The “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” report released today highlights NASA, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Surface Transportation Board among agencies with top rankings, but it also found growing discontent among public servants. Keep reading →
Three years ago, Government Accountability Office was required by law to annually publish a report detailing duplicative, overlapping, and fragmented federal programs. It will be issuing its third report in early 2013. But it is preparing its list now for potential government reorganizers.
The “Memos to National Leaders” project – jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Society for Public Administration — recommends a reorganization commission, and it also offers suggestions for “virtual reorganizations” of programs, as an alternative. An earlier IBM Center blog series raised the issue as to whether the federal government should reorganize. Keep reading →
During this time of budget constraints, the federal government is seeking low-priced, technically acceptable (LPTA) solutions to keep projects and innovation alive. In other words, agencies need to find ways to keep technological innovation moving forward, albeit with tighter purse strings.
As Lisa Mascolo, CEO of Optimos Inc., pointed out in her recent Washington Technology Op-Ed article on the topic of LPTA contracts, “When I hear ‘acceptable,’ I think adequate, good enough, not great but okay.” Keep reading →
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has contracted with Lockheed Martin and Microsoft to migrate the email and collaboration systems supporting approximately 25,000 employees to Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 system, according to a joint announcement released by Lockheed Martin and Microsoft today.
The collaboration and communication service is expected to improve EPA employees’ access to communications and mobility tools and result in expected savings of $12 million over the four-year contract period. Keep reading →
Open source software has long been touted as the antidote to monolithic, buggy, and security-challenged software packages developed by the industry’s 800-pound gorillas.
But a presentation from the National Security Agency (NSA) during a technology symposium last week presented a stark warning for the proponents of open source software: Get your house in order because sooner or later government and industry customers are going to demand verifiable information about where your software came from, who developed it, who had access to the code, and whether or not you can vouch for its security. Keep reading →
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.
But if you’re an innovator, this is – in a strange and unfortunate way – good news. Keep reading →
Three years ago, the satirical news site, The Onion, published a story titled “Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles.”
One early paragraph reads:
Researchers were able to identify nearly 30 varieties of glowing rectangles that play some role throughout the course of each day. Among them: handheld rectangles, music-playing rectangles, mobile communication rectangles, personal work rectangles, and bright alarm cubes, which emit a high-pitched reminder that it’s time to rise from one’s bed and move toward the rectangles in one’s kitchen.
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This is the third in a five-part series examining the issues that governments and organizations need to address in the absence of a BYOD policy, 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 the article clearly has a mocking tone, there is a clear reason for interacting as we do with those glowing rectangles: some are merely the technological membrane through which we interact with other people, while others are the entry-ways to the technological world in which we create or consume media of all kinds, from music and videos to personal and professional email and documents.
And precisely because people have access to their music, to their pictures, to their personal social networks all the time, they expect to be able to access that content and those networks all the time, even when (a) their devices cannot connect to their private network or (b) their devices alone are not able to display the media they want to consume – because their batteries are drained, for example, or because the particular device is not optimized for the type of media they need.
The Benefits of Connecting
There are numerous reasons that employees may want to connect their personal devices (BYOD) to their work computers or office networks. First, if space is an issue on their hard drives, they can play music from their MP3 players (there is debate about music’s impact on productivity). Even if the issue is not space, but rather simply installing personal applications and/or data on a work machine, connecting an external player may be seen as a good work-around.
Second, personal devices run out of power and many can recharge through USB cables. Outlet space is often limited, especially in cubicles, which now comprise 70% of office spaces according to one report. In those circumstances, it seems logical to charge devices in series rather than in parallel.
Finally, and perhaps most persuasively, work is rarely confined to a single machine and the small devices people take with them everywhere are the perfect, and sometimes preferred media for storing documents that will be edited on multiple machines. And why not? Windows phones, iPhones, and Android phones all carry gigabytes of space that are available for those large PowerPoint presentations and image files that no one wants to send through email.
The Dangers of Connecting and How to Minimize Them
There are three main perils of connecting personal devices to work computers and networks. The primary concerns, of course, are malware and spyware. These twin dangers become more apparent whenever new viruses are discovered on Android phones, or the full implications of iPhone apps are realized.
Of secondary, but not insignificant, concern is that employees could use their personal devices to skirt the spirit of the official use-policy, if not its letter. For example, sites that place a toll on an organization’s bandwidth-Pandora, for example, or YouTube-may be blocked on workstations, but employees could run similar apps from their phones-Spotify and/or Amazon Prime Videos.
> Finally, there is simply the productivity issue. Do the media and applications that personal devices bring into the workplace ultimately boost, depress, or have no impact on productivity?
As with accessing work data, there are three ways that organizations can regulate connecting personal devices to work assets.
First, organizations can ban the practice entirely. Second, they can use technological filters, for example by requiring any device to have security enable before it can connect to a network or computer. Third, organizations can have only policy filters in place.
The most important point, however, is that the leadership addresses this issue in their mobile device use-policy and that all employees understand the risks in connecting their devices to work computers and networks.
Gadi Ben-Yehuda (Twitter: @GBYehuda) is Director for Innovation and Social Media at the IBM Center for the Business of Government.
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“The liberation of government datasets is important in itself, but data are truly powerful when used in the development of informative apps.” So proclaimed Todd Park, Brian Forde and Jo Strang in a recent White House Blog, Safety Data Jam connects Tech Innovators with Public Safety Officers.
That safety jam was part of a broader initiative to challenge developers featuring new Data.gov Safety “data sets” that gained fresh exposure this month at the White House’s Safety Datapalooza.
I took a deeper look to see what innovation with government data is possible.
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When the White House announced which of more than 700 applicants would become Presidential Innovation Fellows last month, it also gave a subtle endorsement to a concept pioneered by a small, but growing nonprofit organization called Code for America.
Founded by Jennifer Pahlka in 2009, Code for America has been helping to bring experts and entrepreneurs from the private sector to work together with public sector leaders and inject a dose of innovative ideas into government services. Keep reading →
New college graduates entering the workforce this year may have gotten their first iPhone in high school and their first email address in middle school. While the class of 2007 used laptops for research in their dorm rooms, this year’s graduates could fact-check.
Surely, these new hires will have different expectations for the technology employers will provide and how it will be used. Keep reading →