A senior National Security Agency official today said the agency is racing to embrace an approach to mobile technology that once would have been unthinkable for one of the government’s most secretive agencies, by moving toward 100% end-to-end reliance on commercial communications technology.
NSA Director of Information Assurance Deborah Plunkett told an industry group today in Washington that, “Unless we do this, we will not be able to meet the demand signals from our customers.” Keep reading →
Mobile file sharing provider Accellion has partnered with Good Technology and Mocana Corp. to introduce three new enterprise content-sharing applications for mobile devices. The applications permit agency employees to share enterprise data, similar to technologies such as Dropbox, YouSendIt and Box, but in a way which meets military-grade security standards, allows multiple levels of authentication, and which works on with a variety of popular devices and applications.
Using Good Technology’s Good Dynamics product, and a similar virtual container product from Mocana, the new mobile apps that Accellion announced this week allows enterprise users to collaborate and view more than 200 different file types, editing and sharing files from a secure, encrypted location using smartphones and tablets. Keep reading →
GSA Acting Administrator Dan Tangherlini announced this afternoon that the General Services Administration is instituting a hiring freeze and cutting senior executive performance awards this year by 85%.
The announcement reflected what Tangherlini described in a blog post as a comprehensive, top to bottom review of all agency operations, following the disclosure of abusive travel spending patterns that led to the resignation of former GSA Administrator Martha Johnson and the departure of several GSA executives. Keep reading →
The Office of Personnel Management took steps today to extend federal health insurance coverage eligibility to temporary firefighters and fire protection personnel working on wildland fires across the country.
OPM published an interim final regulation under the Federal Employee Health Benefits (FEHB) program, in response to direction from President Obama, that ensures federal firefighters and their families will have access to the same health insurance afforded to full time federal employees, according to a statement issued by OPM Director John Berry. Keep reading →
Government officials and information specialists from more than 50 countries wrapped up a week long conference in Washington this week to try to answer a simple question: How to unlock the value of government data to improve the lives citizens in developed as well as less developed nations.
The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complex. Keep reading →
It was a year ago this afternoon, when the pages of a new website called Breaking Gov began propagating across the Internet, offering a fresh perspective on the business of government.
As we pause briefly to celebrate our first anniversary, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank the growing number of readers who have discovered Breaking Gov’s distinctive brand of coverage. Keep reading →
The Department of Energy‘s Sandia National Laboratories has developed a radically new way to remove heat from computer components using a design that is 30 times more efficient than current heat exchangers. Keep reading →
The nation needs cyber-security legislation to authorize sharing of threat data between industry and government in real time, said Gen. Keith Alexander, chief of both the National Security Agency and the US Cyber Command, and it can be done without any danger to individual privacy.
“This cyber legislation that’s coming up is going to be absolutely vital to the future of our country,” said Gen. Alexander. Keep reading →
World Bank Group President Dr. Jim Yong Kim today challenged governments and institutions to support a growing international movement to harness data in an effort to foster greater economic prosperity.
Speaking at an international conference on government data, in one of his public appearances since arriving at the World Bank July 2 in Washington, Kim pointed to the bank’s own efforts to make its vast catalog of data available to the public and a growing community of data harvesting groups as a way addressing some of the world’s pressing economic issues. Keep reading →
Trying to measure the real return on investment for allowing federal employees to telework has inevitably involved a bit more art than science. Intuitively and anecdotally, it seems obvious that giving federal workers more flexibility to work remotely makes smart economic sense; and it goes a long way toward improving employee productivity and satisfaction too.
Yet after years of trying to implement telework policies in the federal government, it’s clear from the Office of Personnel Management‘s first comprehensive report to Congress on Telework, released July 6, that assembling reliable figures about telework implementation is still not an easy task. Keep reading →