This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2024 Climate Change Summit. This panel focuses on how academic institutions contribute to climate change action through research, sustainable practices, and policy advocacy. Speakers will showcase university-led initiatives and their alignment with government efforts to meet national climate goals. Attendees will learn how academic expertise can guide effective climate action, emphasizing the importance of informed government strategies in...

Have you ever tried to cancel an online subscription and ended up clicking around in circles trying to find the right button to press? If so, you experienced a "dark pattern" - a deceptive tactic of UX design that tries to trick users into doing something they don't want to do. In the online age, UX designers have enormous power in facilitating our access to information and services. What happens when this power is used for evil? To discuss this question (and more), we're joined by Colin...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from ACT-IAC's 2024 Digital Transformation Summit.  This panel of fedtech experts discusses the progress they have made in their respective agencies to leverage digital transformation to enhance the citizen experience,  focusing on policy and process impediments that can derail progress and how to overcome them.  Panelists: Andrea Fletcher -  Chief Digital Strategy Officer, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid ServicesRaymond Holder - .VP of Digital...

About a year ago, we were joined on the show by Gabriel Zucker of Code for America to talk taxes. Specifically, a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that directed the IRS to develop their own proprietary, free tax prep software for the first time in history. Since then, the IRS has been hard at work. 2024 tax season marks the launch of the IRS Direct File pilot, a simplified tax prep tool available to residents of twelve states. It's free, easy, fast, and represents a huge win for...

This week, The Buzz is joined once again by Robert Puentes, President and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation. Last time, we talked about some of the challenges facing American aviation and the FAA.  The intervening weeks have magnified some of this as Boeing, under scrutiny for a series of engineering failures, has started seeing some serious turnover in upper management and a slew of promises to shape up. So maybe now is a good time to examine a different transportation mode for your...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2024 Shared Services Summit, in partnership with the Shared Services Leadership Coalition. Learn more at sharedservicesnow.org. In this fireside chat, Maria Banks, Director of Federal Sales at Atlassian, sat down with Susan Dorr, Chief Information Officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to never miss an episode! For more from ACT-IAC, follow us on LinkedIn or visit...

 This episode originally aired on April 5th, 2023. As tax season ramps up in earnest, and given the good news about the IRS's Direct File Pilot Program, we thought now would be a good time to revisit an interview we conducted last year with Code For America's Gabriel Zucker, the Interim Program Director of Tax Policy and Partnerships. This interview focused on how the IRS could design a direct file system, what such a tool might look like, and Code for America's work in civic tech for...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our archives. The concept of customer experience has driven business decisions in private industry for some time, but it's only in the last decade that CX, or citizen service, has become a focus of government.  The creation of healthcare.gov in 2013 heralded a new era in government, one marked by an interest in the lessons learned from tech start-ups and the relationship between IT systems, government processes and the people that use them. In...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from ACT-IAC's 2024 Digital Transformation Summit. Digital transformation efforts often rely on implementation of new systems. This presents an opportunity to integrate improved cybersecurity policy from the ground up. Unfortunately, cyber is still often ignored in the digital transformation process despite its importance. In this fireside chat, Paul Butterfoss, CTO of Federal Civilian IT at Leidos, discusses proper cyber hygiene with Paul Selby,...

While virtual reality has been around for several decades, both as a concept and a technology, it is only in the past few years that inexpensive, mass-produced, higher-quality VR systems have become broadly available. This has enabled more people to experiment and conduct research with VR software, and better determine its potential and use. The field of medicine has exemplified this approach. Medical Extended Reality, or MXR, is an emerging area of research surrounding the psychology,...

Since the mass adoption of remote work began in 2020, there has been an ongoing question around what the shift in commuting habits means for American downtowns. What should office space look like? Where should people be living and working, and how do they get between those two places? All of these have implications for local policymakers, developers, and property owners. And the Federal Government is, in a way, all three of these. The Public Buildings Service (PBS), a division of the GSA,...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2024 Acquisition Forum, which specifically focused this year on AI in government. Our forum ended with a fireside chat between Susie Rainey, Diplomacy and Exploration Lead at Accenture Federal, and Michael Derrios, Senior Procurement Executive at the US Department of State. Together, they discuss the implications of  artificial intelligence-driven systems in the procurement process. Submit a nomination for the 2024 Innovation Awards...

In just a few short years, the aviation sector has experienced the whipsaw of a pandemic-era travel freeze followed by a post-pandemic travel explosion. Like many other industries, our already complex air travel system has experienced some recent pain points related to labor shortages, technological failures, and governance challenges. Some are new, but others are long-standing concerns that have resurfaced due to the pressures of a rapidly changing world.  This week, we're joined by...

As we've explored on this show before, the past few years have seen an unprecedented level of public and private investment in green energy, green infrastructure, and electrification. Between the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, over $1 Trillion has flowed into the green economy. This reflects the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to attempt to avoid worst-case global warming scenarios. Unfortunately, when it...

This week, The Buzz presents something a little different than usual. ELC 2023, ACT-IAC's flagship conference in Hershey, PA, opened with a rousing, inspirational keynote from Art Jackson about personal leadership. Art Jackson is a professional speaker and coach, West Point graduate, and former IT executive. Learn more about him at https://artjackson.com/. Learn more about the ACT-IAC Associates Program here! Submit a nomination for the 2024 Innovation Awards here! Subscribe on your...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our December 2023 CX Summit. CX is a key component of the Biden-Harris President's Management Agenda. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act appropriated an additional $79.4 billion to the IRS to assist in modernization and improved service delivery. In this keynote, Commissioner Danny Werfel details the challenges and priorities of the agency as they strive to build a simpler, fairer, more accessible tax system for Americans. Learn more about the...

In August 2022, Congress passed the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors – or Chips and Science Act. Congratulations to whoever came up with that acronym. The law authorized more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in funding for domestic technology manufacturing and development. It has been recognized as a key piece of the reignition of US industrial policy – which has lain dormant for much of the 21st century.  As you can imagine, direct funding of research across the US...

This week will be the last episode of The Buzz for 2023, and we're taking the time to reflect back on a busy year at ACT-IAC with Dave Wennergren, our CEO. We review the major topics of interest for the federal government, how to deal with a rapidly-changing world, what ACT-IAC has been up to, and what to look forward to next year. Thank you, listeners, for making The Buzz a part of your week in 2023. Have a fantastic holiday season, and we'll see you in 2024. Subscribe on your favorite...

The last time we discussed cryptocurrency on this podcast in April 2022, both the economy and the technology sector were in very different places. Right around that time, inflation really began to accelerate, peaking at 9.1% year-over-year in June. The Federal Reserve pumped the brakes and hiked interest rates 5% in a 4-month period. The entire cryptocurrency market essentially collapsed by the end of 2022 - including several high-profile failures like the FTX exchange. In November, the...

This year, ACT-IAC's Imagine Nation ELC was our largest conference ever, with more than 1200 in-person attendees! We also had more sessions than ever, and The Buzz is excited to bring a selection of recordings from this year's event to our podcast audience. This session features the presentation of the Federal Acquisition Institute's 2023 Chief Acquisition Officers Council Awards. After a brief introduction, moderator Christine Harada, Senior Advisor in the Office of Federal Procurement...

This fall, our federal government has teetered on the edge of shutdown more than once before a last-minute agreement could be reached. As of this episode, yet another Continuing Resolution has extended the day of reckoning to either mid-January or early February, depending on the agency. Unfortunately, this is not the first time discord in Congress has disrupted government operations, and it's not likely to be the last. While the process of Congressional appropriations is byzantine and...

This year, ACT-IAC's Imagine Nation ELC was our largest conference ever, with more than 1200 in-person attendees! We also had more sessions than ever, and The Buzz is excited to bring a selection of recordings from this year's event to our podcast audience. We're kicking things off with a lively discussion between OPM Director Kiran Ahuja and her colleague Melvin Brown, who serves as the Deputy CIO. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to never miss an episode! For more from...

This week, the Buzz is partnering with ACT-IAC's Federal Insights Exchange (FIE). The FIE program hosts short-form conversations between industry and agency leaders to share success stories, challenges, and priorities. Our guest host Dr. Allan Burman, President of Jefferson Solutions at the Jefferson Consulting Group and member of the Department of Veterans Affairs FIE, sat down with Dr. Angela Billups, Executive Director for the Office of Acquisitions and Logistics at the VA. Together, they...

Among America's Indigenous communities, the legacy of settler colonialism has left deep scars. As they confront disparities in health outcomes, economic development, and political attention, Tribal governments must routinely do more with less to provide necessary services to their people. In addition, accelerating climate change threatens local ecologies, which many tribes rely on both culturally and economically, in unpredictable ways. Indigenous leaders have no small task before them in...