The Transportation Department system that tracks trucking company’s compliance with federal regulations is 25 years old.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s satellite systems that captures spaced-based weather data is so critical that the agency has been hesitant to make any major changes to it.
Both agencies are now taking advantage of newer processes that will make it easier to modernize these critical systems.
Ankur Saini, the chief product and technology officer at the DoT, said the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s approach isn’t to replace systems one-by-one, but to reimagine the entire workflow and underpinning technology.
“We have better tools, better technology like cloud computing and agentic artificial intelligence,” Saini said during a recent panel discussion at the ATARC Public Sector CIO Summit, a portion of which played on Ask the CIO. “How can we make the experience of somebody as a motor carrier registering with us better? Can we make it faster? Can we make the process more automated? Do we need to collect these 300 pieces of information every single time [a trucking company] engages with us, since we already have that information?”
To that end, FMCSA launched an updated system called Motus in late 2025 to make it easier on private sector motor carrier companies to register and comply with regulatory requirements.
Previously, motor carriers had to deal with as many as five different disparate systems to register and provide data to DoT to ensure compliance. Saini said there was a system to request access to the systems, another to manage that registration, and yet another to get some data out.
With the new system, motor carriers now have a one-stop shop for everything they would need to do with DoT.
Saini said the system provides not only a better user experience, but also addresses concerns about fraud in trucking.
“Cargo theft has gone up like 600% year over year over the last few years, and as our head of the registration program will tell you today, using the system that we had, your dog could register as a trucking company owner. That’s how open the system was. We’re putting an end to that. We have integrated identity verification, business verification, documentation checks all automated through the registration process, so that dogs or other entities that are not humans cannot register as a motor carrier, or foreign entities can’t register as motor carriers and operate on U.S. soil,” he said. “Fraud resistant capabilities is part of the one-stop shop because the data is integrated and we maintain its integrity across the entire lifecycle. If you have four systems that don’t talk to each other, what happens? You could be doing the right thing in four different systems, but business rules don’t traverse system boundaries.”
FMCSA took advantage of moving 100% of its infrastructure to the cloud several years ago as part of the Motus modernization effort. Saini said it lifted-and-shifted systems straight to the cloud in many cases, and now that they are there, modernization is more straight forward.
“What that has allowed us to do is when we modernize, we can use things like auto scaling because we have an ecosystem for 2 million trucking drivers and sometimes things are seasonal. You’ll have a consistent demand over time, and all of a sudden something happens and your usage peaks. It’ll be nice to have scaling features that help us alleviate some of those needs,” he said. “Content delivery networks is another benefit. We’re leveraging everything that we can on our side to make sure that the experience for a consumer is seamless. We have redundancy to make sure these mission critical applications stay online for an extended period of time and not suffer from being seasonally available.”
Speeding up innovation
Over at NOAA, Rick Miner, the agency’s deputy assistant chief information officer for satellites, said modernization efforts have been slow and cautious over the years because of the criticality of the systems.
Miner said these systems tend to have longer lifecycles due NOAA’s cautious nature.
“With this drive now [for modernization], that brings many opportunities for innovation and innovation in a much quicker timeframe, which is a challenge, but it’s also kind of exciting,” he said during the panel. “We’re trying to not just go to cloud or use AI, but stretch it and see how much can it do, how much can it provide while still meeting the mission and the requirements?”
Miner said one example of how NOAA is modernizing legacy systems is with its Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS).
Miner said AWIPS uses a rack of servers that lets forecasters share and analyze data to make weather predictions, including rapid warnings and advisories.
“We’re trying to modernize that by putting it into the cloud and take advantage of all the synergies that are going to happen there at National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS). We’re trying to do the same thing with the observations, so now we can get more data to more forecast offices quicker, without having to copy it and have the extra overhead that the on-premise systems are working,” he said. “Then it should be able to work even in disaster-prone areas. If you imagine being a weather forecast office in Florida when a hurricane comes through, your AWIPS may not be working so hot because you’re not actually in your office. It’s been flooded. But if it’s in the cloud, there’s the potential, and that’s the goal, to be able to do that anywhere. Now I take a laptop and I get a Starlink or something, and I get to the internet, and I can still do my forecasts, and I can provide the emergency managers in those situations there.”
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