Steve Charles

 

Posts by Steve Charles

If any technology in the last 25 years has demonstrated the consequences of too much of a good thing, it’s email. For employees in so many organizations, email’s sheer volume has made it almost counterproductive. That’s one reason why so many federal agencies are turning to social media tools for interpersonal collaboration.

Social tools don’t eliminate email, just as email didn’t wipe out phone calls or the occasional formal document. But they can enable directly relevant communications among members of a workgroup for the real-time collaboration required of efficient workflows. Keep reading →

Life in a government agency can toggle between extremes. At one end you find highly regular and predictable patterns such as the day-to-day processing of claims, forms, receipts, licenses, and benefits. At the other end are sudden, ad hoc situations, often brought on by an external event. And sometimes, people simply realize there is a better way to do things that makes them faster, more efficient, or less expensive.

So regardless, every organization should be continually striving to improve its business processes. Today, easy-to-use technologies make changing and automating such processes a snap. Staff involved in performing the mission can model an activity and design a workflow to support it. And, key to federal organizations, those resulting workflows take into account the laws and regulations embedded in legacy systems from which the new application draws data. Keep reading →


Interest in preventing waste, fraud, and abuse runs high in the federal government these days. Yet fraudulent contractors and healthcare providers continue to get paid so financial functions within agencies are always looking for a better mousetrap. For instance, The Association of Government Accountants released a study this May of best practices for scanning large data sets using the latest data analytics technologies for identifying potential improper payments.

Health and Human Services and the Defense Department account for most of the federal government’s annual improper payment tab. The 2011 figure was down a little, to $115 billion, thanks to some concerted agency work and prodding by the Office of Management and Budget. Keep reading →


It seems that “real time” is the Holy Grail these days for cybersecurity – everything on the network monitored, analyzed for concerns, and either fixed or at least quarantined in a moment’s notice. Obviously this is never completely possible, so we need to pick those areas that either lower risk or increase opportunity. The technology discussed in this article happens to offer both.

I recently attended a few briefings and watched real time patching and configuration management across all assets on a network. While this represents only part of the automated continuous monitoring and remediation processes needed on any network, I found it compelling because patch management and configuration management are fundamentals of security and can also be money savers. Keep reading →


Government is constantly looking for new answers to old problems⎯answers enabled by the constant improvement in IT.

Government customers are no longer content to aim their business analytics tools solely at past events to see what might have happened, whether a security breach, a missed budget or project milestone, or some internal attempt at mischief. Keep reading →

In today’s era of budget austerity, every federal agency must improve processes, cut costs and deliver value quickly. BPM (business process management) is one technique that can help develop applications that achieve these objectives.

Combined with cloud, mobile, and social technology, BPM becomes even more powerful, creating an environment to make good on the government’s “Cloud First” policies and taking federal agencies to new heights in mission-critical functions, delivering value in record time. Keep reading →


I recently visited the Crystal City, Va., office of one of the technology companies we work with and learned what it takes to display many sources of brilliant video across a surface of any size without the unsightly black grids that once defined video walls. The technology, referred to as collaborative telepresence or CTP, was developed and battle-tested in the rough-and-tumble oil and gas industry. It is now finding its way into high-end collaboration environments in the government.

Instead of multiple monitors or projectors separated by a grid of dividing lines, like traditional video teleconferencing or command and control systems, Cyviz mounts high power projectors with pixel-perfect alignment so there are no “seams” in these stunning video walls. Keep reading →

If you could improve your agency’s bottom line and reduce your IT infrastructure costs, all without sacrificing mission-critical capabilities, where would you start?

Ideally, you’d like to know where you’re getting the best performance from your IT investment, along with knowledge about over-use and under-use so you’d know where to make cuts, and whether you might be able to consolidate some operations to save money. Keep reading →

We’ve all heard the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But suppose we speak those 1,000 words at a moderate pace and demonstrate what we are talking about in a five to seven-minute video? According to both common sense and numerous studies, the learning opportunity and communications impact of video are clearly superior.

But until recently, video was costly to produce and cumbersome to distribute, making it impractical for all but the most “canned” applications. All that has changed with Enterprise IP Video tools to capture, record, manage, distribute, and access all video content across an organization’s existing network infrastructure. Keep reading →