David McClure calls the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT) “a little sparkplug igniting innovation all across government.”
Indeed, OCSIT’s just-released 2012 annual report, “More for Mission,” serves as a 51-page catalogue for the office’s multi-pronged push for innovation in technology in the federal government. Keep reading →
With the cost of lighting accounting for more than a third of the energy bills at most federal facilities, officials at the General Services Administration know that it will take more than upgrading to newer florescent and LED lighting to make government buildings more energy efficient. It also means finding ways to efficiently install an array of new and smarter technologies.
The stakes, however, are significant. GSA boasts a portfolio of federal buildings that amounts to nearly 10,000 assets. The upshot, though, is that those buildings offer a rich laboratory to evaluate green technologies. Keep reading →
The Veterans Affairs Department’s move to a cloud-based email system for its employees is nothing if not meticulous. When fully rolled out, in 2014, the new platform will give about 400,000 VA users — and eventually up to 600,000 — an array of collaborative tools and eventually yield tens of millions of dollars in savings on IT infrastructure for the department, VA officials expect.
But for the near term, in a carefully planned first phase, the department plans to migrate 15,000 users to Microsoft 365 for Government within a separate community cloud, by the end of March, said Charles De Sanno, VA’s executive director of enterprise systems engineering. Keep reading →
In a report released Monday, the nonprofit Space Foundation made a number of recommendations for strengthening the focus, oversight and funding of NASA and the U.S. civil space program.
The foundation’s research, conducted over the last year, revealed NASA lacks focus after years shifting of priorities, frequent redirection and mixed signals from Congress and presidential administrations. The 70-page report, “Pioneering: Sustaining U.S. Leadership in Space,” details the agency’s challenges and how the U.S. can regain its leadership in space. Keep reading →
After two 20-something sisters lived through a tornado and its aftermath in their Massachusetts hometown last year, they vowed to transform a well-intentioned but unorganized disaster-recovery process.
The resulting online tool, recovers.org, is now helping local governments and nonprofits coordinate Hurricane Sandy relief efforts through a concept known as “community-powered” recovery. Keep reading →
Two separate, recently released surveys of the quality of federal government Web sites and e-government found some striking strengths in performance, including in comparison with private-sector sites. But they also revealed shortcomings in key areas, such as search engine capability.
The U.S. E-Government Website Quality Report, by ActiveStandards and WelchmanPierpont, gave government sites relatively high marks for accessibility and usability. The report also cited a majority of sites performed poorly in search engine optimization. Keep reading →
For state chief information officers, life at the office has become delicate high-wire act. While under pressure to continue delivering legacy information technology services that are critical to day-to-day operations, CIOs still have to keep up with the surging demand for new IT services, such as mobile- and cloud-based computing.
That’s a central theme from the results of a just-released survey of state CIOs by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), TechAmerica, and consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP, said Doug Robinson, NASCIO’s executive director. Keep reading →
The Wyoming governor’s office gets a mountain of correspondence from constituents, both email and snail mail. On a recent day, for example, some 1,500 inquiries landed on Governor Matt Mead’s desk.
Until recently, the process of managing constituent inquiries to the governor was manual and paper-based, even for electronic correspondence. Keep reading →
In September 2010 the Obama Administration launched Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and the public can locate and tackle tough problems – and win cash prizes doing it. Two years later, 45 federal agencies have awarded more than $13.9 million in prize money in 205 challenges, with some 16,000 citizen “solvers” taking part in the competitions.
These impressive numbers demonstrate the impact made by the administration’s efforts to make incentive prizes a key part of agencies’ problem-solving and innovation arsenal, White House officials said. 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 →