Innovation

This feature showcases one video each Friday that captures the essence of innovation, technology and new ideas happening in government today.

This week’s video is courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Description: The redevelopment of Denver’s historic and ethnically diverse La Alma/Lincoln Park neighborhood is turning an economically challenged area into a vibrant, transit-accessible, district. The community’s master plan preserves affordable housing while adding energy-efficient middle-income and market-rate homes. Because of extensive community engagement, development will include actions to improve the health of residents, reduce pollution, and control stormwater runoff.

EPA created the National Award for Smart Growth Achievement in 2002 to recognize exceptional approaches to development that protect the environment, encourage economic vitality, and enhance quality of life. In the past 11 years, 54 winners from 26 states have shown a variety of approaches that states, regions, cities, suburbs, and rural communities can use to create economically strong, environmentally responsible development.


As one of our contributors wrote recently, it is one of the most challenging times in American history to be part of a government bureaucracy.

A dysfunctional congress offers little or no support; agency budgets face gutting as the nation stares down a fiscal cliff; hiring freezes and the looming shadow of furloughs threaten to turn the government’s talent pool stagnant.
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Governments at many levels have proven themselves to be instrumental in developing both a national and local software-developing community. Competitions like The Big App and Apps for Democracy have spread knowledge of government data sets as well as provided money and recognition to software-development firms. Forward-looking CIOs and CTOs realized that software-both its development and the finished product-could spur innovation and economic activity. They also realized that government could help the software-development community.
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This is the fourth in a six-part series examining how innovation and social media are changing how agencies operate, originally published by the IBM Center for the Business of Government. For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, like us on Facebook.
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Though it might sound futuristic, consider: this weekend, you could print your own circuit board. And here’s how you could print a wrench, courtesy of ZCorp. If you to use or modify someone else’s circuits, just look here, and if you need 3D designs, here are a few. As a bonus, here’s a way to turn a $10 laser into a communications station and, related, the GSA repository on GitHub. Keep reading →

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is beginning work to develop a wireless communications system capable of transmitting data at speeds of 100 gigabits per second, rivaling high-speed fiber optic systems.

The technology is also intended to get around one of the biggest hurdles facing tactical military communications: the effects of weather degrading high-bandwidth transmissions between aircraft and ground stations and vehicles. Cloud cover is one of the big challenges facing high-bandwidth air-to-ground data communications, DARPA officials said. Keep reading →


While President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner continue to push ahead with negotiations over federal revenues and spending, federal workers have also been offering up ideas to curb government spending.

And the ideas of four federal employees are up for a public vote this week, the White House announced today. (The public has until noon, Dec. 21, to vote.) Keep reading →

It’s been a little more than a year since Admiral Thad Allen (USCG-Ret.) joined Booz Allen Hamilton as a senior vice president after a storied career with the U.S. Coast Guard, and serving as National Incident Commander for the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

Breaking Gov contributor Dan Verton sat down with Allen to discuss the importance of innovation and the challenges frontline federal government managers face when trying to implement new innovations. He also discussed some of the priorities for the future of homeland security outlined recently by Booz Allen Hamilton, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Breaking Gov: How important is the concept and practice of innovation to the Department of Homeland Security as we look toward the next 10 years of the homeland security mission?

Adm. Thad Allen: I don’t think there’s any doubt that innovation has been the key to the success of this country since our revolution. The ability to innovate, create new things and bring them to market progress the country along.

I think the real issue is how do you enable innovation in a government department or across the government? How quickly can you recognize technologies and bring them to bear on the problems you’re dealing with?

We have a whole host of regulations and federal acquisition regulations. We’re concerned about who we sell business to in the federal government. There are groups that we want to help and encourage, such as small business and the middle class. We need to figure out a better way to identify innovative capabilities that we can bring to bear in the homeland security area.

I don’t think right now the current acquisition procedures or requirements development procedures are mature to the point where we can move as rapidly as we need to.

Is it just the acquisition side of the equation, or is it the federal culture that does not encourage innovation from frontline managers?

Allen: The whole notion of innovation is a challenge across the government. What you have is a set of regulatory requirements that take time [and] they’re difficult to work through for new and challenging technologies. And then there’s a question of whether or not the people in government are technically qualified to understand those new technologies.

I think there’s a dual challenge. One is a process challenge. How do we make the process simpler? But there’s a content challenge. If you don’t understand the technology regarding cloud analytics [as an example] or what a cloud reference architecture can do, or what high performance computing can do, then you don’t make real good decisions about the acquisition of technology or make policy and budget decisions that enable that.

Are efforts such as the FedRAMP process helping agencies to innovate and adopt new technologies?

Allen: In the current budget environment, we can’t afford to have multiple stovepipe systems, multiple licensing fees, and multiple costs for software platforms. The downward force on funding is going to force the integration of software and data sets.

Then, once you get them in one place, it’s easier to make a fundamental change in how you actually manage the data. It’s something we’re going to have to do and it’s going to be required for mission execution.

More importantly, I don’t think we can operate the systems we’re operating right now and stovepipe them in proprietary systems in the current budget environment.

Our theory is, it takes a network to defeat a network.”

How do you see future of Homeland Security changing?

Allen: I believe terrorism is nothing more than political criminality; so you’re really dealing with a criminal organizations involved in criminal activity. The things all criminal organizations need to succeed is …they need to have a source of financing, they have to talk, they have to move, and they have to spend money to be successful. That is a network.

When you look at our law enforcement organizational structure and how we deal with terrorism, we tend to focus particular threat streams on particular agencies, and that’s how we employ them, like the Drug Enforcement Administration; (the Bureau of) Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the US Secret Service; Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Our theory is, it that takes a network to defeat a network. And if we’re going to do that properly, we’re going to have to break down the walls between those jurisdictions, particularly with regards to how we share information.

Read more from Thad Allen in an op-ed he wrote for Breaking Gov last year on the importance of separating the value of public service from the politics.

If federal CIO’s are judged by how well they lead by example in the social media revolution, then a new study suggests not enough of them are walking the talk.

An analysis of 31 federal chief information officers, just released by MeriTalk, reports that certain federal CIOs are much more engaged than others on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Keep reading →

The word “drone” probably doesn’t make you think “fun” or even “useful.” After all, the most familiar unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is the hulking, weaponized, and sinisterly named Predator deployed by the U.S. military.

How networks of public and private sensors can change how the public sector operates during routine or emergency operations.

It’s 1991, and some computer science professors are tired of walking into their computer lab of the University of Cambridge only to find an empty pot of coffee. Their solution: install a camera and connect it to the server so they could ascertain the status of the coffee pot from their desks. The rest is internet history. Keep reading →

US Government agencies often face a Catch-22 trying to adopt innovative technologies: Procurement rules designed to promote fairness can effectively preclude federal buyers from seeing – or influencing – developments that could eventually help agencies work more effectively.

The Defense Department and intelligence agencies, of course, have been fueling innovative technologies on their own for decades. But as commercial markets have exploded with new ideas, and learned to bring those ideas to market with greater speed, government agencies increasingly find themselves racing to keep up with innovations in the commercial sector. Keep reading →

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