Politics
Next phase of digital transformation for SEC, PTO begins
For the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the next steps in their digital transformation journeys are all about using cloud services to drive change. Both agencies are well past the “move to the cloud” phase of their IT modernization strategy.
Now, the SEC and USPTO are embarking on IT modernization initiatives that have a more direct impact on mission and further drives efficiencies.
The SEC is focusing on three broad areas to adopt new and better services.
Dave Bottom is the CIO of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We’re at the point now where we’ve moved our enterprise data warehouse to an enterprise data platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We’ve moved into Microsoft O365 as a collaboration environment, and are leveraging the capabilities that are there,” said Dave Bottom, the chief information officers of the SEC, during a panel at the recent GITEC conference sponsored by ATARC, an excerpt of which played on Ask the CIO. “We’ve moved to adopt software-as-a-service as a first decision point that we would make rather than building something on-premise. From a procurement acquisition perspective, we have a digital services blanket purchase agreement (BPA), which is, I think, a first for the commission in terms of a focus on digital services, as opposed to infrastructure or application development.”
The SEC awarded a $250 million BPA contract to four firms in 2023.
At the same time, the move to the cloud has allowed the SEC to do more to modernize its underlying infrastructure. Bottom said the agency is less dependent on data centers than ever before.
“We are modernizing our networking on our site and in our security capabilities to account for the fact that we’re more cloud rather than less cloud,” Bottom said. “We’ve adopted the cloud smart methodology, and really, we’re at the point now where access to technology through software-as-a-service or a managed service is really not a problem.”
USPTO using AI to refactor old code
Like the SEC, the USPTO began its cloud journey more than five years ago.
Jamie Holcombe, the USPTO CIO, said his agency’s modernization journey opened the door to reducing latency, both from an infrastructure perspective and from a culture perspective.
On the infrastructure side, Holcombe said USPTO is supporting multiple artificial intelligence efforts.
“We are using generative AI and artificial intelligence for code assistance, refactoring our code and translating a lot of the old code in order for it to work most optimally in the cloud. We are in the beginning stages of it,” he said. “After a 90 day pilot, it’s almost going into production. What we’ve done is we’ve translated the old code and found 80% of its great and the other 20% need experts to figure out and optimize it, make it right.”
Holcombe said his team is doing 30-60-90 day pilots where they have to show progress in 30 days or stop doing the work. USPTO is taking the “fail fast” approach to code modernization.
“You actually can program the GenAI to anticipate that learning. That’s why it’s so fast and that’s why it’s so good,” he said. “We take and generate standard, repetitive code structures, and we actually put that refactoring in so that we’re looking for common things like memory leaks and so forth, such that we don’t use that. We take a lot of the old Oracle stored procedures and pump them into different Python and/or other scripting languages such that we can then move to the cloud and actually use those cloud native services, whether it be AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Azure.”
He added that the USPTO developers are using AI on small snippets of code first and then taking those lessons learned and applying them as they do more code refactoring.
“It is an iterative process of slow momentum and getting success because you really have to think about failing. You have to anticipate failure in order to adapt to it and overcome it,” Holcombe said.
Changing the culture of risk
USPTO is also starting to test agentic AI. Holcombe said his team is applying it to customer service.
“What you’re going to do is apply generative AI to the tier-zero, and you’re going to mature it into tier one, where you don’t need that answering desk because most of the issues and problems can be solved through your learning modules, and you can actually give personalized and customized service over the wire,” he said.
As for the latency in regard to culture, Holcombe said he’s tried to institute a “culture of acceptance,” whether it’s risk or failing or learning.
“The difference between moving fast and moving slow is all dependent upon the culture. So in determining your latency and the ability to accept risk, you have to understand that we’re changing the dynamic within the federal government right now. There’s a sea change among us, and I think it’s a great opportunity to push that latency and not accept the idea that we can do that next week,” he said. “There’s a cost for waiting, and that cost has been normally born by bureaucracy. No more bureaucracy. Get it done now. So I think latency, the length of time it takes to do anything is a key component of the new administration and moving out and getting things done better, cheaper and faster. The government has forgotten cheaper and faster, and now it’s being reminded of it so stark, cheaper and faster is two big components. It’s not just better, it’s cheaper and faster.”
Bottom said the SEC is just dipping its toe into AI capabilities. One major challenge for the agency is managing and labeling its data to ensure it’s authoritative.
“As we move to adopt some of these AI tools that are coming out very rapidly, we’re moving past the point where a user is actually making the determination themselves as they’re going through and doing their daily work,” Bottom said. “What’s authoritative? We’re actually make moving that decision to the tool. So how do we make sure we have the right labeling construct, in terms of competence in the goodness of the data in order to people to make decisions. How do we make sure we’re labeling data in that way?”
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