Casey Cook, the cloud architecture branch chief for the Agriculture Department, said seven mission areas are taking advantage of more than 300 APIs to make data sharing among new and legacy systems easier.

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Lauren Knausenberger, the outgoing chief information officer of the Air Force, said if requested funding for fiscal 2024 comes through as hoped for, several transformation initiatives will get a much needed boost.

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Holly Joers, the program executive officer for the Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems (PEO-DHMS), said DoD’s Cerner-based EHR, is now live at 75% of DoD’s clinics and hospitals, with 160,000 users and 6.1 million beneficiaries in the system so far.

Joers said DoD’s experience has been that the deployment process works much, much better once it’s moved beyond the first few sites. After that, a lot of lessons have been learned, and the institution can start to converge around change management and IT deployment practices that make sense for the whole enterprise.

“I can’t comment specifically on VA, but when I look at where they are now, I’m taken back to where DoD was in the 2017-2018 timeframe,” she said. “There were challenges with the network, and so we made rules about what infrastructure had to be in place before a go-live, and how long it needed to be stable before we went live. We looked at our governance and management process to hear different inputs. When you’re only dealing with four sites, everyone wants to make it work for what their workflow was before. So you really have to have the fortitude to look at making an enterprise standard, knowing that it might not match what they’re currently doing today. And we had to go through those growing pains.”

In the interview Joers also discussed:

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Agencies are buying professional services at a rate experts call “astonishing.”

The growth between 2021 and 2022 was unlike ever before. And half way into fiscal 2023, the spending data shows a continued increase.

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Clare Martorana, the federal chief information officer chairwoman of the Technology Modernization Fund Board, and Raylene Yung, the executive director of the Technology Modernization Fund, say they are giving lawmakers more details and briefings about the progress and impact of the investments.

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The Homeland Security Department’s procurement shop was busier than ever last year, spending almost $24 billion on about 60,000 transactions.

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Shane Barney, the chief information security officer at USCIS, and Miguel Adams, the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s CISO, both say the need to educate and train the business customers on zero trust is important to their agency’s success.

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Dave Lago, a product manager for DISA's Hosting and Compute Center, said the Vulcan tool set includes several commercial software capabilities to help DoD modernize software.

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