The leaders of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the U.K. and the European Commission have committed to removing selected Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system as part of efforts to cut off Russia from the international financing system in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

The countries also commit to implementing restrictive measures to limit the Russian Central Bank from fielding its international reserves and launching measures against individuals and entities that facilitate the war in Ukraine and participate in Russian government’s harmful activities, according to a joint statement published Saturday.

Other measures are introducing a transatlantic task force to effectively implement financial sanctions by determining and freezing the assets of sanctioned companies and individuals and stepping coordination efforts to counter disinformation and other types of hybrid warfare.

“Even beyond the measures we are announcing today, we are prepared to take further measures to hold Russia to account for its attack on Ukraine,” the statement reads.

The latest economic measures came days after the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced additional economic sanctions on Russia’s financial institutions and expanded debt and equity prohibitions in light of Ukraine invasion.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is working on a commercial buying guide for intelligence, defense and federal civilian agencies as NGA shifts to commercial imagery analysis and GEOINT capability sources, Federal News Network reported Friday.

Dave Gauthier, director of commercial and business operations at NGA, said the “commercial supplier matrix” will help NGA gain access to information on commercial capabilities to better match platforms from industry suppliers to the needs and requirements of users.

“With so many different types of suppliers, and so many opportunities to pull in these services, we really have to provide a catalog of capabilities to our user community,” Gauthier added.

He noted that NGA is making a “fundamental shift” toward commercial analytic services.

“It’s this idea that companies themselves, either the imagery providers or in partnership with analytics companies, will work to extract information from imagery, and provide us what I like to call the box scores instead of the game tape,” Gauthier added.

He said the supplier matrix platform is still in the testing phase and that some parts of it could be made available to the public.

“It’s still being built in [and] populated today,” Gauthier said of the platform. “We do have a community of beta testers to help us understand and make sure we’re answering the questions and can anticipate the questions that those users would have when they want to research this information for their own decision making.”

The Department of Defense wants to engage companies, academic institutions and government laboratories to set up regional innovation hubs for microelectronics development and education.

DOD issued a request for information Friday to solicit input on the Microelectronics Commons initiative and interested parties can view information about the process for submitting ideas through the official website of the department’s chief technology officer.

A cross-functional team under Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, proposed the new public-private partnership to encourage microelectronics prototyping work and train college or university students in semiconductor technology.

The team envisions semiconductor company facilities or federally funded research and development centers hosting the prototype hubs.

“Microelectronics are vital to every aspect of our lives from delivering power to our homes to securing our nation’s infrastructure,” said Shyu, an inductee into Executive Mosaic’s Wash100 for 2022.

Andras Szakal, chief technology officer at The Open Group, has shared his thoughts on recent “megatrends” in global work life and technology and what he foresees as their impacts on one another.

In an article for the Global Banking & Finance Review, Szakal traces the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on attitudes toward the workplace as well as identifies the digital transformations needed to keep pace with such evolutions.

Szakal notes that when necessary changes occurred because of the pandemic, they were in line with shifts that were already happening in terms of technological and medical innovations.

“Even just five years ago many of the strategies we used to mitigate [the pandemic’s] damage – from remote working to rapid vaccine and therapeutics development – would not have been possible in the same way,” Szakal writes.

The executive also discusses how mass-career-changes – which he dubs “the great resignation” – from in-person, hospitality-based jobs to digitally rooted ones will (and perhaps have already begun to) usher in an implementation of artificial intelligence and automated technologies in place of these vacating workers.

Szakal attributes this to data that shows that it is “the nature of the work, and not just their ability to get a job, as their main motivating factor” to switch career paths.

In addition to AI, he cites quantum computing and augmented reality as other technologies that are evolving at an ideal rate to meet the ever-growing and mutating needs of humans.

In the end, Szakal turns to technology architecture as a way to allow separate aspects of society that have grown increasingly codependent to cross-pollinate and communicate effectively.

“Without a holistic architecture to structure that communication, the end result will be chaos,” Szakal writes, continuing, “In order to grow and adapt through the next waves of change, which blur any distinction between technological and business pressure, that kind of thinking will need to be elevated to encompass a bigger, clearer picture where continuous digital transformation is core to the strategy.”

He also says he believes a software by his company the Open Group called the TOGAF Standard offers a winning platform for exercising a functional digital architecture.