Max Everett, chief information officer of the Energy Department, has said that preparing a business case for a Technology Modernization Fund proposal has changed the way his agency approaches information technology programs, MeriTalk reported Monday.

The TMF Board in June approved a DOE project proposal to migrate federal email to the cloud, awarding the agency $15M in funding.

The TMF website says that a successful proposal must be able to articulate the savings and lasting financial impact that a project would bring about. A successful proposal must also determine how the agency will repay the TMF.

Everett said his agency was able to build a compelling business case because some of the department’s segments had already performed email cloud migration. The agency was, therefore, already familiar with the savings brought on by such a move. All that was left to do was calculate the cost of non-cloud email implementations.

Everett noted that by preparing a business case, “you quickly start to understand the savings,” and added that he and his agency “want to make sure that all of the IT projects, all of the things we’re looking at, that we’re doing that sort of business case analysis.”

The Labor Department has proposed a rule that seeks to help American small businesses offer association retirement plans to their employees.

The department said Monday the proposal aims to provide minor enterprises, sole proprietors and professional employer organizations access to retirement plans such as 401(k) packages for their workers.

“Many small businesses would like to offer retirement benefits to their employees, but are discouraged by the cost and complexity of running their own plans,” said Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta.

He explained that the association retirement plans will allow employers to perform minimal effort in offering retirement benefits.

The department also plans to save costs and guide small businesses in discussions with financial institutions through the effort.

Around 38M workers in the private sector have no access to a retirement plan via their employers, the department reported.

The White House seeks help from Silicon Valley companies in employing personnel for the government’s technology modernization initiatives, the Washington Post reported Monday.

The Trump administration aims to coordinate with firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM for the recruitment of technical workers, which has been a government-wide problem due to excessively thorough hiring and security clearance processes and low compensation for public service.

Encouraging technology professionals to serve the public at some point in their career will help bring benefits to the country in the long run, according to an unnamed source from the government.

However, big companies are concerned that sharing their employees with the state will produce conflicts of interest when it comes to politics, according to the report.

White House officials assured the public that it will protect technical workers from any political disputes with their employers, the report added.

Avi Bender, director of the Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service, told FedScoop in an interview published Monday that the federal government should identify innovative approaches to shared services implementation and consider additional procurement instruments that are suitable for data management.

“Data management is an ongoing innovation effort that requires continuous and iterative learning, continuous agility and discovery of new opportunities,” he said.

“And sometimes the contract mechanism or the [Federal Acquisition Regulation] is not ideally suited for that, so I think we need to look at different acquisition instruments.”

Bender noted that federal agencies should consider themselves as “big data organizations” and emphasized the need to build up the workforce to support data-centric programs and information technology modernization.

He also cited how NTIS works to help agencies address issues through private sector collaboration.
 

The U.S. Navy has designated a new squadron tasked to test and evaluate unmanned aircraft systems for the service branch and the U.S. Marine Corps, with Cmdr. Matthew Densing serving as leader.

The commissioning of the new unit, named Air Test and Evaluation Squadron or UX 24, took place Thursday at Naval Air Station Patuxent River’s Webster Outlying Field, the Navy said Monday.

UX 24’s operations will leverage more than 23 UAS units including MQ-8 Fire Scouts, RQ-20 Pumas, RQ-21 Blackjacks and commercially sold systems.

“As the Navy continues to require the broad range of capability offered by UAS, UX-24 will always challenge the status quo,” said Densing, who formerly led the Navy’s UAS Test Directorate, UX 24’s predecessor.

Adm. John Richardson, chief of naval operations, approved the directorate’s transition to UX-24 to support research, development, test and evaluation for UAS used in the Department of the Navy‘s forces.

A draft policy directive would direct the Defense Department to hand over to the Office of Management and Budget by Dec. 1 a legislative proposal to establish a “space force” as a separate service branch, SpaceNews reported Monday.

The proposed Space Policy Directive-4 obtained by the publication would require DoD to submit a budget plan for the space-focused service for inclusion in the president’s fiscal 2020 funding request.

The Pentagon would need to establish a “lean” space force using existing resources to “minimize duplication of effort and eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies,” according to the draft document.

The new military branch would oversee the provision of space services to all combatant commands and would include a civilian-led department of the space force and a U.S. space force headed by a four-star officer who will also serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The SPD-4 draft also calls for DoD to establish by fiscal 2019 a space development agency.

Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled Tuesday, Oct. 23, to hold a National Space Council meeting at the National Defense University to talk about the space force formation plans.