The Selective Service System is close to completing phase one of its registration system modernization effort.
With an almost $6 million boost from the Technology Modernization Fund, the Selective Service is moving to the system to the cloud and updating its data infrastructure.
Scott Jones, the Selective Service’s CIO, said the initial phase will help the agency better store, manage and share information with individual registrants upon request.
“Phase two of this project is expected to start shortly after phase one. That final phase is the design and delivery of our data warehouse, and is expected to be complete in fiscal 2026. The entire project will be completed in mid-2026 with our transition to full operations and maintenance,” Jones said on Ask the CIO. “This modernization initiative is delivering resilience and agility to the systems that manage the registration of millions of men aged 18 to 25 including U.S. citizens at home and abroad, as well as male immigrants residing in the United States. Maintaining a comprehensive and secure registration system supports national readiness in the event of a return to conscription during a national emergency.”
The TMF Board awarded SSS $5.9 million in March 2022 out of the funding it received under the American Rescue Plan Act. So far the Selective Service has spent about $3.8 million and has repaid about 12%.
Jones said the TMF funding is helping accelerate not just the system architecture, but the underlying security and ensuring SSS can continue to update the capabilities as needed going forward.
Treating data as an asset
Phase two of the modernization effort is focused on consolidating and migrating various databases into a centralized data warehouse.
Jones said one big piece of phase two is ensuring the data is secured. A close second is making the data easily accessible for business intelligence, artificial intelligence, advanced visualizations and other capabilities.
“We want to use analytics to be able to leverage that data as a strategic asset. It’s the federal government’s data, it’s the public’s data, with regards to which we utilize that to meet end goals of the agency’s mission,” he said. “[We hired] our first full time chief data officer, and I look forward to partnering with the chief information security officer, the chief data officer and all of our stakeholders throughout the agency to be able to create a data warehouse that will drive that capability to analyze that data down to the functional level of users throughout our enterprise, so we can truly have the reporting analytics and business intelligence that will drive our agency success.”
Alma Cruz joined SSS earlier this year from the Federal Reserve Board.
Jones said having Cruz as its full-time CDO is a big step for the Selective Service.
Becoming more agile with software
“I’ve advocated for the position, and I’m delighted that our leadership and stakeholders believe in the value of that assignment, so it’s really going to be instrumental in not only advancing all of our capabilities, but it really is that liaison with the rest of the federal community,” he said. “So much of the zero trust, architecture has dependencies on how your data is designed, managed, procured or maintained and curated. When we talk about principles of zero trust, you talk about concepts of least privilege and those concepts are not just relegated to the access controls at the systems level. They really are access control to down to the data level, and that’s a very important security concept.”
One big benefit of the project for the Selective Service is how it’s helping the agency move toward an agile development methodology.
“This is a natural migration to more agile and more uncoupled microservices, code development and maintenance to be able to agilely scale our systems up and down in the event of a national emergency, but as importantly, it not only provides that maintenance efficiency and agility, but it’s a more intuitive way to maintain your software architecture,” Jones said. “It certainly lends itself to more efficient and predictable, total cost of ownership and certainly greater security as you re host your software and your database in a FedRAMP secure cloud.”
Jones said before the TMF project, the Selective Service was moving toward being an agile organization, but by no means was fully there.
“We had a very sophisticated development team, and have had that for years at our agency. But because our software applications are proprietary and serve a very specific need for our nation’s defense capabilities, we were more traditional waterfall. That doesn’t mean that we were naive to agile concepts. They just didn’t necessarily fit our construct for maintaining our code,” he said “The feedback that we’ve had from our cloud integration partner after reviewing our code during the rationalization process was very favorable to our code design and the commenting that we had within our code, it was very well documented, and that itself has been a great aid to us being able to move toward a new JAVA script platform and agile DevSecOps.”
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