For all the progress federal agencies have made toward mobile technology, CIOs still long for industry innovation that leads to a secure, virtual solution for devices other than BlackBerries.
The sentiment came through at a panel discussion Tuesday moderated by Rick Holgate at the Telework Exchange’s Fall 2012 Town Hall Meeting in Washington, D.C. Holgate is chief information officer at the Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Keep reading →
Choosing the best software for soldiers on the battlefield is becoming as important as the weapons they use. But it’s also becoming an increasingly complicated supply challenge for military commanders and acquisition officials, according to defense experts.
There’s little question that real-time information – and the ability to analyze and act on that information quickly – is becoming the ultimate weapon for warfighters. Keep reading →
The Army’s migration to an enterprise-wide email system, after years of false starts and execution detours, is gaining significant momentum and appears on track to hit the 1.4 million user mark by March 31, Army program officials told AOL Government.
While enterprise email and communications systems are taken for granted at most organizations, Army soldiers and civilians – and most military personnel – have had to get by without the convenience of having a single globally-accessible email account, capable of communicating sensitive information securely anywhere in the world. Keep reading →
The Defense Department has launched a barrage of programs across the services to provide its civilian and uniformed personnel with mobile devices. Overseeing this vast and varied process is the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is responsible for running many of the department’s mobile pilot programs and setting up the infrastructure to provide applications and services to warfighters.
The head of DISA and top technology officers outlined how individual agencies fit into those efforts at the Defense & Security Mobile Technologies Symposium in Washington, D.C. last week. Keep reading →
A new, enterprise-class IT backbone in a box has become the latest solution for a highly digitized U.S. military and first responders to access tactical data networks quickly and maintain connectivity wherever they are.
Developed to operate in a variety of environments where infrastructure is lacking or nonexistent, Dell’s Tactical Mobile Data Center (TMDC), is a completely customizable, air deployable data center that can be loaded onto transport planes, ships, trucks or slung under helicopters. Keep reading →
PENTAGON: The Army showed off an impressive array of battlefield wi-fi gadgetry today in the Pentagon courtyard, exhibiting new-found realism about what gadgets it might not need.
Consider the hardware to connect the individual foot soldier to the brigade-wide command network, which has been stripped down from a 14-pound prototype to a militarized smartphone plugged into a handheld radio. Keep reading →
The past three weeks worth of news reports about GSA‘s lavish convention spending and indiscretions by Secret Service agents–and the inquisitions on Capitol Hill in response–could already fill a few hard drives.
So it always a bit baffling to see how little attention the media–and Congress–give federal agencies and government executives when they do get things right. Keep reading →
There’s lots of happy-happy hype about “the cloud.” If you press the experts, though, they’ll admit that the savings from adopting cloud computing will come in the long run, not the near term, and only after a lot of hard work – including, when it comes to government, some all-out turf wars.
With budgets getting tight, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is counting on big savings over the next decade from implementing cloud computing – essentially, consolidating lots of separate information technology systems that each serve a separate organization into one centralized system to reap efficiencies of scale. The National Security Agency director and director of Cyber Command, Gen. Keith Alexander, predicted a 30-40 percent savings in NSA’s information technology costs from its move to the cloud, now in progress. Keep reading →
When Susan Lawrence quit her waitressing job in her hometown of Ida Grove, Iowa, to enlist in the Army, smart phones and network-centric warfare were not part of the common vernacular.
Lawrence enlisted in what was then the Women’s Army Corps one week after her 18th birthday, specializing in home economics, typing and shorthand. Today, Lawrence is a lieutenant general and chief information officer of the Army overseeing a $10 billion information technology budget. Keep reading →
The Army, eager to get Federal Aviation Administration permission to fly unmanned aircraft in civilian airspace near its U.S. bases for training, has issued a new directive on the subject and will apply for an FAA Certificate of Authorization to operate drones near Fort Stewart, Georgia.