Every time Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his department make a decision that affects local schools, he remembers that he once “lived on the other side of the law.”
That is, he served as superintendent and CEO of the Chicago Public Schools for eight years before coming to Washington to run the Department of Education, and he worked in education for more than a decade before that. He knows what life is like for educators who have to carry out policies developed in Washington. Keep reading →
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Shredder Challenge” could be called the world’s ultimate jigsaw puzzle contest. But it was serious business for the nearly 9,000 teams of problem solvers from all over the world who entered the competition after DARPA officials launched it in late October.
In the Shredder Challenge competitors attempted to reconstruct machine-shredded documents in increasingly difficult stages to claim DARPA’s $50,000 prize. The challenge comprised five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the content of the documents and the technique employed to shred the documents varied to make the challenge progressively more difficult. Keep reading →
In 2007, Admiral Thad Allen had a feeling that something was changing in the workforce he led. There was something fundamentally different about the new generation of men and women in the Coast Guard. So Allen, who had become the 23rd Commandant a year earlier, did what nobody would expect a 36-year veteran to do — he embraced social media and started blogging.
“I was sensing a change with the advent of social media and how young people were aggregating [data] and producing behaviors without being in each other’s presence,” said Allen, who spoke to Breaking Gov contributor Dan Verton at his new Booz Allen Hamilton office in McLean, Va., last week about a variety of management topics, including the importance of “meta-leadership” in government. Keep reading →
The White House has unveiled a new government web site section designed to help accelerate the environmental review and permitting process for 14 high priority infrastructure projects.
The new Federal Infrastructure Projects Dashboard is also intended to bring greater public attention to the projects, and the promise of jobs associated with them, said Jeff Zients, deputy director for management and chief performance officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget in a blog post yesterday. Keep reading →
Data analytics are proving to be a powerful tool for improving the results of government program, according to a new report released today, “From Data To Decisions: The Power of Analytics.”
The report, which examines how several federal agencies used data, is a joint effort between the Partnership for Public Service and the Public Sector Business Analytics & Optimization practice at the IBM Center for The Business of Government. Keep reading →
President Obama ordered federal agencies to begin creating records management systems designed for the 21st century, taking advantage of available digital technologies while protecting the public’s right to information about the actions and decisions of federal agencies.
The White House described the steps outlined in the order as the “most significant…since the Truman Administration to improve the management of federal records.” Keep reading →
When Wolf Tombe took over as chief technology officer at the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), there were more than 3,000 deployed technologies, a major data center had run out of room and power, yet server utilization was only 10 percent, and almost every server in the agency had a different configuration and operating system.
That was 8 years ago. Keep reading →
The holiday season will provide the struggling U.S. Postal Service with a much needed infusion of revenue, but hardly enough to stop its financial meltdown.
As the mail service heads into the holidays buckling under a $5.1 billion debt, sending packages is just about the only business line that’s growing and in the black. Keep reading →
One day early last year, Veterans Affairs Department chief technology officer Peter Levin happened to run into VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.
“He came up to me and said, ‘I hear you’re working on a special project.'” Levin’s project was a tool that would give veterans easy and quick online access to their personal health records. Keep reading →
The Army has entered DISA’s Cloud Computing Purple Zone.
It’s secure. It’s effective. And it is saving the Army $100 million this year alone on enterprise email operating costs, according to Mike Krieger, deputy chief information officer, G-6, U.S. Army. Keep reading →