affairs
• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
• Customs and Border Protection
• Internal Revenue Service
• Office of Federal Student Aid
• Transportation Security Administration
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
• Veterans Health Administration.

The nonprofit and the company urge Congress to require agencies that provide “high-impact” citizen services to establish customer experience standards encompassing quality, effectiveness and speed.

Agencies designate a senior executive to oversee customer experience across an organization, create a feedback-based key performance measure and use social media platforms to inform customers, gather input and answer questions from the public, according to the report.

The report also recommend that the Office of Management and Budget use data in efforts to help agencies manage programs and investments that could address pressing customer concerns.

AFS and the Partnership’s joint research effort builds on data released last month via the President’s Management Agenda and the OMB’s crossagency customer experience objective.