Sec. 6. Research on commercially available information technology solutions
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Not later than 60 days after the enactment of this Act, the Assistant Secretary, in coordination with the Chief Information Officer, shall establish a working group of appropriate Department employees, and contractors as appropriate, to liaise with the private sector for the purposes of identifying commercially available technologies that may be adopted by the Bureau to advance the criteria described in section 4, evaluating proposed technological solutions, and augmenting the Bureau’s ongoing modernization efforts. The working group established pursuant to subsection
(a)shall be composed of personnel who can consult on the policy, legal, and technical aspects of the passport issuance process with entities that wish to provide such technologies to the Department. Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the working group established pursuant to subsection
(a)should consider piloting not fewer than three commercial information technology systems with potential to accelerate the passport renewal process, reduce the backlog of requests, and backup legacy systems with cloud-based software solutions. Not later than one year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Assistant Secretary, in coordination with the Chief Information Officer, shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report— describing the usefulness of the working group to the Department’s ongoing modernization efforts and its reception by private sector actors; containing a summary of each proposal made to the working group pursuant to this section and whether the Secretary intends to adopt each proposal; providing recommendations to scale successful solutions.