Politics
Holcombe changed the way USPTO viewed IT
When Jamie Holcombe arrived at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2019, he had a simple goal: Focus the technology on the mission and get out of day-to-day.
Holcombe, who recently left after spending almost seven years as the USPTO’s chief information officer, drove technology changes to modernize the patent and trademark systems.
Holcombe said the technology of the Patent and Trademark Office is more mission driven than ever before.
Jamie Holcombe was the CIO for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for almost seven years.
“Why were we involved in networking or data centers or really anything? We should not be because that does not have any core differentiation to our business model. So if we can outsource that and then use the most advanced tools every three to five years, replacing those tools with new tools, our examiners will have a much better chance at keeping up with the backlog,” Holcombe said on Ask the CIO. “Our biggest issue was we receive 600,000 patent applications every year. We were developing a backlog such that the examiners are inundated with all of this information and data. They have an obligation to sort through it and filter through it. So we needed to give them the tools and the ability, the capabilities, the potential, to overcome that backlog and keep up with the current application process. That’s what we set out to do.”
USPTO changed its approach to technology modernization over the last six years to focus on mission first and only while also securing its data.
Holcombe, who joined USAI as a vice president in August, said he spent the first several years at the agency just getting out of managing the infrastructure, which was mostly on-premise data centers, relying on mainframes and legacy relational databases.
“Every time we made a change in the relational database, we had to make sure that the system of record on the mainframe was updated. That really weighs you down. It’s like an anchor around your neck, having to duplicate all actions in two different places. That is insanity when you’re trying to move fast,” he said. “So eliminating that mainframe was a fantastic thing. We were so proud to get it done. We also have gotten rid of all of our old IBM WebSphere, as well as a lot of the other batch processing that was done at night. That was 25 years of old systems that were overtaken by modernized architectures and infrastructure.”
In Holcombe’s first year, USPTO spent about $43 million to stabilize its current infrastructure and then another $150 million over the next four years to modernize systems and applications.
In addition to the basic modernization efforts, Holcombe said he also changed the way the USPTO viewed technology as an asset. He said the idea was to constantly modernize, but also stop programs that weren’t making progress or weren’t meeting mission goals.
“The other business units in your agency or bureau need to have skin in the game, and in order to do that, you have to have people that are representatives of the business unit that are actually making decisions on budget and priorities, not necessarily the IP or technical specifications. Of course, they come up with the requirements. What we’re talking about is having two people in charge of a product. Those two people are your business unit head and your technical architect or your technical lead, and those two are responsible for running the product team,” he said. “Then what you do every 90 days as review before the Quarterly Review Board. We actually had all the deputy business unit heads decide on what was going to be funded in the next quarter and what was going to be adapted or killed in the next quarter. So every 90 days, you had your pulse on what is going on, and that sense of urgency began to creep up.”
Holcombe said this approach make sure the “dog was wagging the tail” and not “the tail wagging the dog” when it came to mission-focused IT modernization.
The modernization efforts over the last several years let USPTO invest heavily in artificial intelligence capabilities. Its employees have access to several tools to review documents and reduce the burden on examiners for administrative and clerical tasks. And before Holcombe left, the agency issued a request for information seeking technology that could improve the efficiency in the patent and trademark examining processes. Some examples the agency highlighted in the RFI are those around IT improvements, robotic process automation (RPA) bot development/usage, and new code or ideas to improve current processes.
Additionally, USPTO is using generative AI and artificial intelligence for code assistance, refactoring its code and translating old code to work in the cloud.
Holcombe said the agency started this effort in 2024 and initial pilots demonstrated it could accurately translate about 80% of the old code and the other 20% needed experts to figure it out and optimize it.
Holcombe said two big remaining priorities for acting CIO Deborah Stephens include the continued implementation of a zero trust architecture and relying on GenAI tools to modernize legacy code faster, from three weeks to three days.
“That is the biggest promise right now of code assist AI, that it can go through all of the testing, because you can actually produce test scripts from your AI, and you get this done to the point where requirements are done, and you can have this accelerated cycle,” he said. “You need to go with a sense of urgency. And that’s what I left the organization with, a sense of urgency to get her done.”
The post Holcombe changed the way USPTO viewed IT first appeared on Federal News Network.
