best practices

Government Business Owners, Not Just CIOs, Need ‘The Risk Talk’

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Communication about the perils of taking inappropriate risk – and how to accept or not accept IT risk in government – is seriously lacking these days. There is clearly a link missing in the chain that connects government business managers with matters of importance such as IT risk.

Take for instance, the Utah data breach and all of the “lessons learned” that have been discussed since following a data breach that exposed the health data of 500,000 people and social security numbers of 280,000 Utah Medicaid recipients. The incident, which took place earlier this year, led the executive director of Utah’s Department of Technology Services to resign in May. Keep reading →

 /  Published September 11, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Message To Innovation Fellows: Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

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There has been a lot of activity from the Obama Administration this week in the name of innovation and best practices.

There was a double-post on the White House Blog by Federal CTO Todd Park and the Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel about two new initiatives that would seem to be related, but it is not clear how. The first was a prelude to White House’s Plans To Announce Presidential Innovation Fellows and the second was from VanRoekel touting the progress of the Digital Strategy Progress. The latter featured the use of the term “building blocks.” Keep reading →

 /  Published August 24, 2012 at 10:30 AM

Rah, Rah HRU: Online University Gains Stature With HR Professionals

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At a time when education costs are soaring and student debt is rising, there’s one institution of higher learning that’s tuition free for most students and is saving money – lots of it.

It’s the federal Chief Human Capital Officers‘ innovative cross-government HR University, which has saved more than $17.6 million in taxpayer dollars since it was launched last year, according to the Office of Personnel Management, the council’s partner in HRU. Keep reading →

 /  Published August 16, 2012 at 10:00 AM

Governments Don’t Have Websites; Governments Are Websites

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Quick question – don’t think too hard about it: What is Amazon?

At one level, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, a public company listed on the NASDAQ. At another level – the physical – it is a collection of over 50,000 employees, hundreds of warehouses and zillions of servers. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 25, 2012 at 10:00 AM

Sebelius, Park Should Show More Proof Of Health Datapalooza Claims

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Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park co-authored a White House blog this week about the high-points of the recent Health Datapalooza, touting a number of accomplishments. And certainly, they deserve credit for trying to unleash the forces of innovation on a bureaucracy as big as HHS.

However, looking more deeply into some of the high points mentioned in the blog, one discovers not everything is as self-evident or available to data users as it might appear. For example, they touted the following: Keep reading →

 /  Published June 22, 2012 at 10:01 AM

Innovate Or Dissipate: You Don’t Have a Choice

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We all know government is facing extreme budget pressure. It’s no secret that more work needs to be done than there are dollars to pay for it. Additional resources to invest in opportunities to improve citizen services and increase operational capability are extremely difficult to find.

However, if we as a country want to keep our competitive edge, we need to continually evolve to run better than ever before. We have to break through barriers, embrace new ideas, and innovate faster than any other country in the world. Taxpayers deserve no less. Keep reading →

 /  Published June 21, 2012 at 9:03 AM

Government’s Virtual Worlds Go On Display

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The virtual worlds operated by federal agencies are evolving in several directions and many of them — including more than 20 government virtual world projects — will be on display this week, May 16-18, at the 6th Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds (FCVW) Conference.

Established by the Information Resources Management College (iCollege) of the National Defense University in July 2007, the consortium was created to explore multi-agency and intra-agency collaboration using the robust capabilities of virtual worlds. Keep reading →

 /  Published May 15, 2012 at 2:35 PM

FedRAMP Cloud Security Program Names First Accredited Assessors

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The federal office charged with promoting the sharing of security credentials for government cloud computing systems, known as FedRAMP, has released the first list of accredited Third Party Assessment Organizations (3PAO) approved for testing security controls.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Keep reading →

 /  Published May 15, 2012 at 9:25 AM

Procurement Forum Highlights Gains And Strains In Federal IT

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The General Services Administration’s decision to abandon a 50-year old conference franchise, known as IRMCO, in favor of a new one-day symposium dedicated to advancing acquisition, proved to be a winning move for GSA Thursday and a step forward for the acquisition community.

The new forum may have done more to reveal than relieve the strains that exist between federal acquisition specialists and those they buy for and from. But it did succeed in bringing together many of the government’s top acquisition and technology officials–and more than 600 government and industry executives–to focus on ways to improve how the federal government buys technology. Keep reading →

 /  Published March 30, 2012 at 1:35 PM

Innovation in Government: Creating The ‘Know Your Farmer’ Program

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This is the second in a series of profiles of innovative leaders in government based on interviews by the authors Paul R. Lawrence and Mark A. Abramson for the book “Paths to Making a Difference: Leading in Government.” The book highlights the management lessons of 24 political executives during their first two years in the Obama administration.

Historically, a major criticism of government has been that it consists of individual government agencies (often called stove-pipes or silos) which tend not to work very well with other agencies, even those within their own department.

When she arrived at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan found some truth in this criticism of government. Many agencies within USDA viewed themselves as somewhat independent of the Office of the Secretary. Keep reading →

 /  Published March 28, 2012 at 3:05 PM
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