In early 2017 he arrived at GSA.Īrrieta then approached his boss, Mary Davie (recently named deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service), to see if he could get $250,000 to do a proof of concept to digitize one part of Schedule 70. During his interview, he repeatedly raised the idea of digitizing Schedule 70. The next instance of serendipity came in late 2016, when GSA approached him about applying to be head of the Schedule 70 program. Trying new things may require passion, and passion is more likely to result from self-generated energy. But “I had a background in contracting,” he said, “so I became interested in using this for more than just financial transactions.”Īrrieta was clearly motivated by self-directed energy. That use case resonated with Arrieta, whose wife is from Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in Latin America. He also discovered that “there were folks in government who were very passionate about blockchain as a mechanism to help the unbanked,” both domestically and in developing nations. “As a leader,” he says, Bloom-Raskin “was very open to me exploring.” In a policy shop, he added, “you have access to lots of experts – I met about blockchain with people at MIT and went to some conferences.” “Her one comment sparked my interest,” Arrieta said, and he got blockchain included on a list of technologies the NSC group would examine.Īt this point, Arrieta started avidly working to learn more. ![]() When he was starting work in this group, Bloom-Raskin mentioned to him that a new technology called blockchain might revolutionize financial services. Treasury has a seat on the National Security Council, and Bloom-Raskin asked Arrieta to represent Treasury on a working group on emerging technologies because he had earlier worked as program manager for a Treasury project to use big data in anti-terrorism efforts. He admired his boss, Deputy Secretary Sarah Bloom-Raskin, for her willingness to involve him in senior staff meetings beyond his specific bailiwick. ![]() As I did so, it became clear that he was driven by serendipity and opportunistic search (in the positive sense of the word) rather than some methodical strategic planning process that outlined goals upfront and thought about the optimal way to reach them.īefore joining GSA, Arrieta spent three years with the Treasury Department as its small business executive. I started my search by talking with Arrieta about the path that led him to pursue a blockchain implementation at GSA. It has been quite an education for me to talk with Arrieta and his vendors, Sapient and United Solutions, about what they’ve been up to, and to read some of the new literature on blockchain. Another design feature of blockchain is that entries to the ledger are immutable - somebody can update an entry on the ledger, but the update only adds to the original entry, it can’t replace it (so people can’t hide their tracks and erase the past). Both FCW and GCN have reported on the technology with some frequency, and the IBM Center for the Business of Government has posted two blogs on blockchain in government.Īt its simplest, blockchain is a ledger - a record of transactions and other relevant data about companies or individuals - that is distributed its content is shared in real time with anyone with access to the blockchain. Recently, though, blockchain has been getting a lot of mainstream attention for possible applications well outside of bitcoin, including several articles over the last few years in the Economist. (A Google search of “bitcoin” and “dark web” generates 2.7 million hits.) I suspect that most people in government who have heard of blockchain still associate it mainly with bitcoin. Bitcoin has a bit of a checkered past, and even something of a checkered present, as a play-space for libertarian activists who didn’t like the government’s control of money, and as a possible vehicle for criminal or terrorist financing. ![]() Might I want to write about it, he asked?īlockchain was initially developed as a platform to allow trading of the cryptocurrency bitcoin in a trustworthy, transparent environment. He told me his organization had awarded in late June the federal government’s first contract to use blockchain technology, involving moving FASt Lane, a service that Schedule 70 designed to speed how fast new vendors can get on schedule, onto the blockchain. ![]() The other week I got an email from Jose Arrieta, the new director, arrived less than a year ago, of the General Services Administration’s Schedule 70 (IT products and services) operations.
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