The National Nuclear Security Administration’s technology hasn’t kept pace with its mission demands.
This lack of investment has created a backlog of technology needs.
But now, the agency is trying to close its technology gap, said Jaime Wolff, the associate administrator for Information Management and chief information officer for NNSA.
“We should have been making many of these investments in technology over the past seven years, but we’re doing it today. That’s a huge differentiator,” Wolff said at the recent AFCEA Bethesda Energy, Infrastructure and Environment (EIE) Summit, an excerpt of which played on Ask the CIO. “We have to make those investments. Our systems and machines have to be supportive of the mission. As that mission expands, we have to be there to support them, and that’s we’re furious doing that right now. One of our top priorities is IT modernization, simply for that reason.”
Years of underinvestment by the NNSA has impacted not just technology but also buildings, roads and labs too.
For fiscal 2025, NNSA requested just under $25 billion, a 13% increase over 2024. As part of that increase, NNSA wanted $3.3 billion for infrastructure and operations, a 27% increase over 2024.
But with the full-year continuing resolution now in place, some of those investments remain in limbo.
Wolff, who spoke at the event before the Congress finalized the CR, said NNSA made some progress in 2024 and had big plans for 2025 and beyond.
“A lot of our sites are doing enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization projects. Many of those ERPs were implemented about 25 years ago. So as we get into that, that’s just indicative of how the entire organization is. Unfortunately, I’d say the same holds true for most federal agencies,” he said. “We have this giant backlog of technology that needs refreshed, and we’re in it. We’re driving really hard. If you just look at the core infrastructure in the ground, you have incredible requirement to update that infrastructure. When we have a 10-gigabit connection to a site, that really needs to be 400 or 500 gigabits because, in a modern environment, we are cloud-based across all networks and we need to be able to move data efficiently from one site to the next,” Wolff said. “That’s just one simple area but it’s true across every function that we have.”
Innovation at Sandia
At Sandia National Lab, John Zepper, executive director for information and security engineering and CIO, is addressing a similar technical debt challenge by crowdsourcing ideas from staff members.
He said through an internal platform, Sandia received over 1,100 ideas to save money and go faster in less than a month.
“We started tracking those. We saved almost $47 million just by looking at those ideas. These are people who are so passionate about fixing something it’s not even theirs. So just getting this innovation, which I also credit Jamie and Steven [McAndrews, NNSA deputy CIO] around, we have to be more efficient,” Zepper said. “We have to do it faster. We have to do it less expensive. We just started tracking that, and it’s been fantastic just to see the dynamics that it changes.”
He said the best idea of the month receives a “championship belt” as a way to add some fun and friendly competition to the effort.
“They wear it over their shoulder, like a heavyweight boxer. These are the things that when you have leadership that’s willing to take some risk, to go faster and to save money, that’s just right,” Zepper said.
One example of an idea that came from staff members is a better way to fix satellites after they have been launched into space.
“What if you could put a protective barrier around that satellite that could be upgraded from the ground? Then you write a translator into the hardware of the satellite and now you can upgrade that for 20-30 years,” Zepper said. “The cost of that and the savings are phenomenal, because you can redo that protective barrier over and over and over again.”
Reducing cyber tools
Along with innovation, Zepper said another top priority is digital engineering.
He said the agency uses digital twins, which provide a master design that can be analyzed and refined for innovation.
“You can run analysis on that model. You can take subsets of that and send it to Kansas City to be built or prototyped. The savings there alone could be fantastic, but if you have an authoritative source and you’re using that for digital engineering, there’s many, many things that can go faster,” he said. “You can be more efficient. You can try more designs. You can use data analytics to look at tolerances around your where you’re drilling holes, and look at the whether or not you have structural issues there. We are investing heavily in that area. We we’re trying to come up with a new format that’s neutral, that you can share those particular analysis and designs.”
Unlike Sandia, Wolff’s focus remains on improving the legacy infrastructure.
He said around zero trust and cybersecurity, NNSA plans to consolidate and maximize the number of tools it’s using.
“Those tools are offered across NNSA. Some are mandatory and some of them are shared across other parts of Department of Energy. Those tools need optimized, and that is incredibly important,” Wolff said. “We need to fully deploy them and take advantage of all the capability within them. How do we best use those tools? That’s going to be a long, large project because we really are talking a massive portfolio, both from a money perspective, but the number of machines that it’s touching.”
NNSA currently has 15 cybersecurity tools and is spending over $100 million on them.
Outside of cyber, Wolff said two other big priorities are deploying business tools, such as case management for human resources and customer relationship management applications, and expanding their support for the use of artificial intelligence.
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