Tag Archives: Mattermost

Empowering Public Sector Technical Teams With Generative AI in a Secure Collaboration Platform

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Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) – with its seemingly limitless potential use cases – have captured the public imagination. And they’re just as compelling to government agencies and the military. Organizations across the public and private sectors are racing to identify the most effective applications of the technology and to implement robust and secure solutions enabled by generative AI.

For instance, generative AI can be a powerful assistant to technical and operational teams such as those involved in application development and incident response. The technology can help teams gain real-time insights, bring to light solutions to unexpected problems, and help make fast, data-driven decisions.

It’s with those advantages in mind that Mattermost partnered with Ask Sage to integrate the Ask Sage GPT solution with the Mattermost secure collaboration platform. The result is secure, AI-enhanced collaboration for technical teams in the U.S. public sector.

Real-time Insights, Natural-language Format

Mattermost is a secure, workflow-centric collaboration platform for technical and operational teams that need to meet nation-state-level security and trust requirements. Available self-hosted or in the cloud, Mattermost integrates team messaging, audio and screen share, technical tools, workflow automation, and project management in an open-source solution.

Mattermost Generative AI Blog Embedded Image 2023

Ask Sage is a GPT-powered platform provider that specializes in enabling secure access to Generative AI capabilities for both government and commercial teams. With a wide range of use cases, including summarization, coding, code review, code improvement, RFP writing, responding and evaluation, and report writing, Ask Sage is built on cutting-edge AI technologies such as Azure OpenAI GPT, Cohere, Google Bard, and various open-source LLMs. The solution can ingest custom datasets, tap into APIs, and connect to data lakes for real-time data and insights in a natural-language format.

Ask Sage can quickly and automatically process large amounts of structured and unstructured data – including government-related data such as laws, Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), DoD Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), and DoD policy and governance content. Outputs include summaries, translations, sentiment analysis, deep insights, and coding.

Integration of Ask Sage with Mattermost provides technical teams with secure, real-time access to generative AI to enhance collaboration, operational productivity, and decision quality. Government and contractor teams can now securely leverage the power of OpenAI and collaborate within a single, seamless interface.

Real-time Insights, Natural-language Format

With this strategic integration, Mattermost equips technical teams to leverage generative AI to accelerate processes, increase output, and improve outcomes. It’s ideal for government teams that write code, manage RFPs, analyze large data sets, or develop and translate intelligence reports.

Ask Sage offers rapid data analysis and summarization to help teams gain new insights as circumstances evolve. Team members spend less time and effort on manual research and analysis, giving them more time to focus on higher-priority decision-making and strategic tasks.

Users can improve the accuracy and depth of Ask Sage results by uploading relevant data –which is labeled by classification level, encrypted, and separated from the OpenAI models. Once uploaded, the data can be accessed only by authorized users through granular access controls within Mattermost.

Collaboration Purpose-built for Public Sector

Mattermost is well-suited to technical public sector teams, because it’s available as an on-prem, self-hosted deployment. That means teams can collaborate securely with lower risk of compromise. It’s also an open-source solution, so organizations can tailor security settings to protect information at impact levels up to IL6 for DoD Secret data. That’s protection that general-purpose, cloud-based productivity and instant-message tools can’t match.

The platform allows teams to create as many topic- or project-specific communication channels as they need. These channels allow users to centralize conversations, data, and tools – including Ask Sage – in the right context. That keeps team members focused and productive, without the need to continually context-switch.

Another useful Mattermost feature is built-in, customizable playbooks – essentially digital checklists – that help team members consistently take the right actions at the right times. Mattermost playbooks can now include generative AI to further automate and accelerate project workflows and incident response.

Leveraging Mattermost’s secure collaboration platform combined with Ask Sage’s generative AI capabilities can revolutionize the way government teams work together, manage technical projects, and respond to mission-critical situations. As interest in OpenAI GPT and similar platforms grows, this strategic integration is a gamechanger in enabling U.S. government and military organizations to securely benefit from generative AI.

Speak with a member of our team today and learn more about Mattermost at www.mattermost.com.

3 New Ways to Integrate Microsoft Teams with Your Purpose-built Technical Collaboration Platform

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Technical and operational team members rely on a broad range of specialized tools: GitLab, Jira, Jenkins, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and many others. Meanwhile, their colleagues across the organization may also use general-purpose solutions such as Microsoft Teams. In fact, many of your people involved in application development, IT operations, and other technical workflows need to stay connected to Teams. And that presents some opportunities.

Microsoft Teams provides a useful all-employee meeting and chat experience. But it can’t deliver the features your technical and IT teams need, such as:

  • Built-in integrations with specialized developer and technical tools
  • Project- or topic-specific channels for in-context conversations
  • Customizable playbooks or digitized checklists to optimize technical workflows
  • Ironclad security for mission-critical workflows connecting to sensitive systems
Mattermost for Microsoft Teams Collaboration Blog Embedded Image 2023

For these capabilities, smart organizations rely on a purpose-built technical collaboration platform. An effective collaboration platform provides a single plane of glass that gives all team members a unified environment for information sharing, project tracking, and both real-time and asynchronous collaboration.

Fortunately, organizations now have an effective means of integrating Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 into their technical and operational processes. Mattermost for Microsoft Teams enables technical users to stay connected to Teams while collaborating in a highly customized and secure collaboration environment.

In particular, three innovative capabilities can equip your organization to turbocharge Teams integration and accelerate your technical workflows:

  1. Secure, customizable Teams messaging extension: The Teams messaging extension allows technical users to collaborate in secure shared channels across the Mattermost and Teams experiences. Users can take advantage of integrated voice, video, screen share, and calendar across the two platforms. They also get unified user management and authentication through Azure Active Directory and Active Federation Services single sign-on. The extension allows Teams users to connect to hundreds of technical and developer systems, along with custom in-house tools, by using their technologies of choice.
  2. Private communications mode for sensitive content: A private communications mode ensures strong security for your sensitive data and technical intellectual property (IP). With this capability, you retain complete control of all messages and files sent. You can optionally store data outside the Teams environment in your own encrypted databases in private or public clouds, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
  3. Business continuity mode during Teams outages: Mattermost for Microsoft Teams can be deployed in private or public clouds independent of Azure. That means you can now maintain vital communications, security, and resiliency functions during an outage of Microsoft 365.

With these features, you have new capabilities to optimize collaboration for technical and operational teams. Centralized IT functions can give your technical teams an extended customization experience while enabling them to remain firmly integrated into the all-employee Teams and Microsoft 365 platforms.

Through the integration of Mattermost and Teams, your technical operators can stay connected to nontechnical stakeholders. Yet within the same environment, they also have direct access to the webhooks, slash commands, custom plugins and apps, automations, workflow orchestration, and project management they need.

Technical and operational users can now leverage Teams while collaborating in a customizable environment – with the security, specialized tools, and purpose-built automations that optimize your mission-critical workflows.

View our demo on integrating Mattermost with Microsoft Teams.

3 Ways to Address Developers’ Productivity Concerns

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From modernizing software development to creating Zero Trust cybersecurity architectures, the federal government has ambitious plans for 2023. But those plans will only reach fruition by removing the barriers that get in the way of developer productivity.

Government agencies have made great strides to bring IT teams, including developers, closer together over the past few years. For example, they’ve made significant investments in software development factories that are rooted in DevOps cultures. And the Department of Defense clearly recognizes the benefits of collaboration between cybersecurity and development teams, making it a core facet of the agency’s software modernization strategy.

But as a recent Mattermost survey discovered, more must be done to break down communication and collaboration barriers that inhibit developer productivity.

Mattermost Developer Productivity Concerns Blog Embedded Image 2023For Unblocking Workflows: The 2023 Guide to Developer Productivity, 300 software developers were surveyed to find out what’s keeping them from being as productive as possible, and what can be done to accelerate productivity. Their responses showed that although organizations have tried to build more collaborative development cultures, there’s still some work to be done in certain areas.

Let’s dig into some of the challenges—and what you, as a government IT professional, can do to address them.

“Poor communication across teams” is a big productivity challenge

Poor communication practices are the biggest obstacles to productivity and collaboration, with 29% of survey respondents citing “poor communication across teams” as an inhibitor. Their biggest issues are around “lack of process and documentation” (27%) and “lack of clarity around project prioritization” (25%).

General-purpose collaboration platforms that other teams use aren’t helping. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said there are “too many distractions from non-developers” using those tools while 25% said they “don’t fit their workflows well.”

“Information spread across too many tools” (46%) and lack of integration with other tools” (45%) are making it tough to collaborate and find information

Having to work with different tools is also making it difficult for developers to collaborate. Indeed, the developers surveyed said that information silos were among their biggest concerns.

These silos are making it frustrating for developers to find what they need when they need it. Thirty-two percent of respondents said they spend 3 to 5 hours per week hunting down information while 18% spent 6 to 8 hours.

Remote work “somewhat improves collaboration” but continues to be a source of tension among some developers

Remote work might be the norm, but developers aren’t entirely taken with it. Forty-three percent of respondents stated that remote work “somewhat improves collaboration” while 33% believe it makes collaboration worse.

That number is down from our 2021 survey, where more than half of respondents said that remote work was a net gain. The fact that the number has fallen is likely a reflection of the deterioration of communications practices and lack of integration, both of which contribute to poor project clarity.

What government agencies can do to improve developer productivity

Our survey respondents sent a clear message: Give us tools and processes that allow us to collaborate more effectively, break up information silos, and share knowledge easily. There are three things you can do to satisfy these needs.

  1. Invest in software built for developer workflows.

Since open source is easily customizable, it’s simple to integrate different development tools. This will make it easier for developers to share code and resources, manage workflows, and communicate with each other without interference from other teams.

  1. Create a central repository for knowledge sharing.

Having a “single source of truth” that developers can refer to when looking for information can save enormous time. Invest in a repository that pulls information from different teams and tools. Provide developers with greater visibility and access to the information they need to do their jobs more efficiently.

  1. Automate information sharing and workflow management.

Automatically input new information into the repository once it’s received so developers don’t have to look for it. Automate workflow processes, too, by using a system that automatically checks off tasks when they’re done, alerts developers when it’s their time to work on a project, and more. Help your developers spend less time focusing on these tasks and more time building applications.

The success of accelerated investments in software factories and modernization initiatives in 2023 will depend in large part on developers’ abilities to be productive. Right now, there are obstacles getting in the way of that productivity. But you can eliminate those obstacles by improving collaboration and information sharing.

 

Want to learn more about developers’ productivity concerns and what you can do to address them? Check out Unblocking Workflows: The 2023 Guide to Developer Productivity.

New Collaboration Tools to Help Government Agencies Advance Their Digital Operations

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Government agencies have long depended on secure collaboration tools. Now, as these agencies focus on modernization initiatives, they require an integrated solution that can securely manage software development workflows and digital operations.

In addition, these new tools need to drive improved productivity, and support compliance requirements. That’s why Mattermost has invested in enhancing its messaging collaboration platform with new solutions for playbooks, workflow management, task management and tool integrations.

Customizable Playbooks for Recurring Procedures

Many government organizations rely on complex processes to enable their operations. Manual, inconsistent approaches result in errors, omissions and missed steps. Digitizing these processes can increase productivity and improve effectiveness. A proven way to achieve those goals is through playbooks.

Playbooks from Mattermost offer prescribed workflows that streamline and optimize recurring processes. They make any structured process repeatable and predictable through checklists, automated triggers and actions, status dashboards and updates, and retrospective timelines and reports.

As a result, federal agencies can better orchestrate work across teams and tools. They can document complex operations, and they can better support scenarios and use cases that require repeatable and reliable process steps. That way, they can achieve consistent processes, predictable outcomes and continuous improvement.

By taking advantage of these playbooks, agencies across government can:

  • Orchestrate digital processes that span teams, tools and missions – Built-in task checklists and real-time messaging enable all stakeholders to understand what’s in progress and what actions to take next.
  • Improve visibility and quality – Prescribed checklists make sure every team member follows best practices, the first time and every time. Status updates eliminate confusion and ensure stakeholders remain informed on workflows.
  • Streamline tasks with triggers and actions A no-code framework enables teams to automate repetitive work, freeing up time for more strategic priorities.
  • Improve with every iteration Retrospective reports and timelines enable teams to retrace what happened and benefit from key takeaways. Incorporating learnings back into playbooks makes processes more effective and scalable.
  • Integrate and extend – Because playbooks are built on an open source platform, they allow for customization and extensibility. Team members can leverage other tools they’re already using through APIs, plug-ins and an ecosystem of community-built integrations.
  • Maintain tight security – Built-in security and firewalls, as well as secure cloud-deployment options, make sure sensitive data remains protected in a broad range of collaboration scenarios.

Built on a Unified Collaboration Hub

Additional Mattermost capabilities and offerings further support agencies in shifting to digitized operations. For starters, a single command-and-control hub optimizes team collaboration. In addition to playbooks, the platform provides channels for real-time and asynchronous messaging, as well as boards for Kanban-style project and task management. Integrations with an ecosystem of developer-centric applications include GitLab, Jira and Confluence.

High-availability, mission-critical security and privacy provide the information safeguards agencies need. Public sector organizations can deploy the platform on-prem, in air-gapped environments or in a secure cloud to maintain complete control of their data. Strict, customizable access controls help ensure military-grade protections. They also assist organizations in complying with standards such as those associated with HIPAA, FINRA, GDPR and regulatory requirements.

What’s more, a single, flexible licensing mechanism covers multiple networks. Separate teams can benefit from the same tools and practices, even across multiple air-gapped environments.

Finally, these capabilities are available across a number of governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs), including NASA Solutions for Enterprise wide Procurement (SEWP). A variety of channel partners can help agencies meet their small-business goals. The platform also meets requirements for the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) for Section 508 compliance.

Designed for Agency Deployment

Mattermost’s new and enhanced collaboration tools are offered as part of a growing portfolio of solutions specifically designed for government organizations.

As government agencies and defense organizations navigate the shift to always-on digital operations, effective alignment of people, tools and processes can help teams better achieve their missions. By replacing manual tasks, fragmented communication and fragile workflows with digitized, repeatable process frameworks, they can operate more efficiently and effectively to meet changing use cases and demands.

View Our Free Resource, the Mattermost Government Solutions Guide, and learn more about Mattermost at www.mattermost.com

Overcoming DevOps Challenges with a New Approach

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Today, too many government software organizations are in crisis. They face soaring expectations for delivering digital solutions, the challenge of understanding a complex and fast-changing array of new technologies and new threats, and must draw from a limited pool of experienced developers, SRE, and SecOps professionals that are ready to execute in modern environments.

What’s worse, technical talent is too often underutilized. On average, we have seen reports that nearly 40% of developer time is wasted on meetings, interruptions, and other cumbersome processes. Add to this the mounting pressure of incidents, emergencies, and shifting priorities, and it’s no wonder why software leaders say that less than 18% of their teams are truly agile.

When engineers can’t flourish, you should expect to see short tenures, delivery delays, and unstable operations. This is especially true in government, where innovation can often be stifled by legacy processes.

Highly Collaborative Teams are More Productive Teams — But the Wrong Tools Can Hold Them Back

What we do know is that teams with tailored collaboration patterns typically and materially outperformed their peers. Far more than video calls and calendars, developer collaboration is focused on thoughtfully integrating technical processes, workflows, and tools to maximize context and productivity, reducing unnecessary interruptions and ensuring alignment across the software development lifecycle.

But the majority of collaboration and prescribed “productivity” products on the market aren’t built to support technical teams. Because of this, they force users to context switch between tools to accomplish tasks. Often, this interrupts the flow of users across collaboration, task management, and developer processes, impeding the ability of engineers to get work done effectively.

Fortunately, the rise of open source has given developers a voice in changing the status quo. Open source platforms are prevalent and popular because they offer developers access to system source code, making the tools easily extensible and customizable, all while preserving the ability to rapidly integrate with other critical tools in their stack. Thousands of technical teams have contributed to open source projects, advancing real-time messaging beyond the limitations of basic messaging, into unified task, project, and workflow management.

By leveraging the right open source platforms, developers can avoid context switching and dramatically accelerate their software organization’s ability to plan, build, and ship software faster and better, all while retaining full control over sensitive data by self hosting. With the right tools like these, engineers and developers can help their organization achieve and transform digital operations.

Increased Complexity in Digital Operations

Many teams were already struggling to achieve efficient collaboration despite multiple tools that purported to solve the problem of aligning technical teams across the myriad of complex R&D processes. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediate acceleration of remote work and digital transformation, the expectations for digital operations teams have surged.

While virtually every organization is now competing with the ability to build and operate software with increased velocity and quality, too many digital operations teams are buckling under the growing complexity of development toolchains, distributed teams, increased demands for specialization within their functions, knowledge silos, talent shortages, operational bottlenecks, an unprecedented attack surface, and a continuous rise in security risk.

At the same time, the number of applications that will need to be built and operated is exploding. Over 500 million software applications are expected to be built in the next five years. This is with a near-0% unemployment rate amongst software engineers and an expectation of consumer-grade experiences across business tools and applications, and 24/7/365 availability.

Building a Better Future for Digital Operations

So how can we help developers and technical teams move forward? We believe that the first step to mastering and transforming digital operations is to align your teams, tools, and processes across each stage of the development lifecycle – from sprint planning to release to incident management.

Armed with little more than general-purpose collaboration tools built for business users, technical teams are at a significant disadvantage for supporting the complex, fast-changing needs of digital operations at scale. These tools aren’t built for the extensibility, security and bespoke compliance requirements needed to integrate technical teams with the processes and customizations digital operators rely on.

The industry needs a solution to this disconnection. Engineers and developers need a platform built explicitly for digital operations, unifying team communication, task and project management, and workflows into a single point of collaboration. This centralized command center accelerates visibility, alignment and control, and enables teams to operate at the rapid speed of the evolving digital world.

As DevOps teams continue to overcome the challenges of a hybrid workplace and misaligned workflows, the need for this dedicated collaboration platform has become increasingly evident. By breaking down technology and information barriers, stakeholder alignment is also facilitated so that the organizational silos that typically impede digital transformation efforts are no longer a factor.

By making it easier for developers to collaborate, organizations can meet the urgent need and requirement for engineering velocity. For government agencies, meeting this demand will drive not only an accelerated shift to digital government operations, but an increase in overall innovation and quality of software and services for all citizens.

 

Learn more about Mattermost at www.mattermost.com and download the Mattermost Government Solutions Guide.