In early 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services will pilot its new contracting writing machine, Accelerate. HHS will make paintings with a small institution of contracting officials and industry to show that using the cloud and blockchain technology isn’t the best possible, however real.
Jose Arrieta, who is presently the leader facts officer and changed into the appearing deputy assistant secretary for offers, acquisition policy, and accountability at HHS, said the agency had made numerous development since December when the Accelerate platform acquired the authority to perform. The grants, acquisition policy and responsibility office has been trying out the potential of the device to take in actual data from the five contract writing systems HHS makes use of in addition to the analytics for charges paid and terms and conditions and refining the microservices that they built to higher communicate with application managers.
“We need them to go through the whole workflow and see how it works, see how it may be higher, and see how records will be displayed higher,” Arrieta stated on Ask the CIO. “Then our aim, with the aid of in the direction of the give up of January 2020, is to reduce the one’s users over and fully use Accelerate.” Then through the years, HHS will retain to adapt Accelerate primarily based on consumer’s needs and sooner or later decommission at the least of the settlement writing structures and offer to get the right of entry to Accelerate to more than 2,000 contracting officers and experts.
Arrieta said Accelerate would not simply modernize the corporation’s method of contracting writing but emerge as a living system where the acquisition workforce could make tips and modifications show up in a count of weeks. “When we say we’re doing testing, we are making it more intuitive, so it aligns with how the contracting officers, program officials, and industry partners assume and need to engage with the functionality,” he said. “We are making the functionality more intuitive so that it’s easier for contracting officers to use. So while we change and reduce to the gadget, they sit down and understand what to do.”
Additionally, Arrieta said if different HHS places of work are not inquisitive about shifting to the contracting writing platform, they could still take benefit of the equipment will provide, which includes analysis of more than $24.2 billion in spending, 100,000 contacts, terms, and situations, and charges paid information, thru a utility programming interface (API).
“We’ve considered this approach. We’ve created the capacity for both options — shut down all of the agreement writing gadgets and use Accelerate and have a couple of clones of Accelerate with custom-designed microservices operating throughout the department or permit some agreement writing systems that aren’t Accelerate to live in the area, however, get the benefit of sharing of records from across the complete branch,” he said.
Developing a contracting writing structure with microservices and APIs to pull collective records isn’t what makes Accelerate modern. It’s the generation that underlies the facts that make Accelerate greater than your common contract writing system. Arrieta uses blockchain or allotted ledger era to ensure the information is legitimate and regular. He stated this generation is more than just a buzzword or something futurists like to discuss.
Arrieta started the stock exchanges in Hong Kong, London, and Australia; all use blockchain. BMW, Walmart, Microsoft, and IBM all use this technology to cozy their supply chains and other internal operations. “For us, the cause why we decided to use blockchain is because we wanted to create a potential to digitize records, index facts in an immutable style, and percentage it throughout an ecosystem. Whether that information turned into acquisition or human resources statistics, we wanted to create a flexible functionality to percentage it,” he stated. “We wanted to split the commercial enterprise technique from the data itself. We didn’t want a device in which the data existed within the workflow, which increases your prices for transition afterward.”
He said the blockchain technology also helps HHS become comfortable with the facts because users must have an encrypted key to enter the data. The microservices are separate from statistics. Handiest reaches back for the records while a person plays that particular characteristic. For us, it becomes a way to transport to the cloud and enhance our cybersecurity posture as a corporation. It was a way to use the modern generation to create flexibility. Hence, the company can evolve with lengthy-time period modifications that could arise in the marketplace, and that’s why we chose it,” he stated.
“The largest challenge with facts in government doesn’t always believe within the person you’re doing commercial enterprise with. I can cross-check and ensure they’re registered with the IRS and feature paid their taxes. But can I accept the datasets related to the number of licenses we purchased ultimate yr? Can I believe the dataset of how many gloves we bought final year?
We know we copy information, share it with a person, and do something with it, after which the system we copied it from modifications because we sold extra gloves. With our model, we’ve got trust inside the facts because everyone who interacts with our version, whether they may be the use of their agreement writing system or our microservices, the file of index information is up to date for anyone in actual time the second the trade takes place. We have considered the dataset.”
