The Buzz with ACT-IAC

The Buzz is going on a short hiatus this summer, so our releases will be less regular than usual. In the meantime, we'll be replaying some of our favorite episodes from the past year or so. This week, we're revisiting a conversation we had with James Salzman and J.B. Ruhl , environmental law professors at UCLA and Vanderbilt, respectively. They are the authors of The Greens' Dilemma...

This week, The Buzz presents a keynote session from our 2024 Health Innovation Summit. In this fireside chat, Kevin Seeley, VP of Strategic Programs for Military Health at GDIT, sits down with Naomi Escoffery , Chief Accelerator Officer at the Defense Health Agency. Together, they discuss efforts towards modernization and innovation to improve healthcare outcomes for active-duty US military person...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from ACT-IAC's 2024 Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is responsible for developing and issuing guidance around the standards and measurements we use in all kinds of technological development in the US. In the modern era, this includes Artificial Intelligence. Since the release of the...

Last week, ACT-IAC held its 2024 Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference in Cambridge, MD, where leaders and experts from across government, industry and academia met to discuss how government can harness new technology to improve mission outcomes. Our conference kicked off with a keynote presentation and fireside chat with Arun Gupta, a venture capitalist, lecturer at Stanford University, a...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2024 Resilient Infrastructure Summit. In this opening keynote session, Dr. Elizabeth Doris, Director of the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), discusses the past, present and future work that the laboratory has conducted to assist in the United States' clean energy transition, resili...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2024 Resilient Infrastructure Summit. This panel focuses on how academic institutions contribute to infrastructure change action through research, sustainable practices, and policy advocacy. Speakers will showcase university-led initiatives and their alignment with government efforts to meet national goals. Attendees will learn how academic expertise...

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...

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 Digit...

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 av...

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 promi...

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.  Agile Product Discovery Course | A...

 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...

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-up...

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 But...

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. Med...

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...

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...

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...

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 crisis and the need to rapidly reduce greenhouse ga...

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 Associ...

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 str...

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 dorm...

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 we...

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 en...

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. A...