Hoover Institution Press today released The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry, by Hoover research fellow David Davenport and Pepperdine professor of public policy Gordon Lloyd. This thought-provoking book illustrates how the twenty-first-century discourse between progressives and conservatives grew out of the Roosevelt-Hoover debate of the 1930s. Providing an often-overlooked historical perspective, the authors… Keep reading →
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In The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry, Davenport and Lloyd Highlight a Back-to-Basics Approach for Reviving the Conservative Movement
By businesswire
A top procurement official at the General Services Administration has posted a set of priorities on a GSA website that will guide the agency’s technology services arm as it plans out future procurement strategies.
Kevin Youel, acting assistant commissioner of GSA’s Integrated Technology Service (ITS), said that the principles emerged during a recent discussion with federal chief information and acquisition officers, along with agency deputies throughout the federal government.
The discussion, the agency’s second stakeholder roundtable, focused primarily on setting priorities for GSA’s next generation of network services portfolio and related procurement offerings.
“The discussion gave us guiding principles for the Network Services 2020 (NS2020) Strategy,” said Youel in a blog posted this week. But some of the principles “apply beyond IT, to any government acquisition,” he said.
Youel said GSA shared findings from GSA’s top-down review of previous and current telecommunications contracts, including FTS2001 and Networx, based on meetings with more than 100 stakeholders, and after reviewing market trends and other data analysis.
“Our past outreach shows that GSA needs to match portfolio structure to agency buying patterns,” he said. It also needs to be aligned as well as to industry market segments, he said.
While agencies “value the more than $700 million in savings achieved by Networx in FY12,” he said, GSA “must continue to achieve greater savings through strategic sourcing to keep us in line with the September 20 GAO report that concludes government should do more strategic sourcing.”
Youel summarized the top five principles that emerged from the discussions, which according to his blog post, called for:
1. Deeper government partnerships. Agencies want a spectrum of offerings ranging from complete solutions and managed services to commodity building blocks, with which to build their own solutions. They see value in GSA providing a portfolio of services based upon affinity clusters of services. Contract options brought to the table by other agencies also may be part of the mix.
2. Government and industry success. The more government makes our buys look like big corporate buys, the better we can tie into the market and existing industry capability. This means agency commitment, aggregated common requirements, and price visibility. There are benefits to aligning our portfolio with how industry works, and we need industry to weigh in and work with GSA to achieve this compatibility. Aligning offerings with industry practice and good industry partner communications will reduce transaction costs and benefit all. We discussed how to make incentives, instead of penalties, tied to contractor success, which could improve service to users and build upon the win-win.
3. Expand scope and delivery methods. We discussed the need and value of acquisition and operational efficiency. In developing this portfolio, GSA and agencies are looking broadly at how we aggregate requirements. A framework to weave related services and elements in an efficient way might include Software as a Service (SaaS), mobile applications, and other options. Some agencies are looking for turn-key solutions that offer hands-off management. Agencies are also looking for aggregated service and lower infrastructure costs through identifying common needs.
4. Continue commitment to innovation. We must continue to offer options to support continuous and convenient access to industry partner innovations. Looking at how we refresh technology and pricing could give us steady improvements with fewer heavy lifts. Many times, we can add innovation without developing new acquisitions.
5. Increase transition support and more. GSA can provide tailored customer support throughout the acquisition life cycle, including assistance with acquisition, fair opportunity, and transition processes. The systems and processes we have in place for consolidated and centralized billing have provided operational efficiencies. Enhancing these systems will further drive down government and industry operating costs.
“Our current program provides more than $1.8 billion of networking services to federal agencies,” he concluded. “We continue to enhance our existing portfolio as we plan for the future. An NS2020 Interagency Advisory Panel will guide the strategy work for NS2020 and bring the strategy to the Federal CIO Council, he said.
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“The United States has built the most powerful military the world has ever seen, but we are not invincible. Information technology is a both an essential enabler of American power, but it is also our Achilles heel. And that’s why this project is so important,” said Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, referring to a new cybersecurity research center opened by L-3 and Virginia Tech in Arlington, Va., Oct. 5.
“Cyberspace is the soft underbelly of American power,” said Moran, who called the need for more effective solutions for cyberspace an “urgent national priority.” Keep reading →
The Wyoming governor’s office gets a mountain of correspondence from constituents, both email and snail mail. On a recent day, for example, some 1,500 inquiries landed on Governor Matt Mead’s desk.
Until recently, the process of managing constituent inquiries to the governor was manual and paper-based, even for electronic correspondence. Keep reading →
The Morphing Network Assets to Restrict Adversarial Reconnaissance (MORPHINATOR) program is applying a process known as cyber maneuvering to rearrange key network characteristics such as IP addresses, service ports and operating software to prevent intruders from getting a good look at it.
The Army has awarded the Raytheon Company a $3.1 million contract to develop a computer defense technology that constantly changes a network’s characteristics to confuse attackers.
The U.S. Defense Department has accelerated its efforts to develop offensive cyber weapons that could be used to dismantle hostile military networks in countries where U.S. forces are operating, The Washington Post reported today.
The report cites the Pentagon’s growing frustration with the military’s inability to disable enemy air defense systems and other military communications networks in places like Libya, where U.S. pilots flew combat missions to protect civilian populations from attacks by the Libyan army. That frustration has reportedly led to a five-year, $500 million budget infusion for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s main research and development organization, to fast track research into offensive cyber tools. Keep reading →
The American Red Cross, borrowing an approach used successfully by Dell, launched what’s being billed as the first social media-based operations center devoted to humanitarian relief.
The Digital Operations Center, located in the Red Cross National Disaster Operations Center in Washington, D.C., expands the Red Cross’ ability to engage with the public during emergencies. The new operations center, which Dell help fund and design, is modeled after Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center, where Dell personnel monitor what customers are saying online about Dell and try to remedy customer issues proactively. Keep reading →
More than a dozen CIOs and senior IT managers from the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday told a gathering of industry executives that mobile computing and communications technologies are among the agency’s top strategic IT imperatives.
Speaking at the DHS Information Technology Industry Day, members of the DHS CIO Council and other senior IT program managers underscored the urgent need to modernize outdated systems for new mobile applications while maintaining the agency’s need for security and reliability. Keep reading →
President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal calls for a significant boost in funding for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with the aim of supporting advanced manufacturing research and help reignite a crippled industry with technology support.
The budget proposal, released Monday, calls for $857 million, an increase of $106.2 million, or 14.1%, compared to FY 2012–an increase that is considered unusual given the cutbacks that most agencies have had to embrace in the coming fiscal year. Keep reading →
At the beginning of his administration, President Obama created a minor controversy by insisting on using a personal mobile device. But much of that debate, such that it was, revolved around presidential records. Little was said, at least publicly, about the profound security implications of the commander in chief sending and receiving important, possibly vital, information through cyberspace.
Appropriately, even less was known about the type of data President Obama accesses, creates, and stores on the device, and the degree to which any such data is stored in “the cloud,” particularly in non-government-controlled cloud storage. What is known, however, is that mobile devices are the most prevalent, and most rapidly expanding, gateways to all types of cloud services. Keep reading →