Increasingly, government agencies are looking to the private sector and enlisting the public’s help in order to optimize efficiency and operating practices. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is one of the agencies leading the way, by bringing private sector best practices to the government. “Information technology is a team sport where we all succeed or fail together,” says USPTO Chief Information Officer (CIO) John B. Owens. In the last few months, Owens has reached out to private sector leaders to hold meetups and webinars for USPTO staff, and the USPTO also reached out to the public during last month’s National Day of Civil Hacking.

On June 11, Owens welcomed over 400 IT professionals from the public and private sector to the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, VA – part of the DevOps Days movement held in cities worldwide. During the two-day event on June 11 and 12, attendees heard firsthand from industry experts how to implement “DevOps,” a technology movement for optimizing software development. DevOps emphasizes collaboration and enhances efficiency, and when teams use key DevOps principles, they can release new software much faster and with higher quality. If you missed the event, you can still watch the keynote speeches.

Using DevOps is a key part of USPTO’s IT strategy, which Owens described in his guest USPTO director's blog earlier this year. With demands on USPTO IT systems escalating from both public stakeholders and the agency’s own patent and trademark examiners – DevOps will enable the USPTO to release higher quality software and services much faster, leveraging automation tools and stressing tighter cross-team collaboration. One result of using these invigorated IT efforts were new features for the Patents End to End system rolled out in May. Patent examiners use this system to manage their day to day work. The new tools are being rolled out to all patent examiners, with 3,800 examiners trained so far, with a goal of training the remaining examiners by mid-August. USPTO is also planning additional releases of next generation IT systems later this year and next. 

Supported by more robust and improved IT systems, USPTO examiners are better able to issue the best quality patents, as the agency works to protect our nation’s cutting edge ideas.