Sheena Burrell, chief information officer at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and a voting board member of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) run by the General Services Administration (GSA), said today that the fund is seeing a lot of interest from Federal agencies in zero trust security-related projects.
In discussing the current levels of agency interest in TMF funding during a webinar organized by the Alliance for Digital Innovation (ADI), Burrell also said she’d like to see proposals from agencies that deal with leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and machine learning (ML) technologies to improve customer experience.
“Currently, we’ve been seeing a lot of zero trust architecture projects,” Burrell said in reply to a question from ADI Executive Director Ross Nodurft about current themes in agency demand for funding.
The zero trust interest, Burrell said, is “to be expected as … we had an executive order that came out and when that executive order came out, it didn’t necessarily come with funding,” she said of the Biden administration 2021 executive order on improving Federal agency cybersecurity by, among other steps, moving toward zero trust security architectures.
“When we had the executive order say, ‘please implement zero trust architecture by 2024,’ a lot of agencies were eager to utilize this fund because they didn’t have money just kind of set aside and laying around waiting for those executive orders,” she said. “I love seeing some of those types of things.”
Burrell said the TMF board also likes to see agency interest in funding for modernization projects, especially those that have a positive impact for citizens. “These are for customer experience, and making sure that we’re offering services that are streamlined and that are engaging with our customers.”
On the emerging tech front, Burrell said, “one of the things that I would love to be able to see more, and just as a Federal government, to see is more artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, [and] machine learning.”
“As you have more generative AI, that … the American people are really excited about, they’re going to want to see that in the applications that they interface with the government, and I would love to be able to see more of those type of projects that come in,” Burrell said.
“Those are more kind of your innovative type of projects,” she said, and ones that Federal agencies “may not necessarily have that kind of discretionary funding to be able to invest in those things.”
“But they do have a big impact to the rest of the American population … as you streamline your processes, automate those processes, and provide a good user experience … with security” and with ethical policies “to provide some faster service to the American people,” the NARA CIO said.
