To help keep pace with the rising number of applications, Bourgeois, who is now director of the Interior Department's National Business Center, focused on upgrading security policies and technology to meet federal standards, developing an enterprise architecture to define how the office's technology is developed and deployed, and implementing a storage area network to support its massive online transaction database.
The ability to support this database using a SAN means the office has a pool of storage resources that can be diverted to wherever they're needed rather than attaching new storage devices to each database server. "If we'd done this initiative using our previous storage architecture of adding capacity to individual servers, it would have cost us $22.4 million more," Bourgeois says. The Patent Office wants to make full use of its SAN by creating "wrapper code" around patent files that will let electronically filed data move through the IT systems from one end to the other.
Many of Bourgeois' marching orders were dictated by the Patent Office's 21st Century Strategic Plan, introduced in 2002. It's designed to prepare the office to accommodate increasing processing demands while cutting the amount of time patent examiners must wait to get a response from the office's database, which contains data on nearly all of the 7 million patents issued since 1790. However, in recent years, Congress has been diverting patent-application revenue to the general treasury to help cover the country's budget deficit, hurting the office's ability to hire new examiners and keep up with the growing number of applications, Lehman says.
While technology isn't a substitute for trained examiners, it can expedite and ensure the integrity of the review process through online application filing, public key infrastructure data security, and enhanced database-search capabilities, says Edward Kazenske, deputy commissioner for patent resources and planning. "In some cases, technology is the only way massive amounts of data can be reviewed," he says.
Bourgeois' successor will be responsible for integrating the Patent Office's online efforts with those of European and Japanese patent offices, given that they publish 90% of the world's patents. "Our goal is to provide access to each other's files while we're in the examination process so that we can review their work and identify what their examiners have done," Bourgeois says.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
