Looking for a way to keep up with who’s who among the senior management at the Department of Homeland Security?
An updated feature on DHS’s websites not only lists nearly 40 of DHS’s top department and component excutives–with links to each of their profiles–but also provides an email sign up provision to be notified when changes are made to the list. Keep reading →
The U.S. government is the world’s largest single purchaser of goods and services. But not even the federal government has been immune from needing to cut costs dramatically, which in turn has had a sweeping impact on contractors–and small business contractors in particular.
A new survey of 740 active small businesses pursuing government work found that small businesses are having to spend more to bid on government contracts, are being rebuffed with greater frequency, but being rewarded for their persistence. Keep reading →
The Office of Personnel Management has brought in a 25-year IT veteran, David Bowen, to serve as its new chief technology officer, an OPM spokeswoman confirmed today. His mission is to concentrate on the agency’s outdated retirement system and ensure that its new governmentwide hiring site, USAJobs.gov, continues to function properly after a rocky start in October.
Bowen, who until earlier this month had been the Federal Aviation Administration’s CIO and Assistant Administrator, will be working as a detailee with OPM’s CIO, Matt Perry, in an effort to tackle a growing backlog retiree applications. Keep reading →
Years of decentralized efforts by federal agencies to share information using the World Wide Web have resulted in a tangle of thousands of government websites, a fifth of which are no longer in use, according to a new government report.
The new “State of the Federal Web Report,” released Dec. 16 by a government task force, represents the first comprehensive review of federal websites, following the Obama administration conclusion earlier this year that there were simply too many government websites. Keep reading →
A U.S. Government advisory board took the unprecedented step Tuesday in asking two science journals to refrain from publishing certain details from two new papers that describe how to produce what experts warn is a far more deadly version of the Asian “bird flu” virus.
The new strain has the potential to infect and kill millions of people, according to the London-based Independent, which initially reported the story. Keep reading →
What you don’t know about your mobile technology can harm you–and your organization–warned a long-time federal intelligence executive now helping the U.S. Army’s leading logistics provider.
That was the impetus behind a new seven minute video developed for the 70,000 employees of the Army Materiel Command, but which offers a primer for virtually anyone using a mobile smart phone or laptop for work. Keep reading →
Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel, speaking publicly for the first time to the government IT community since being appointed last August, laid out a redirected vision for how the federal government needs to move forward using information technology, and highlighted his primary imperatives heading into 2012 that call for making “little things big and big things little.”
VanRoekel outlined several imperatives Friday for his office in the coming year that build on, and to some extent, recasts the policies of his predecessor, Vivek Kundra. Specifically, he stressed his desire to: Keep reading →
A new online service has put a spotlight on the 1000 most highly paid federal civil servants, renewing the debate on whether government employees are overcompensated.
The list of highest paid civil servants, issued by an Internet start-up firm, WikiOrgCharts, provides a new perspective on the extent to which doctors, lawyers and banking professionals hold top paying government jobs and the sizable incomes that the federal government pays to attract senior management talent. Keep reading →
The U.S. Army’s efforts to move to new, single enterprise email service would be halted, at least temporarily, if language in the 2012 defense authorization bill approved by House and Senate negotiators Monday goes into effect, according to a report by Federal News Radio.
The legislation orders Army Secretary John McHugh to designate the service’s enterprise-email transition as a formal acquisition program, which would be overseen by the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisitions, logistics and technology, rather than under the direction of the Army’s G-6 CIO office. Keep reading →
Nearly $1.4 billion in surplus dollar coins are sitting in Federal Reserve vaults because so few people want them. So Vice President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced at a cabinet meeting today that the Administration was suspending the production of Presidential dollar coins for circulation. Keep reading →