Archives for October 2021

Agencies need a way to transfer the knowledge of soon-to-be retiring employees, and one option might be artificial intelligence. Natural language processing (NLP) and automation are some of the technologies agencies are considering both to cope with an aging-out of the federal workforce, and to respond to new employee expectations resulting from the pandemic.

About half of NASA’s workforce will be eligible to retire in the next five years. That represents a lot of institutional knowledge, subject matter expertise and activity that needs to be passed on to the next generation. John Dankanitch, chief technologist at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, said natural language process can help, specifically by making that expertise searchable.

“We have just thousands and thousands of documents. As I mentioned for geophysics, we have terabytes of data, and they don’t all have the correct metadata in there to be able to make it easy to search,” he said as part of a webinar last week, presented by GovExec. “And so if I’m going to develop some new type of technology or somebody else at another NASA center wants to find out what we’re doing, it needs to be something that’s easy to find in this new ecosystem, especially if you’re bringing on early career folks and you haven’t had a really good succession plan.”

The need to make knowledge more searchable has also inspired agencies to reevaluate their documentation processes, sometimes after many years of no changes. Michael Peckham, acting chief financial officer at the Program Support Center in the Department of Health and Human Services, said this makes staff simultaneously learn how to use their tools and how to make them better.

“It’s just a necessary evil, but it’s a really good one. And it will help you with that knowledge transfer, because people will have a source document that they can go back to. You need to check what your machine is doing,” he said. “You need to babysit, need to look after them. And it’s a great way for people to learn what the tool is doing for you. And then they can start to question from a different angle.”

Embracing change can be hard, both Peckham and Dankanitch acknowledged. Even as a technologist, Dankanitch admitted he still resents iPhone updates that slightly change the interface on his apps or change old functions. But Peckham said using human centered design to make employees privy to software development along the way rather than once it’s finished will ensure better adoption.

If agencies minimize manual processes and use stored data more, it helps to create a reference model “where we’re gathering information from a one-source system and we have a single source of truth. We’re going to limit the ‘after’ questions that we get a lot of times,” Peckham said.

He did not think federal government prepared adequately for the ensuing retirement wave, citing the growing backlog of claims processing at the Office of Personnel Management; although that backlog has been compounded somewhat by the pandemic remote work crunch.

“We are actively working on recruiting right now. We have reclassified all of our position descriptions. It’s one of the requirements within the federal government … We have started advertising very heavily to bring folks in the door,” he said.

In the past, he said, agencies would bring people in and heavily train them up for the job. Now, he said, it is more common to bring in people who are tech savvy already and then teach them the rules and processes.

The pandemic also presented a perfect storm for adopting new technologies which agencies had before only dipped their toes in, Peckham said, and that more shared workspaces or flexibility around who has to come into the office are to be expected. Natural language processing can also help with activities that traditionally took a lot of individual “face time” and therefore may have slowed by the lack of people physically on site every day.

“We have a software development and we’ll have thousands of requirements that need to be checked,” Dankanitch said. “And we’ve been actually able to use NLP to go through our requirements documentation and then automate some of the software checks validation to make sure that we have a product that meets all the requirements, and without as much touch time which significantly brings down the cost.”

But still, not every job can be done over Zoom or with a VPN.

“For example, we have limited opportunities for integration and test of our spaceflight hardware. And so we’ve had tests for band propulsion systems. And if we have COVID restrictions for the number of people in the room, that can be really hard for teaching some of the early career folks,” Dankanitch said. “And that’s really because we have to have the experts in the room actually doing the final assembly, the integration, the testing. If we have a capacity restriction, the people that unfortunately get left out are the future leaders that we’re going to have, and they miss out on that opportunity.”

At the same time, Dankanitch considered the increased receptiveness to employees’ individual needs was a positive to come out of the pandemic. Managers are more aware of their teams’ personal requirements such as working around child care or mental health stressors.

“It helps us to try to understand that work-life balance a little bit better,” he said. “That’s probably why we’re the Best Place to Work in the federal government, for nine years in a row now.”

Federal employees and retirees might want to keep an eye on the Thrift Savings Plan over the coming year.

The agency that runs the plan is in the early stages of a massive modernization effort, one that will overhaul the systems that manage and secure the TSP on the back-end.

But the initiative will also bring some new features and benefits to TSP participants as well. The project is known as “Converge” to the employees and contractors who are knee-deep in the technical aspects of it.

But participants will know it as the project that will eventually bring them a new TSP mobile app, a mutual fund window, new security functions and a few more features that most consumers might recognize from the online banking world.

Many of these changes, especially the technical stuff on the back-end, have been in the works for years. But the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board has said participant feedback is informing the direction it’s taking with some of those new features.

In a recent survey of its participants, 57% of those younger than 40 said they wanted a mobile app to access the TSP. About 24% of participants over the age of 40 agreed.

Participants will still be able to access their accounts and communicate with the TSP through their online accounts, email, and the customer service phone line. But starting next summer, they’ll also have access to a new TSP mobile app, as well as a chat function and a virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence.

“That’s going to be available to our participants 24/7, so whenever they log onto the website they’ll have access to that virtual assistant,” Tanner Nohe, the TSP’s program manager for the project, told the board at its monthly meeting last week. “It’s basically a tutorial of questions that participants might be asking.”

Live TSP customer service reps will run the chat function, and they’ll have the ability to hand off participants to other individuals who can help with more specific questions or concerns over the phone.

The TSP will also add a more features that should make it easier for participants to manage their money and interact with the plan — think more online forms and more electronic signatures.

Participants will also get the ability to digitally scan checks into the TSP, much like the feature that most banking institutions offer.

Nohe said the TSP will also offer a “concierge” service  to help participants roll money into the plan, a popular topic that often prompts questions from federal employees and retirees.

Plus, there’s an upcoming mutual fund window, which should open sometime next summer as well, the TSP said. Participants will have access to thousands of funds not usually available to them through the plan’s core five.

The plan is still designing the mutual fund window. But it will  offer a search tool so participants can filter through the funds and look through their options based on criteria that are important to them, Nohe said. The plan will also set up a dedicated contact center for participants who have mutual fund window questions.

There will be no limit on trades once participants enter the window, though some specific funds may have their own, Nohe said.

The mutual fund window has a lot of interest from both participants and members of Congress. Look for more information from the TSP in the coming months.

Beyond the mobile app and the mutual fund window, participants will see new  security protocols next year as well.

Participants may see more prompts for a one-time password, for example, to make higher-risk transactions online. The plan is adding more fraud detection and prevention tools to the online experience. Participants will be able to use their biometric data, like facial recognition or a fingerprint, to access their TSP accounts, too.

The FRTIB has said participants will start seeing these changes sometime next summer. In the meantime, the TSP will start communicating with its participants next year to prepare them for the changes.

And yes, participants will actively have to prepare.

Most importantly, participants will have to set up new log-in credentials to access their online accounts. That means they’ll have to set up a new username, password and multi-factor authentication to get into their accounts.

Those who have multiple TSP accounts, say a military and a civilian retirement account, will only need to create one new credential to access everything, Nohe said.

Ahead of the big launch, there will be a brief blackout window where participants may be unable, temporarily, to access their accounts or make certain transactions for a short period of time.

Again, the TSP is still working out all the specifics. But in the meantime, keep an eye out for more information from the plan itself starting next January or February. And of course, we’ll do our best to keep you informed here of what you need to know.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Amelia Brust

The idea that humans typically only use about 10% of their brains is a myth but a pervasive one. In reality, most of the brain is continuously active with the majority of its energy consumed for higher cognitive functions. The rest of its energy powers unconscious activities, such as heart rate, or conscious ones, such as driving a car. These regions of the brain may not always be firing simultaneously, however, as like any muscle the brain has rest periods. The myth is commonly traced back to American psychologist and author William James’ 1907 book “The Energies of Men,” which said, “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”

Source: Scientific American

Agencies need a way to transfer the knowledge of soon-to-be retiring employees, and one option might be artificial intelligence. Natural language processing (NLP) and automation are some of the technologies agencies are considering both to cope with an aging-out of the federal workforce, and to respond to new employee expectations resulting from the pandemic.

About half of NASA’s workforce will be eligible to retire in the next five years. That represents a lot of institutional knowledge, subject matter expertise and activity that needs to be passed on to the next generation. John Dankanitch, chief technologist at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, said natural language process can help, specifically by making that expertise searchable.

“We have just thousands and thousands of documents. As I mentioned for geophysics, we have terabytes of data, and they don’t all have the correct metadata in there to be able to make it easy to search,” he said as part of a webinar last week, presented by GovExec. “And so if I’m going to develop some new type of technology or somebody else at another NASA center wants to find out what we’re doing, it needs to be something that’s easy to find in this new ecosystem, especially if you’re bringing on early career folks and you haven’t had a really good succession plan.”

The need to make knowledge more searchable has also inspired agencies to reevaluate their documentation processes, sometimes after many years of no changes. Michael Peckham, acting chief financial officer at the Program Support Center in the Department of Health and Human Services, said this makes staff simultaneously learn how to use their tools and how to make them better.

“It’s just a necessary evil, but it’s a really good one. And it will help you with that knowledge transfer, because people will have a source document that they can go back to. You need to check what your machine is doing,” he said. “You need to babysit, need to look after them. And it’s a great way for people to learn what the tool is doing for you. And then they can start to question from a different angle.”

Embracing change can be hard, both Peckham and Dankanitch acknowledged. Even as a technologist, Dankanitch admitted he still resents iPhone updates that slightly change the interface on his apps or change old functions. But Peckham said using human centered design to make employees privy to software development along the way rather than once it’s finished will ensure better adoption.

If agencies minimize manual processes and use stored data more, it helps to create a reference model “where we’re gathering information from a one-source system and we have a single source of truth. We’re going to limit the ‘after’ questions that we get a lot of times,” Peckham said.

He did not think federal government prepared adequately for the ensuing retirement wave, citing the growing backlog of claims processing at the Office of Personnel Management; although that backlog has been compounded somewhat by the pandemic remote work crunch.

“We are actively working on recruiting right now. We have reclassified all of our position descriptions. It’s one of the requirements within the federal government … We have started advertising very heavily to bring folks in the door,” he said.

In the past, he said, agencies would bring people in and heavily train them up for the job. Now, he said, it is more common to bring in people who are tech savvy already and then teach them the rules and processes.

The pandemic also presented a perfect storm for adopting new technologies which agencies had before only dipped their toes in, Peckham said, and that more shared workspaces or flexibility around who has to come into the office are to be expected. Natural language processing can also help with activities that traditionally took a lot of individual “face time” and therefore may have slowed by the lack of people physically on site every day.

“We have a software development and we’ll have thousands of requirements that need to be checked,” Dankanitch said. “And we’ve been actually able to use NLP to go through our requirements documentation and then automate some of the software checks validation to make sure that we have a product that meets all the requirements, and without as much touch time which significantly brings down the cost.”

But still, not every job can be done over Zoom or with a VPN.

“For example, we have limited opportunities for integration and test of our spaceflight hardware. And so we’ve had tests for band propulsion systems. And if we have COVID restrictions for the number of people in the room, that can be really hard for teaching some of the early career folks,” Dankanitch said. “And that’s really because we have to have the experts in the room actually doing the final assembly, the integration, the testing. If we have a capacity restriction, the people that unfortunately get left out are the future leaders that we’re going to have, and they miss out on that opportunity.”

At the same time, Dankanitch considered the increased receptiveness to employees’ individual needs was a positive to come out of the pandemic. Managers are more aware of their teams’ personal requirements such as working around child care or mental health stressors.

“It helps us to try to understand that work-life balance a little bit better,” he said. “That’s probably why we’re the Best Place to Work in the federal government, for nine years in a row now.”