NTIA FSDS PM Q_A Session_Transcript_2023-11-06_FINAL.pdf

NTIA PM Q&A Session Transcript

11/6/2023 9:00 AM EST

Rosner, Alan [First we] will give you an overview of the agenda.

I think all these slides are going to be posted back to sam.gov as well [slides have to be emailed to vendors], as part of the record of this event.

So again, as I said, I’ll get started looking to give you an overview of what we're trying to do with the FSDS program and address any of the questions that we can at this point, but you'll see pretty quickly where we are. I think everybody has seen the RFI and sources sought that have come out and so we're still heavily in that the market research phase right now next slide.

So, I've introduced myself [prior to the recording as Program Manager of FSDS]. I want to take a moment to introduce a few other people.

David Wicker is my deputy here and also leads a number of our technical development efforts as well.

Tamara Severe, who heads all of our acquisitions and contracts is online.

We have Danielle Green, who's one of our contracting officers. I think you'll see her referenced in the sources sought that is out right now.

A couple of rules of engagement, please post any questions that you're going to have in the chat or use the raise hand feature. The MITRE team will recognize you at some point when we get to questions and answers.

Any questions that can't be answered here in this forum will be addressed afterwards. I know that a number of you have submitted questions already, some of them pertain to our acquisition strategy which is not yet finalized. So, we can't answer all of those questions right now.

As I said, we are in the market research phase. Our goal is to get back to answering all of those questions, and again the answers to those questions will be posted back into sam.gov as well, so that everybody can have access to that information. So again, that's a quick overview of where we are.

Next slide goes into a couple of things that we've been doing.

So as I said, we're currently in the market research phase. We've made a request for information; that was an opportunity for vendors to give us feedback on our statement of need and some other matters pertaining to our acquisition approach. We have Sources Sought out right now responses for that are due back on the 17th of November. I believe if I'm getting it right, it [is due at] about 2:00 in the afternoon. Please be timely because that date means something else in the federal government as well, so do not be late if you are responding to the sources sought.

One of the really important things that we want to come out of all of this is an opportunity for good teams to form, and so in that regard, we set up a lightning networking session. We're going to be conducting those on November 8th, that’s Wednesday of this week. And so, if you're planning to participate in that, and we encourage people to participate in that, your slides for that are due today, I think before the end of the day.

We're currently looking at challenge- based acquisition as part of the acquisition strategy as we go forward. Obviously, our market research is informing our final strategy, but there's a number of things that have come back and this is why we do market research, right. So, a number of things have already come back out of the RFI. GWACs are being looked at as potential contract vehicles.

We're going to have scenario-based kind of challenges with dynamic oral proposals being considered as part of a down select process. As I just said, the market research is really kind of focused on creating those strong partnerships. We got a very good response to the RFI, and I would expect that to turn into good partnerships going forward. You'll see our schedule later, but we're working to release this solicitation by the third quarter of FY24 and the intent is to award before the end of FY24.

Next slide please.

So, we work with MITRE as part of crafting the storyline behind what we're trying to do with the Federal Spectrum Data System, and we created this kind of pictorial to help express where we are today, and the Office of Spectrum Management tools that we have is not unlike what has happened in a lot of other government agencies where individual kind of stove pipe tools have been built for specific purposes. And over time, there's kind of been a recognition of the need for those tools to work better together over time, and all it supports what are our overall objectives that we're trying to achieve in the Office of Spectrum Management. Now, there are things like at the top of this in terms of their strategic outcomes, efficient of federal spectrum use, effective sharing trust and transparency, collaborative governance, kind of global leadership. We do all of those kinds of things everyday inside of the Office of Spectrum Management to help get that done, but we have the capabilities that are below that to support our key business processes, things like frequency assignment, the IRAC, you know, and managing all the activities of the IRAC. This is where federal agencies give NTIA feedback on things that are flowing through the key business processes, spectrum visualization, and spectrum certification.

Then you're familiar with that process as well and allocation management working closely with, for example, with the Federal Communications Commission on spectrum allocation and where spectrum is shared and where it's not. Below that we have the core business activities, which pretty much relate to those capabilities in terms of frequency management, IRAC support, certification support and allocation planning, and below that, we would like to get to a point where that's all driven by a common data repository. We do have the need to have both classified secret and unclassified information that drives all of those business processes at the same time, I mentioned that we work closely with the FCC. NTIA is essentially an advisor to the President and the executive branch, so, we work very closely with the White House and on the left-hand side we exchanged data directly with Mexico and Canada as well as commercial entities. In some cases, the public, as part of conducting the work that we do, so again we created this pictorial to help understand how we see the work that we do in terms of the business processes we support in OSM and how that drives our strategic outcomes and how the Federal Spectrum Data System in the future should help drive that.

It's very much as you would expect, data driven underneath to support all of that going forward.

Next slide.

This has been briefed pretty much in the open for probably a number of years now. These are the overall goals of the IT modernization, the first one listed there is to strengthen security, so you're going to hear us talk about and you know, if you've worked in government systems before, you've heard the concepts of zero trust and other security improvements that need to result over time to move to commercial cloud. All of those we're working to take advantage of to improve our overall security posture. It is our intent to protect the information that is provided to us by federal agencies to the level of nature that it needs to be protected. Second, our goal is to modernize the IT platform, including the application stack. Again, as I mentioned at the beginning, you know we have a number of stove pipe systems that weren't really designed to be integrated going forward and we need to kind of evolve all of that. So that we can, align our business processes together, have information flow more seamlessly, be able to evolve our business processes quickly without having to do significant major overhauls to our information systems, enhanced spectrum analysis. That's all part of being able to do things like visualizing the information that we have, being able to look across the data sets that we have and to be able to answer the questions that come up tomorrow. They could be band questions, they could be technical questions, they could be sharing related questions. A lot of those questions today require a lot of manual people in the loop processes to conduct those technical analysis. We're trying to automate as much as that as possible, improve and streamline our spectrum processes wherever there's an opportunity to do that, or to introduce new technologies that could help them improve those processes and allow them to move faster. We keep using an example of, can artificial intelligence be applied to automatically select frequencies or to make frequency assignments? Those are things that we're interested in and the last is to improve the quality of our spectrum data. Hopefully some of that can be done by just making it centrally available to us inside of a data lake or another concept like that, but also we need to put in place the processes to ensure that we maintain our data at the appropriate level of quality.

So, we can do those things that are listed above like enhance spectrum analysis and this is at the top level the overall goals that we're trying to achieve. One of the things that we are looking at is producing, we have a next level kind of requirements document that may be part of what we release as part of the solicitation going forward.

Next slide.

This [a graphic] breaks it out of a little more. I won't go until all of this, but on top you see the overall scope in terms of the key business processes, frequency assignment, expecting, certification, special temporary authorizations, relocation and transition, and IRAC management and underneath that today, those were heavily kind of stove piped systems and we would like to move to an enabling architecture that uses things like microservices, common data Lake with applications writing on top, all with a common kind of user interface that is secure, scalable. I really shouldn't have to mention all of these things, They should be kind of standard in government today, but we are expecting, you know, vendors to have established DevSecOps processes to be able to move us towards zero trust in terms of information security but the key improvement areas are all things that we are trying to highlight and take advantage of as part of the evolution that that we're working to put in place here. And I'll highlight one of them in terms of visualization. This is key. It can come in a number of different formats, everything from geographical and mapping based to tabular. Being able to produce reports on demand, all of this in an effort to kind of cut down the time frame it takes to understand our information. We have a lot of data, and we know the capability is there to be able to understand it as the Office of Spectrum management needs to answer questions going forward.

Next slide.

So, this is just a, you know, I can't drive this one enough. A couple of examples. You know, in terms of just visualization mockups, but we are really trying to use our data smarter. And it can mean, applying artificial intelligence or business intelligence systems to our information that we have, we're doing a little bit of this now because we have direct access to the spectum 21 databases, we're able to look in and analyze and visualize our information using some of the internal Microsoft tools that we have access to but we want to go well beyond that and we don't have all of our data sets tied together in the integrated kind of data link and that's all. Part of that's why I mentioned that earlier, because visualization of the information, into a context that people can understand is absolutely key and there's a lot of flexibility to be able to look at data in terms of capabilities today.

Next slide.

So, AS-IS systems that we have today on the frequency assignment side, the frequency management record system or resource system, FMRS is kind of the key thing tool that does the add, modify, delete to all of the government master file records that exist as mostly just an internal tool for NTIA. It's driven from spectrum 21 in a lot of cases were other inputs from the data capture and forwarding system, DCFS. So, all of these tools, all these things work together in a semi disconnected way to support the current frequency assignment business process. All of that needs to greatly improve over time. And where this is an area where we're looking for good ideas in terms of how to move forward in this space certification.

Most of you are familiar with EL-CID, we are moving into production on EL-CID online. EL-CID online as one of the capabilities that we see kind of moving forward into the modernization. We've made a significant investment in it. It's matured significantly and is about to go kind of into full production here and probably within the next month in terms of connecting with other agencies for production use. The other one is IRACNET that is used in pretty well established to track and manage all of the activities in the business process for the IRAC has a tremendous amount of information in it and you know I don't want to say it fully meets the needs of the business process but is fairly mature in that regard. So that's another tool that is very likely to move forward as part of the modernization. There, we can ultimately get to answer questions about the, you know, some of the other tools like the STA tool, some of which are not as significantly used.

I would cast out that this is kind of just an overview of and if we ultimately need to answer any questions about the existing legacy tools, we will. But a lot of this is, you know, as you can see, they're set up in a lot of cases as individual stove pipes, not necessarily geared to work together. We're trying to evolve that as we go forward, so that there are more kinds of services running off of a common data structure going forward next line. Just giving you a quick overview of what GMF the government master file where all the frequency assignments that NTA tracks and what the numbers look like for that. So GMF includes about 650,000 records right now. Most of those are unclassified, but there's about 4000 classified records in the high side system roughly. You know, 3900 of those third sorry, 3390 thousand [390,000] of those are federal systems, 260,000 or nonfederal systems we get the nonfederal systems through feed from the FCC. It's important that we have them because there's a lot of shared spectrum where those records need to be looked at.

There are roughly 100,000 assignments that have certifications associated with them, and they give you a breakdown. NTIA processed about 84,000 GMF records in 2023 with 24,000 of those being new. Most of these 53,000 being modifications and 7000 being deletions, and we processed, I think nearly 2000 requests for special temporary authorizations. Most of those came over from the FCC for various purposes. We don't have here breakdown of the certification requests and other data sources like IRAC net. We'll be looking to kind of add that information and make that information available, but again, that was really just to give you a sense of how much work that we do in the frequency assignment space. One of the kinds of core business processes and how much information moves through our systems next line.

Alright, so some of the complexities that we want to talk about.

We have established business processes right and while we recognize and I think we've gotten a couple of questions about this, while we would like to obviously modernize those business processes where it's appropriate or where we're able to or we can use technology to do that. In some cases, we can't necessarily force a hugely significant change. I do not anticipate as part of this that, for example, that we're getting rid of frequency assignments in any capacity. Could we make improvements that might bring things like artificial intelligence to it, or automated frequency assignment approval in certain cases? Possibly yes, but it's kind of a delicate dance that we have to go through to make process change occur. So those have to be chosen kind of very carefully as we move forward. And subject matter expertise can't stress this enough. Every place that I have been in spectrum having appropriate subject matter expertise is absolutely key. It is not just about automating and information systems, it is about understanding the reasons and purposes why we have the business processes that we do and why those are important. That is absolutely key to being successful in this space. In some cases, we have limited documentation of some of our IT systems. That is something that we may not be able to significantly change as we move into this modernization. We're looking to document how some of our business processes flow, but again, the focus is on what we can do for the future, not so much let's reengineer the past. I mentioned earlier that we don't have kind of really fine level detail requirements. We're obviously looking to do this from an agile perspective and as part of that will be collecting requirements. We are looking at releasing a next level down requirements document that we have developed as part of the solicitation and the last one refers to you know, we have to be cognizant of the SMEs time as we involve them in a business process. So we on the government side are careful about that because they have a day job to do and they have those, you know those 650,000 records to deal with on a regular basis. The agenda is the frequency assignment agenda is something that takes us a fair amount of time from the staff to deal with every single week and we try to, you know, evolve them smartly in the process as we go forward.

Next slide.

I want to touch on a couple of things that we are doing now, and this is in an effort to make sure that we're set up well for the future as we move into modernization. So, the first one I'm probably most important has to do with getting a kind of a new standard in place for the frequency assignment work.

If you're familiar with the GMF card format, it is very old. We've kind of figured out over time how to add additional things to it, but it's not a modern kind of XML exchange format. It works for us for the most part, sometimes causing us some problems. Umm, but it is how we exchange information today now going forward in the future, we'd like to evolve that into something like an XML standard.

We are working with MITRE today.

We go to the next slide.

On the development of an XML kind of a draft XML initiation of a of a data structure. What this slide illustrates is what's on top is a representation of something that came out of GMF. It's a little hard to read. In fact, you have all the all the boxes to the right to just pretty much help explain what all the different fields are, why they're there and the nature and purpose behind that. And so, it's very difficult for a novice user to look at it and appreciate the information about it. The snippet example from the bottom is in terms of using XML. Obviously is a lot clearer and easier to read if you have to read it. It's also something that information systems today are established and able to work with them, process and so this just drives home the point that we know we need to evolve our data structure. We are working to get in place kind of an early iteration of that. One of the reasons for going something like XML is because it's extendable, right? We can evolve that over time. One of our goals, obviously, is part of this is to have forward and backward compatibility so that we can move information to and from the GMF standard.

We recognize that it will take time to evolve the data structure and so we have to have forward and backward compatibility during that period of time. While we are doing it . I did mention this a little bit earlier, it goes without saying that we're going to build new information systems. Those systems have to comply with all of the security requirements that are necessary for federal systems. In addition, there are requirements for us to move and evolve towards a zero-trust, and so that will mean a number of things throughout all of our information systems, even down to the data level. So, we need expertise in helping us move and evolve our systems, so we become more zero trust compliant. But that's a large factor in helping protect information. Ensure that information is only viewed and processed by people that need to have access to that information. Part of what we are doing now in terms of working to take advantage of some of the improvements to security or we're moving some of our information systems to an Azure cloud environment. This will give us access to a number of tools as well as allow us to modernize our authentication efforts. All of that, some of that work is actually ongoing now to move our systems out of the Department of Commerce and take advantage of some of the improvements that we can get just by shifting into the commercial cloud environment. So, more information on that will be available obviously as we move towards the solicitation next line.

We want to highlight some lessons learned and risks as well, and I'm not going to talk to all of these, but at the top level across the top stakeholders and communication, obviously very critical. We do have a working group with the agencies called the Spectrum IT Modernization Working Group where we discuss and inform them. Kind of what we're doing as part of the modernization and then get their feedback internally. We have a number of working groups which served to kind of get feedback from some of those SMEs, but having a good process for stakeholder communication is absolutely key. Some of our lessons learned in the past have been, information systems that that get built at the aren't suitable to support the spectrum business processes and if you get the thumbs down from stakeholders and SME's, you're not going forward, you're not going to have success. So that's absolutely critical software systems engineering. You know, obviously being able to design, build, track requirements, do all of the aspects associated with all the best processes, practices associated with building a modern kind of secure set of web applications. That's absolutely critical and I consider it something that, you know, I'm essentially just buying that. I think every potential vendor or respondent should be able to prove out of the box that they're able to do all of that and have been doing it , you know, with a significant experience level and success program and contract management. Again, that goes to kind of being able to manage your project, us being able to manage that project with you and be able to do things like discuss risks, come up, you know, obviously with an approach that leads to success, one of the ones that I've attached myself a lot to recently is getting to things like a minimum viable product. I'm sure as part of this, one of the things that we're considering is, you know, we'll look to have a product kind of some level of product on the ground inside of a short time frame as a minimum viable product. With the overall goal and objective of being able to prove that we can be successful. Something that we could build on over time, but also that that the that you know the foundational kind of architecture of the system is achievable and so very much focused on being able to get product on the ground in a very short period of time and establish, so, that the users can start to take advantage of it to some extent, but two so that we can get to that success point and then be able to evolve that over time and then the last area is kind of, you know resources so that we require the contractor have expertise and moderate secure government applications, electromagnetic physics. I can't stress this enough.

If you don't understand the physics of what we do and the business processes, you're not going to be successful in this space. And so, the last three there on the right-hand side are pretty much you know a a baseline requirement if you're considering being a respondent in this space, so that's lessons learned.

I think the next slide is some risks that we wanted to highlight.

Changes to data standards, things like that. We're very cognizant of things like that's part of the reason why we're working on the data standard work now, user adoption and change. That's why I said stakeholder communication is so critically important, stakeholder buy in as part of that as well. Size and complexity of the mission needed acquisition. I talked a lot about complexity. We have some very complex business processes; we need ways to break them down to ensure success as we move forward. I am very much focused on what can we achieve in a year, right or something like that, and then what can we achieve? And then next year, that adds on to that. Those are all success points and opportunities for success points for us and it helps us reduce the complexity of the problem, so we do not have one large, colossal failure at the end of this depending on the accurate and complete spectrum data. For visualization understanding I mentioned data improvement is key part of what we're trying to achieve.

Trusted Spectrum engineering, analysis, and physics-based logic. We're actually working on something with the lab and Boulder to make a prop model available as this is being done in part to help any future vendors reduce the dependency on having to do a lot of the physics-based modeling. That might have to be done in this space. Reverse engineering legacy systems. Obviously, there might be a bit of understanding of the business processes, but less dependent on fully understanding how those systems work and, in some cases, where more focused on replacing them, business processes that cross the mains. So, want to make this very clear that I made it, you know in the overall diagram that I talked about, we showed unclassified and classified secret. One of the things that these people spend a lot of time doing internally today is kind of a manual cross. The main process that's going to go away, one of the reasons that we're driven to move to an XML data standard, so that makes it easier to flow that information through a cross domain. So cross domain solution is definitely part of the solution set here.

And need to deliver user capabilities frequently. That is, that is a, you know, I mentioned that it's all part of kind of the agile process, those minimum viable products, getting capabilities out and maturing and evolving that over a period of time.

All right, I think we're down to last slide might be scheduled alright.

So, this is our notional, I'll drive notional schedule because things can always happen as part of this process, but our goal here is to get a request, so solicitation out in the spring with a contract award before the end of the year. We are going through some internal improvement. I'm going to the investment review board processes that we have to go through both with NTIA and the Department of Commerce before we get approval for doing a solicitation release. But we are pretty close to starting that process now. So, we looked at approval from that nearly spring and that will move us into a solicitation phase going forward.

I think that is my last slide.

With that, we're going to turn to questions. There were three questions. I'm just going to read them off now.

I reiterate this again, since we're in the market research phase, we can't necessarily answer all of your questions right now, but the point is to capture, then and then obviously to try to get back to as many of those questions as we can going forward.

Again, all the questions and the answers get posted on sam.gov to make that information available to everybody.

But the three questions I think that we picked out one was.

It is NTIA looking for a feasibility study to capture workflow analytical and data requirements holistically.

Basically, is NTIA going to take this opportunity to analyze whether certain processes need to be added and improved upon for existing capabilities or as anti-looking to replace functionality of the existing systems only so the IT you've heard me talk about this, I think you know as we as I went through the briefing. So, in certain cases, yes, I think that we, we can make tweaks or adjustments to the business processes. It is going to be dependent on what those changes are.

Am I looking to replace the frequency assignment business process?

No, I don't think I would be successful at doing that but potentially could we do things like apply artificial intelligence to those processes to help cut down the time it takes to get frequencies approved? Yes, those are our potential things that we are certainly willing to consider, but do we necessarily need to look at the entire set of business processes all at once and try to evolve that? No, I think that we're not out to, to redo everything.

Question two is the draft management plan. This is referring to our overall management plan that we had released, I guess as part of an earlier solicitation, and so the question is, “Is the draft management plan NTIA's definition of agile, or is the desired management approach for FSDS to include waterfall level pre-planning?”

We would expect some level of you know preplanning to incur but we are very much focused on having an agile process for the purposes of kind of development and release cycles, looking for somebody that has matured DevSecOps processes that you know that we can leverage as part of this and the reference in this question to our earlier plan that would say that the plan is currently under revision and obviously, we'll be considering that as part of what we potentially release for the supporting documents in this situation.

The rest, at least from what was submitted, “Will the agency consider sponsoring secret clearance level facility clearance if all technical requirements are met for this effort?”

So, an offer must meet the security requirements at the contract award in order to begin contract execution and timely matter. So, a little bit of that is kind of under consideration. We haven't completed all the documentation or the acquisition at this point, but generally you have to be able to meet the requirements of the solicitation as it's put out.

And I think that's the last question. I'm going to go back and get Adams help here to see what other questions we have coming in.

ADAM BOUFFARD

We have three in chat Alan that I can go ahead and start asking and then just encourage the group post your questions in chat. I'll raise your hand. So, we can call in your first. First come first serve basis, but the first question is, “Is FSDS envisioned to replace Spectrum 21?"

ALAN ROSNER

We work on closely with DoD on Spectrum 21. They do the core development there. They have done some work to develop a modernized version of Spectrum 21. We haven't had our opportunity to be involved in testing of that yet, but if that capability is mature and successful, that might be a way for us to move forward. I will say though that I'm very much interested in having a web-based solution, even if that is successful. So that's something that we're going to have to evaluate in the absolute worst case, if the modernized version of spectrum 21 fails, yes, we would be looking to have ultimately a replacement for it. I recognize that that would probably take some significant time to put in place. I would add that it's our expectation that that would probably be almost entirely web based. I think it's time we do not have the same say, disconnected requirements that the Department of Defense has in that space. And so, we think that we could operate almost entirely as the web-based solution in that area.

Umm, alright, so you just do you want me to read off the next question? I see it in the chat

ADAM BOUFFARD

Yeah, you can go if you want to roll through, or I can, either way?

ALAN ROSNER

“Is the intent to move away from MCEB pub 8 standard.”

So, we haven't, the only place that the really that part of that has been adopted from our perspective is with regards to EL-CID Online that supports the connection between US and the Department of Defense.

Their system is the end-to-end spectrum supportability system. Our system is EL-CID online. That connection is actually about to come online here, probably in the next month or two into production and that's the only place that I believe we've directly used of that part of the pub 8 standard. Everything else between spectrum 21, as you know uses SFAF and I think as that diagram I showed showed earlier uses a version of GMF that allows us to exchange information between the agencies. That's a DoD standard, and on the NTIA side, obviously we're looking at where we should be in all of our business processes with regards to the data and obviously, interoperability is very, very important to us as we consider evolving any of our data structures, we will be working closely with DoD and other government agencies to ensure where we do have to exchange information that we can be interoperable. And that is why I emphasized the need for the first version that we're working on for this XML version at GMF is that it has to be forwardly and backwardly compatible. We've actually done demonstrations with minor where we convert data to XML and then we convert it all back to GMF and it's got to be an exact match.

Alright.

Next question “Besides the lift and shift, cloud work, do you need any help in modernizing your applications for moving it to the cloud?”

Alan you skipped one.

“Can you discuss more about the physics-based mod and SIM work being done with the group in Boulder? Are these services meant to replace those currently used as part of the frequency nomination process?”

In interference analysis, so there are possibilities there so, the work that is being done is if, if you're familiar with ITS Institute for Telecommunications Sciences in Boulder, that's part of NTIA, they and part of their work, they will develop a models as part of their work the ITS model is pretty well known and the regular train model is pretty well known. That's one of the models that they have. We are working with them to encapsulate those models into web services. Now others are working with them too, to build or enhance models or improvements in certain bands. I'll put it that way and all of those could potentially be part of tools going forward. I would anticipate that there are improvements over time to those physics-based models as we kind of try to squeeze more and more out of the spectrum of that we have, we want to have a system by which those models can be applied as quickly as possible to and our engineering tools that support our business processes. That being said, in some cases those models are, for example in MATLAB or other kind of analysis capabilities and being able to take those types of models and move them kind of quickly and be able to utilize them as part of the business processes going forward is very important to us because alternatively what happens is then they do and we're trying to avoid this. They wind up in some kind of customized tool that somebody has to run separately, feed and massage the data into it, and obviously that consumes and takes time, and we want to process by which those models are readily available to people and can be developed and easily integrated into the business process that we're trying to support.

I hope that helps.

Alright.

“Besides the lift and shift the cloud work, do you need any help in modernizing your applications for moving it to the cloud?”

So, I'll just use an example that the two applications that we said we probably keep in large extent to the way they are, things like ELCID online, we have significant investment there and that capability is fairly mature. If we move to the cloud, we probably have to do things like rewire the authentication on it, make it more secure. You're familiar with zero trust, there’s potential for doing things like data tagging.

There's a number of things that might need to be done under the hood to either better enable them for cloud or make them more secure in a cloud environment. Yes, and so we'd be looking at all of that to improve that. But also, you know we have six different database relational database systems. I'd like to get that down to two, so that means how do we evolve all that into a common data like so that we can access that information across all of our systems and have it accessible. Yes, so that's another thing we can get from cloud access to common security and replicated data sets as part of cloud environment but not going that far at this point right now. It was described in the slides as a lift and shift and then the FSDS work will evolve the rest of it should.

ADAM BOUFFARD

Alan, before you answer the next, did you just want to let folks know that we were probably going to run over a little bit on the 10:00 o'clock?

Yeah, I’ll keep answering questions if folks want. We started a little bit late, so we have a little bit of flexibility here to go over and if you're able to.

Alright. Am I in the right place?

“Should industry expect a single award or multiple award contract?”

I'm not going to answer that at this time. It's part of our acquisition strategy, which is still evolving.

“Are the agencies open to moving away from using Card 3?”

Is that yes, that's good. I assume that, just, I think I've already said the agencies are open to it. Yes, we're going to have to work with some of them. Some of them use pretty much just our tools for supporting their spectrum management processes, other larger agencies have some of their own tools, and we're going have to work with them on, you know, being able to evolve that, you know, exchange of information. But we recognize that, and we've already started talking to some of them about that, but also that's the reason why we're pushing for that backward compatibility from the outset. We are not out and very, very cognizant of that, we do not want to break anything.

“Has NTIA investigated hybrid data model solutions.”

I'm going to let Dave answer that, because he's been deeply involved in the in the data work today, actually, we're going to have to get back to you, we'll answer that.

Sorry, so were their other questions that I've missed in the chat or?

Folks can raise their hands and sort of get called on if they would rather do it through audio.

“Have you considered a JSON data exchange standard instead of the XML standard currently being investigated? This would foster more efficient data exchange between modern APIs (e.g., REST, GraphQL)”

We talked about the JSON as part of that. I don't know if it's going to be JSON instead of XML or in addition to it, and we don't have a definitive answer. I recognize that JSON being used, you know widely as well and so it's kind of something that we're considering. And in a lot of areas, I'll say we have very much an open mind about things, particularly if it if it can significantly help us evolve our systems to the end states that we really kind of describing at the beginning, which is we want a whole lot of flexibility for the, for the future ohm, I like to say this a lot, there's a lot of questions that we don't know are going to, you know, they're going to come tomorrow, but I don't know today what they are, right. Umm, there is, we know that there's increased pressure to do more and more with existing, you know, and even some cases less spectrum than we have today, and we need tools and capabilities that are flexible. It's not just a matter of rebuilding the capabilities that we have to be more modernized, but it's also about, you know, having that flexibility to be able to quickly do something to support future analysis needs as they come forward. And so that's what we want to, you know, kind of fundamentally change is the op tempo that it takes us to be able to respond to new needs and to do that we think we need to do things like tie all of our data sets together, have a common set of tools that we can work quickly against a things, umm, trying to prevent cases where we know this today. But a lot of engineers say developed their own little stuff on the side, and it works great and supports them. It's kind of like, you know, doing magic work in excel. That's fantastic, right? You can get your job done, but how does that help people overall? Kind of going forward, it doesn't really, and so we're trying to cut down as much of that as possible. Centralized those services and those capabilities to be able to do things like visualized information.

Alright. Were there any other questions?

If not, I hope that the overview today gave you a kind of a good sense of what we're trying to do with the federal spectrum data system and the IT modernization work and I think they'll be, as I said, the beginning more information kind of coming forward as we move towards the solicitation, we want to thank everybody that responded as part of the request for information and thank you in advance for everybody that's responding back as part of the sources sought. This is all very valuable information to us as part of the market research process helps us a whole lot, and just from the RFI responses that I've seen myself, it really helped us better understand where this space might exist going forward. I would encourage everybody to participate in the Lightning networking sessions that are coming up on the 8th.

And I think that's all I have. Is there anything else from the team that I may have left out?

You have a couple additional questions and the alright chat, and then I'll just add Alan that the questions that were posted that you didn't get to answer in the beginning of the three that you did answer the additional questions will also be posted along with these on sam.gov.

So just to let everyone know that if you posted a question to the PM Q&A prior, those will be answered, answered in writing, and posted to sam.gov.

Alright, so looking at the questions and thank you for that.

“Can you expand on Data Policy: SQL/Relational, NoSQL, Database provider?”

No SQL database provider problem is, I believe I've really had to take this one offline because I'm not the technical expert to provide this, but I believe from my own understanding that the answer is yes, we have all of that stuff and we're not going to dictate necessarily how this gets done, but we have, yes we have SQL database. Yes, I think we have like a, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe ELCID online uses Oracle blobs, things like that. So yeah, we have a combination of stuff that we have to figure out how to evolve and move forward, but I'm not going to dictate how it gets done.

Alright. Yeah. I Appreciate the conversation.

“Is there still an option doing the Spectrum Modernization Working group well?”

No, that's the IT modernization working group, it is not for industry unless you're in direct support to one of those agencies. That working group is really between us and the agencies.

So, I saw a hand come up and then go away, did we have any other questions online?

TONY WHITT

That was me. To give you some backup that you know in the Azure environment, discussions have been happening in our circle related to all those data types.

So, SQL you know NoSQL those kind of data uses. Yeah, as I said before, we are very open minded. We want vendors to understand as well as possible the environments that we have and propose solutions that set us up for the future.

Alright, that being said, I think I'm going to do a last call on questions and if not, I'm going to thank everybody for participating today. I'll look forward to seeing everybody in the lighting networking sessions.

Adam. Anything else?

Or no, Sir, I don't see any additional questions, so.

ALAN ROSNER

OK, alright. Again, I hope this was helpful to you and look forward to seeing everybody on Wednesday.

Thank you.

CHRISTOPHER HOLMES

Thanks for doing this, this is great.