NASA develops an in-house team for the tricky information technology projects

The Federal Digital Service spawned look-alikes in several agencies. Among them NASA, an agency that already had heavy technology chops. For a look inside NASA’s Digital Service, Shawn Chittle joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin And give us a quick review. This has been around a couple of years, but it’s still fairly new among the digital services.

Shawn Chittle Yes. So digital transformation is where we get our funding. And Jill Marlowe is the chief digital transformation officer out of the OCIO, Office of Chief Information officer at NASA. And a couple of years ago, she had the idea for this digital SWAT team. And as a result, she hired Tracy Bierman out of the Kennedy Space Center as her first hire. And then he set out to build this team. And I was his first hire in January of 23. We didn’t like the term SWAT team. So we looked around and we thought, well, Shawn, you came from the U.S. Digital Service. Why don’t we try digital service here at NASA, and that’s where it was born.

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Tom Temin And by the way, as the team lead, you are the co-founder.

Shawn Chittle Yes, I’m the co-founder with with Tracy Bierman. And we’re kind of a flat organization, so I’m not really the lead of it. We’re just all kind of have our own departments, our own missions.

Tom Temin All right. But you get along with each other.

Shawn Chittle Yeah, I hope so.

Tom Temin All right. And what are the goals for NASA’s digital service?

Shawn Chittle Well, we want to accelerate missions, and we do so by bringing human centered design and advanced modern digital techniques to the agency, whether it’s missions, projects or the different mission support organizations that are out there.

Tom Temin When you think of organizational change, you think of the applications and the systems that are used generally by everyone. Say it’s grantmaking or this type of thing. How do you get involved in the missions? Those are pretty closely husband activities filled with people that know precisely what they’re trying to accomplish, whether it’s something having to do with aeronautics here on Earth or spaceflight.

Shawn Chittle Yeah. First we kind of started with the the normal HR type projects of agency business solution, we worked on that and some other key internal things. And then believe it or not, Artemis found us. And I’ve been working with that team down at Kennedy to accelerate the mission testing platform. They’re using a cluj of PowerPoint, Word Visio, all the different things that government is very familiar with. And they’re like, Hey, can we design a testing platform to get us to the moon faster? And I’m like, Sure happy to do it. So they’re the subject matter experts in spacecraft, and I’m the subject matter expert on how to do digital. And us together are making a really cool product for the government.

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Tom Temin I guess it’s a little shocking that something as advanced as Artemis is still using slide rules when it comes to the digital component.

Shawn Chittle Well, not using slide rules.

Tom Temin Well, spreadsheets, for example, is the digital equivalent of the slide rule, I think nowadays.

Shawn Chittle Sure. We’re a government runs on Excel. So there’s a lot of that stuff, but there are some very modern practices happening and we’re just trying to celebrate those.

Tom Temin And tell us about the organization. How many people do you have? Where are you physically located, if you are or scattered?

Shawn Chittle Yeah, we’re distributed with four of us total. Tracy and I hired two people, a service designer and a product designer. One’s in Milwaukee and one’s in Bangor, Maine. And so we work remotely over teams.

Tom Temin Four of you for something as scattered as NASA. Sounds like you’re more trainers than developers.

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Shawn Chittle Well, we work pretty hard. We get a lot of work done. But because we work in really modern, agile ways, we can kind of compress timelines. We don’t like to do things over like, say, three months.

Tom Temin Well, let’s go back to that example of Artemis. You were trying to update the, I guess, the dashboard, if you will, for lack of a better word, that the scientists and engineers getting that mission going see, when they put all the data related to testing and so forth, flight dynamics together. So how did that happen? How can a couple of people do that? Or are you mainly a contracting purchaser?

Shawn Chittle Well, so the team down there is amazing, the testing platform team, and Paul Douglas and the rest of his team are just awesome. They originally had like this 50 page documents back, and that’s kind of how the way the government runs. And I’m not saying that documentation and specs are wrong, but we took a human centered approach to this. So I opened up a platform called MURAL, not Miro, but MURAL, which is fedramp to what NASA uses. And we started sketching the ideas of how this testing platform, which we call Archimedes Lever, is going to work. And they’re like, let’s put this here, let’s put that there. And of course most people can’t design all that well. So I take their ideas, and then I repurpose them in an application called Figma, which then lets them prototype and see what they’re going to get. They’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they’re super excited and they can’t wait to have this thing done. And we’re using the Microsoft Power app platform to do that.

Tom Temin So Figma and Mural, these are commercial products also that you’re just helping funnel them into.

Shawn Chittle Yes. So Figma is just getting their ATO from the government, whereas Mural has had an ATO for a while, authority to operate. I want to use acronyms.

Tom Temin And are these workflow systems, what are they exactly?

Shawn Chittle They’re 21st century Photoshop to use a term. It’s a way for them to see the product so they can say, yes, that’s what I want. They can try it, they can test it, they can prototype it, then we can go build it, and we know what we’re building is the right thing.

Tom Temin Does this have elements of CAD and engineering also in there?

Shawn Chittle No, it’s not that rigorous. It’s moving around checkboxes and buttons and things like that, and showing screens and displays that make sense to them.

Tom Temin Interesting. We’re speaking with Shawn Chittle. He is the team leader for NASA’s Digital Service. And Artemis is gigantic. NASA is riding on it in some ways, its public and something gets a lot of scrutiny. But NASA’s has hundreds of programs going throughout the space centers and labs and so forth. There’s four of you. Does the demand for the services exceed what you can do? And how do you prioritize?

Shawn Chittle That’s a great, great question. So we do have a triage process, our own little intake. We spend about a half an hour with a customer, and ask them some key questions. We go over their work and we say, this is a good fit for us, we can do this the next few months or few weeks. If not, we can come back to you later. We are a pilot. I was told to make sure I told you that, and that we are looking for our permanence within the OCIO and that news will be coming out later. I’m sure Jill will be happy to talk to you about that. But for now, we are four people and we are looking to scale.

Tom Temin And getting back to the question of Mural and Figma as an example, did those exist? Were there licenses for them already in Artemis or is that something that you’re going to kind of carry and fit everything into in the next round of projects? How does that work?

Shawn Chittle So OCIO pays for that, for Mural and for Figma. And the missions get that benefit, as you know, organizations that we support. Power out platform got some exciting news. We are going to be hopefully granting more licenses to more people. We are kind of doubling down on this low-code, no code platform, which allows us to get out of the Excel and PowerPoint, and into more application based solutions.

Tom Temin And can the people on the projects that are doing the project, do they have the skills or can they acquire the skills to re-orient that data and that spreadsheet information into these platforms themselves?

Shawn Chittle Sure. So there’s a different spectrum of knowledge that you need to have for power out platforms. Sometimes you can click and make it work. Other times you’re going to need a designer like myself to kind of walk you through and help you build. And we have contractors as well. They’re going to do that, Microsoft is also contributing that to them.

Tom Temin So there is a contractor component for different project.

Shawn Chittle Absolutely.

Tom Temin And I want to talk about you, Shawn, yourself. You mentioned you came from the U.S. Digital Service. Tell us more about your background, how you came to the job you have now.

Shawn Chittle Well, Tom, it’s a funny story. I was living in New York and just fine. And then COVID happened, and I thought, wow, this is pretty strange. And the White House contacted me and said, hey, we’re looking for digital service experts. Would you want to come and work for us? And I said, Sure, I’d heard of you. So the first thing I did in my federal career in 2020 was the COVID task force, the White House, which was pretty wild to see. I then left and went over to the Pentagon to do the Defense Digital Service when, of course, and then later Ukraine. I left and did that. And then I went to the Department of Justice where they put me in the fentanyl crisis. So I have just had a pretty wild experience. At NASA I haven’t had any major problems like that, just been an awesome agency to work for. In fact, 11 years running. Best place to work in federal government.

Tom Temin Yeah. And so where were you before the White House? Because they don’t call everybody up and say, Golly.

Shawn Chittle Yeah, I was at Zillow making sure people could rent their apartments in New York. And it’s a dream job because you could see all that kind of stuff. But really, I was ready for something in federal service. I want to serve my country for a long time, and I’m happy to do it. In fact, my grandfather was in the Air Mobility Command in World War II and actually worked in the Air Mobility Command at the Pentagon for a while. So a bit of a legacy there.

Tom Temin Yeah. So how do you find the government? Can you get things done quickly, do you find because the average Fed finds things that are take forever. And if you can do two things in a five year stint there you’ve done a lot.

Shawn Chittle It’s leadership. We have great top cover in the OCIO and at NASA and they say here’s our problem can you go do this, and they mostly let us kind of run our show and let us do that. So yeah, I’m pretty happy in the last two years of the amount of things that we’ve gotten done. And there’s only just more to do. We are bureaucracy hackers. We try to like knock down bureaucracy and fight it where we can, but we also work within a system, and we want to make sure everyone’s respected.

Tom Temin Sure. And I guess my question is, to what extent is experience at one place useful in another? Because you’re not a senior executive. Career senior executives, the original design of that program was that they were program or agency agnostic, and could take their skills from place to place. It didn’t work out that way, but that was the original model of it. But you’re one of those people that seems to be able to float around and land in different places and help.

Shawn Chittle Yes. The digital service expert is a USDS model, so if you can go from agency to agency, but they’re all different. They have different teams, different platforms. But Figma really is kind of I think the platform a lot of people can be rallying around. A lot of people do use Mural. The processes that I learned at the DoD for demonstrating software and rapidly iterating it, I brought to NASA so we can do things in days, weeks and months that take other teams, sometimes years. So we’re happy about that.

Tom Temin And as the Pentagon look toward someday, somehow. There’s only 7,000 recommendations, and ten reports for getting around, I’m exaggerating, for the [Planning Programing, Budgeting and Execution process (PPBE)], it seems like that would be ripe for some kind of lightning strike. Gordian Knot knife through it type of approach that you could handle here.

Shawn Chittle Yeah, I’m not sure I can’t speak to that, I’m not working on those kind of things. But the governance models that are at NASA, there has been some investigation as to how digital service teams can help rejigger that. We have a lot of boards, and so we’re looking at maybe making things a little more efficient. But again, with due respect to those who are there in those positions.

Tom Temin And is there a human relations component to this, because when you come in, I’m here to help. So that’s a challenge in of itself.

Shawn Chittle Well, we want to make ourselves so efficient and so effective that people come to us. We don’t have to really go to them. And really, when you look at the speed at which we’re able to get stuff to market, there’s a FOMO, a fear of missing out that I see happening within NASA and within government, where they’re like, How did you get that done so fast? I want that. And so we just see more and more attention brought to us, which we love.

Tom Temin And what are the next couple of projects on the roster?

Shawn Chittle Well, that’s a really good question. These power out platform that’s been expanded is going to really, really grow, and we’re going to see a lot of things coming through that, I think, that’s the team that I’m on. There’s the NASA.gov team that my colleague is on. They’re expanding that as well. And then AI, which my other colleague is kind of working on, which is getting NASA ready for the AI world that we’re about to enter.

Tom Temin Nasa.gov. NASA was one of the original agencies to be online in an effective way. And I remember this. This is now 30 years on since Netscape, let’s say. NASA was right there. And in many ways, the NASA Website is one of the most ambitious and rich anywhere. It’s like National Geographic or something. And so how do they take something that big? I can’t imagine what the spaghetti code looks like behind NASA.gov. But what do you do there? What do they envision as the next round for that, to modernize it?

Shawn Chittle Well, I would suggest you have Abby Bowman, who is the digital modernization lead for the CIO, and she is wonderful. And they have taken that spaghetti and they’ve moved over to WordPress, and they are scaling that with both nasa.gov and science.nasa.gov. And she has great stories for you.

Tom Temin And artificial intelligence is like saying water, everything in the universe has water, as you know, even Mars. And so what’s your plan for NASA Digital Service with respect to AI, when probably a thousand people are pursuing AI?

Shawn Chittle We have a lot of AI initiatives. David Salvagnini is our Chief AI and Data officer.

Tom Temin He’s been on the show.

Shawn Chittle Ok, fantastic. That’s awesome to hear. So he’s the lead on that, and has been driving that kind of stuff.

Tom Temin And you have some activities at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Shawn Chittle Well, so the Office of Strategic Infrastructure came to our team and said, look, we’re trying to do an agency wide freight logistics shipping application. And Shenandoah Speers, who’s the head of the application group at the OCIO, said, Hey, Shawn, can you help us with this? So we launched this investigation into all the different centers about how we could find the right commercial off the shelf application. And we looked at lots of different products. I brought along, Tom, the actual OSI team with me, and in doing this investigation, asking questions, coming up with frameworks. And it turns out the JPL had this little application that they home built. Now NASA funds JPL, and we asked for a demo of it, and they gave us this demo over and over. They just went over backwards helping us and we’re like, ok, OSI, how much of this is good for you? Like only 90% good. So we’re like, okay, we can do the other 10%. So we ended up acquiring that software for free. They gave us the source code and that saved NASA and the government millions of dollars through that cooperation, which you just said earlier, is about people making those connections in relationships to get stuff done.

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