Federal News Network\u2019s Cloud Exchange 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cMy deputy CIO came to me and said, \u2018What do you think about having our AI engineer look at this grants management system?\u2019 I said, \u2018Sure, let\u2019s see what we can do.\u2019 I figured I\u2019d get a report back in about a week to let us know where we stand and how things are operating.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he expected to either a data points analysis of what was going wrong or a root cause analysis or maybe some refactoring to help the system operate better. \u201cBut no, he came to us in a one week timeframe with a fully operating and ready replacement system for the organization,\u201d Tunnessen recalled.<\/p>\n
For NEA, grant-making does rely on a small system. One of the agency\u2019s main mission areas is to award grants, making it a critical and complex application.<\/p>\n
Continuing to evolve at speed at NEA<\/p>\n
The agency\u2019s budget is around $207 million per year. The majority of that budget goes out to grants and partnerships throughout the nation to support the arts communities and the public.<\/p>\n
Tunnessen said the grants system must be able to accept applications, analyze those applications and present them to NEA\u2019s leadership, which then selects grant recipients.<\/p>\n
While the grants systems remains in development mode, Tunnessen said that has more to do with how NEA works with its grantees than the system itself.<\/p>\n
He expects to finalize the development, obtain an authority to operate and launch the new system in late calendar year 2026 or early 2027.<\/p>\n
But this grants development project showed two important things, Tunnessen said:<\/p>\n
First, NEA could move at speed, just like the private sector.
\nSecond, its six-plus year IT modernization journey is delivering on the promises of the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just think it comes down to getting the governance controls and the leadership in place to allow it to happen. There is a certain amount of risk that the CIO needs to accept and is responsible for within an organization. That is a key factor across government: Making sure that you make the environment available for this to happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, the fact that we are a small agency does assist us in our operations and the way that we are able to greatly reduce cycle time of development in practice \u2014 everywhere from ideation to deployment. We\u2019ve worked very hard on increasing our cybersecurity and updating our infrastructure. Now, our key factor is making sure that both the internal and external customers are best met with the digital tools that are necessary to help them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Optimizing NEA cloud spending with FinOps<\/p>\n
Tunnessen said when he arrived at NEA in 2020, the agency still hosted most applications on-premise.<\/p>\n
The journey to the cloud has been slow and cautious as he and the IT team initially chose one external facing and one internal facing application to modernize and move to a cloud service provider. Today, NEA is in a multicloud environment with the majority of its applications residing in an infrastructure as a service setup, with a goal of moving toward a platform as a service infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are working on our network optimization, our implementation of artificial intelligence and our optimization of our digital presence for the public \u2014 as well as for the staff \u2014 to create a more efficient and effective operation for the government,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve also been working with the chief financial officer\u2019s office on setting up financial operations to get a better understanding of the costs that are incurred utilizing our cloud environment, making sure that it\u2019s optimized for the use within the agency.\u201d<\/p>\n
The use of FinOps to manage and optimize NEA\u2019s cloud spending is an important step toward Tunnessen\u2019s newest modernization goal: \u201cMake this building that I\u2019m sitting in right now nothing more than an internet connection, that\u2019s all. That\u2019s all it should be. You should be able to connect and work, but nothing is sitting here waiting for you to use. You can work from anywhere and do whatever you need.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, to meet that goal, NEA has been moving toward a zero trust architecture. Tunnessen said its cybersecurity enhancements work hand-in-hand with their cloud migration efforts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were able to identify the controls that were necessary to get to a certain level where we are continuously monitoring our systems and continuously advancing our cyber solutions,\u201d he said. \u201cWith the IaaS to PaaS transitions, we are setting everything up to\u00a0create more of a plug-and-play style solution. We are getting the analysis through cyber tools to reach the ATO status.\u2019<\/p>\n
NEA is also working on a multiagent solution to provide its systems analyses. It has already created a cybersecurity agent that can scan the GitHub repository and then do an analysis of known exploited vulnerabilities, a MITRE ATT&CK analysis and a NIST 800-53 Rev 5 analyses.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of that will generate a report, as well as a timeline for remediation,\u201d Tunnessen said. \u201cWe will submit it into the repository of the system itself, so that the documentation is already there and the analysis is done.\u201d<\/p>\n
The agent also performs a Section 508 analysis and provides a report to help NEA ensure it meets accessibility requirements.<\/p>\n
All of these efforts are reducing the cycle times around cybersecurity and modernization of systems, which Tunnessen said is the ultimate goal for NEA.<\/p>\n
Discover more articles and videos now on the Cloud Exchange event page<\/a>.<\/p>\nCopyright
\n \u00a9\u00a02026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\ufeff The National Endowment for the Arts will launch a new grants system in the coming year. What\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43431,24,25,43433,43446,43447,43448,43449],"class_list":["post-79861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-2026-cloud-exchange","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cloud-exchange","tag-grants-management-system","tag-jim-tunnessen","tag-national-endowment-for-the-arts","tag-software-coding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}