NewsBrief January 28, 2022

USCIS chief data officer prioritizing data quality in fiscal 2022

(fedscoop) U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ top priority is reducing the time it takes to obtain green cards, visas and employment authorizations in fiscal 2022, and for its Office of the Chief Data Officer that means first improving data quality, according to CDO Beth Puchek. OCDO’s Data Quality Branch already created a process allowing USCIS‘s more than 1,000 data analysts to report data issues, and next the office wants to streamline processing of employment authorization documents (EADs). Read More

White House publishes final zero trust strategy for federal agencies

(fedscoop) The White House on Wednesday published a final version of its zero-trust architecture strategy, which is intended to substantially improve the cybersecurity of government agency systems by 2024. Key aspects of the new document include a new enhanced focus on multi-factor authentication, a requirement that departments move towards encrypting all DNS requests and HTTP traffic, and begin to segment their network perimeters into separate isolated environments. Read More

A new commercial strategy for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

(Federal News Network) The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is revising its approach to using commercial sources of technology and data. It wants to diversify its sources, improve data security, and maybe have some influence on what the GEOINT industry does. For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to the NGA’s associate director for enterprise, Gary Dunow. Read More

GSA to replace federal IT Dashboard at next White House budget proposal

(fedscoop) The General Services Administration will replace the federal IT Dashboard when the White House submits its proposed fiscal 2023 budget to Congress in about a month, according to IT Data Transparency Director Dan York. Two applications — the IT Collect Application Programming Interface (API) and the Office of Government-wide Policy (OGP) Visualization Platform — will supplant the legacy dashboard, following a year-long modernization effort. Read More

The role of AI in open source intelligence

(C4ISRNET) For a long time, open source intelligence (OSINT) was primarily composed of insights from foreign news sources. It was supplemental public information that analysts could layer on top of classified intelligence to gain a full operational picture. Many in the intelligence community viewed it as a “nice to have” rather than a mission-critical data source — something to confirm rather than to foundationally inform. Read More

CIO perspectives on leading agile change

(McKinsey & Company) Across industries and geographies, organizations are embracing agility. A recent McKinsey Global Survey found that 44 percent of respondents had started or completed an agile transformation in their organization, with another 19 percent reporting that they were preparing to launch an agile transformation in the near future. As a growing number of executives are drawn to the promise of enterprise agility, many executives are seeking out insights and practical advice from peers who are further along in their agile journeys. Read More

James Webb Space Telescope Reaches L2 Orbit After NASA Course Adjustment

(ExecutiveGov) NASA has finished adjusting the course of its James Webb Space Telescope toward a final orbit around the L2 Lagrange point. Webb performed a mid-course burn where the spacecraft’s onboard thrusters fired for almost 297 seconds to achieve a corrected trajectory, Alise Fisher, public affairs specialist at NASA, said in a blog post published Monday. The burn boosted the space telescope’s speed by 3.6 miles per hour to execute the trajectory change, which is needed for Webb to orbit around L2. Read More