Wyatt Kash

 

Posts by Wyatt Kash

The U.S. General Services Administration announced today that it is now offering cloud-based email services available to government agencies, through a new package of purchase agreements. The move is expected to make it easier for government agencies to migrate email operations over to Internet-based cloud computing service providers and reduce costs.

GSA developed 20 blanket purchase agreements and awarded them to 17 businesses today, GSA officials said. As a result, federal, state, local and tribal governments will be able to access a variety of cloud based email services. Keep reading →

The scrutiny over what federal employees spend to attend work-related conferences has continued to escalate after a recent salvo of letters to the secretaries of the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Education, Health and Human Services and other agencies.

The letters, from Congressman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee he chairs, ask for a detailed accounting of travel spending in connection with 150 conferences. After analyzing “thousands of documents,” the committee concluded that the General Services Administration was hardly alone when, in 2010, it permitted employees to spend an average of $600 per day per employee to attend an over-the-top regional training conference in Las Vegas. Keep reading →

Three months after the White House’s release of the Administration’s Digital Government Strategy, Federal Chief Information Officer Steve VanRoekel used the occasion to reiterate the need for government to rethink its approach to providing information and services to the public and declared “agencies are making great strides” toward a vision of digitally-delivered services.

Writing in a White House blog posted this morning, VanRoekel cited the Census Department’s release of a mobile application, and and an application programming interface, aimed at developers, as an example of the progress agencies are demonstrating in moving forward on the Digital Government Strategy released in May. Keep reading →

The White House announced it plans to introduce the inaugural members of its Presidential Innovation Fellows program in a ceremony Aug. 23, at 10 a.m. (EDT) that will be streamed live on WhiteHouse.gov/live.

“This new initiative is bringing in top innovators from outside government to work with top innovators inside government to create real and substantial changes that will in a very short time frame benefit the American people, save taxpayers money, and help create new jobs,” said U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Todd Park. Keep reading →

Computer monitoring software maker SpectorSoft is gaining sudden attention among federal workers after a Washington Post article identified the Vero Bearch, Fla. company for its role in aiding Food and Drug Administration officials to intercept screen shots, emails, key strokes, and other communications from scientists working at the FDA.

Concerned about unauthorized disclosures in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal, FDA officials reportedly installed the monitoring software on the laptop computers of an undisclosed number of FDA scientists. Keep reading →

More federal managers view information technology as an opportunity than as a cost, according to a new survey released this week. But with so many other priorities on executives’ plates, and the sense that IT departments could be delivering more effectively than many are, technology leaders have their work cut out in demonstrating that IT can contribute to real cost savings or to better decision making.

More than two thirds of federal executives believe their IT departments understand their agency’s missions and grasp their agencies core challenges. Keep reading →

The U.S. Census Bureau is putting real-time economic statistics into the hands of Americans via a new mobile application called “America’s Economy.”

The new application, released today, will provide constantly updated statistics on the U.S. economy, including monthly economic indicators, trends, along with a schedule of upcoming announcements, according to Census officials. Keep reading →


A new report reflecting the views of 55 top human capital officers in the federal government suggests that the degree of difficulty for federal managers trying to hire and retain the talent government needs to operate today is perhaps higher than ever. Intensifying budget pressures could, however, be the spark needed to reform a stranglehold of antiquated federal hiring and pay practices.

The severity of federal human resources challenges is hard to understate. Keep reading →

Responses of 300 federal executives (blue bar is current rate; red bar is expectation over next 12-18 months.)

Nearly two thirds of federal executives involved with mobile computing decisions in a recent poll reported that tablet computers are now being used by at least some employees at their agencies. And the over half believe that at least 5% of agency employees will primarily use tablets in their work in the next 12 to 18 months. Keep reading →

The legal profession may be known for many things, but innovative practices isn’t always one that comes to mine – especially within government circles.

So it may come as a surprise that among a newly-published list of 50 leading contributors to the legal community, which included executives from Yale Law School as well as Apple and Google, it also included Mary Alice Baish, the superintendent of documents for U. S. Government Printing Office. Keep reading →

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