The nation's top inventors and businesses rely heavily on the United States Patent and Trademark Office to issue patents for inventions and register trademarks for product and intellectual property identification. The agency has come to embrace increasingly more emerging and advanced technologies in recent years to meet its mission, and it is now also enduring a large-scale modernization. USPTO Chief Information Officer Jamie Holcombe is working to help make the agency's systems "better, cheaper and faster." Holcombe joined the agency at the request of Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director Andrei Iancu, who immediately articulated his aims to "propel the USPTO into the next decade." "He wanted to ensure that all the up-to-date commercial tools were available to the USPTO examiners so that we could conduct our business in the most advanced way possible," Holcombe told Nextgov in the latest episode of Critical Update.