Cloud Exchange 2026: NEA’s Jim Tunnessen on deploying new IT at speed

What makes this new grants system unique is that an NEA engineer developed it using an artificial intelligence agent — in a week.

Jim Tunnessen, chief information officer and chief artificial intelligence officer at NEA, said in a matter of days, the engineer developed a complete replacement for the grants system, using the current U.S. Web Design System standards and making the agency system much more user-friendly.

Reimagining the NEA grant system

“Our grant system was not operating as effectively as it needed to be — to be as polite as possible. We recently lost the primary developer on that system. They had left, and we were left with a system that needed some handholding,” Tunnessen said during Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange 2026.

“My deputy CIO came to me and said, ‘What do you think about having our AI engineer look at this grants management system?’ I said, ‘Sure, let’s see what we can do.’ I figured I’d get a report back in about a week to let us know where we stand and how things are operating.”

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. “But no, he came to us in a one week timeframe with a fully operating and ready replacement system for the organization,” Tunnessen recalled.

For NEA, grant-making does rely on a small system. One of the agency’s main mission areas is to award grants, making it a critical and complex application.

Continuing to evolve at speed at NEA

The agency’s 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.

Tunnessen said the grants system must be able to accept applications, analyze those applications and present them to NEA’s leadership, which then selects grant recipients.

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.

He expects to finalize the development, obtain an authority to operate and launch the new system in late calendar year 2026 or early 2027.

But this grants development project showed two important things, Tunnessen said:

• First, NEA could move at speed, just like the private sector.
• Second, its six-plus year IT modernization journey is delivering on the promises of the past.

“I 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,” he said.

“Yes, 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 — everywhere from ideation to deployment. We’ve 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.”

Optimizing NEA cloud spending with FinOps

Tunnessen said when he arrived at NEA in 2020, the agency still hosted most applications on-premise.

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.

“We are working on our network optimization, our implementation of artificial intelligence and our optimization of our digital presence for the public — as well as for the staff — to create a more efficient and effective operation for the government,” he said.

“We’ve also been working with the chief financial officer’s 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’s optimized for the use within the agency.”

The use of FinOps to manage and optimize NEA’s cloud spending is an important step toward Tunnessen’s newest modernization goal: “Make this building that I’m sitting in right now nothing more than an internet connection, that’s all. That’s 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.”

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.

“We 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,” he said. “With the IaaS to PaaS transitions, we are setting everything up to create more of a plug-and-play style solution. We are getting the analysis through cyber tools to reach the ATO status.’

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.

“All of that will generate a report, as well as a timeline for remediation,” Tunnessen said. “We will submit it into the repository of the system itself, so that the documentation is already there and the analysis is done.”

The agent also performs a Section 508 analysis and provides a report to help NEA ensure it meets accessibility requirements.

All of these efforts are reducing the cycle times around cybersecurity and modernization of systems, which Tunnessen said is the ultimate goal for NEA.

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