Defense Department

Feds@Work: An Advocate For Whistleblowers

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Becoming a whistleblower is often a risky and difficult path for federal employees, and so is finding the truth and protecting those who have exposed wrongdoing from being fired, punished or harassed.

Dan Meyer, director of civilian reprisal investigations with the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Defense (DOD), took the job of protecting whistleblowers to new and often perilous territory — the Pentagon’s intelligence and counterintelligence communities and the murky world of top secret or “black” programs. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 10, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Cyber Intelligence: Cyber’s Role In 21st Century Military Transformation

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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has reiterated the military’s going-forward strategy on many occasions, saying about our military’s direction: “It must be complemented by the full range of America’s national security capabilities – strong intelligence, strong diplomacy, a strong economy, strong technology, developments in cyber capabilities.” These five areas comprise the new defense strategy.

Last week the web was all abuzz with coverage of President Obama’s press conference at the Pentagon along with Defense Secretary Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey as they unveiled the administration’s new military strategy. It is clear the U.S. military will undergo dramatic changes due to budget cuts. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 9, 2012 at 3:54 PM

Obama Redirects Military’s Focus; Invests In ISR, Counter-Terror and Pacific

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The United States will police the globe, respond to disasters and shape the international environment much as it has –though our sharpest focus will be on China and the western Pacific — but it will do all that with a significantly smaller land force than it currently has.

 /  Published January 5, 2012 at 3:41 PM

Defense Spending Wizardry

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The failure of the Congressional Super Committee last month initiated a new phase in the defense spending debate.

Barring intervention from the Congress and President, the Committee’s failure results in an average reduction of $55 billion per year over nine years, beginning in January 2013, from defense spending that now exceeds $700 billion annually. Both sides of the debate have begun employing wizardry to use a variety of numbers to make their respective arguments on the right level of spending. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 20, 2011 at 9:35 AM

Army’s Resource Forest Is Good Metaphor For System Of Systems Approach

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Earlier this month, I received the Department of Defense Request for Information (RFI) on the DoD Enterprise Information Web and a request to talk about how the semantic web can help DOD in particular, and perhaps the federal government on a broader scale as well.

Having recently completed a three month assignment at Binary Group to help bring semantic web standards and semantic technologies to various parts of the Department of Defense (DoD), I gained an increased appreciation and respect for the work of DoD and our service people. I learned more about their specific content and IT requirements and wanted to share some of my lessons learned with our readers.

Keep reading →

 /  Published November 30, 2011 at 11:05 AM

VA Pulls Plug On Purchases Of Personal Desktop Printers

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is directing every chief information officer in the field to stop buying personal desktop printers, the first step to retiring these high-cost tools across the agency and replacing them with big multiuse printers.

VA spokeswoman Josephine Schuda said Nov. 29 that some regional and facility CIOs have informally gotten word of the policy shift although the Office of Information and Technology (OIT) has not yet issued a directive. The policy change came after OIT studied pilots at two facilities which have shown the value of buying and using desktop printers was less than using multiuse printers. The only exception is if an office can make a compelling case to buy one. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 28, 2011 at 10:15 AM

Nine Factors Common To Successful Federal IT Acquisitions

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The federal government’s record for acquiring major information technology projects has rarely earned high marks.

However, a new report from the Government Accountability Office identified seven occasions were agency IT acquisition investments were deemed successful. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 23, 2011 at 8:48 AM

Record Number Of Federal Agencies Earn Clean Financial Audits

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While planning at federal agencies is likely to remain in disarray as a result of Congress’ latest failure to resolve federal deficits, the actual financial statements at 23 out of 24 earned their best audit reviews yet, the Office of Management and Budget announced Friday.

The declaration meant that each agency, with the exception of the Pentagon, had satisfied independent auditors that their financial statements were accurate and reflected sound financial management practices. The results were the best record to date in the two decades since the passage of the 1990 Chief Financial Officers Act, when major agencies were required to produce audited financial statements comparable to what private corporations must produce. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 22, 2011 at 9:35 AM

Army Saving $100 Million In Email Costs With Move To DISA Cloud

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The Army has entered DISA’s Cloud Computing Purple Zone.

It’s secure. It’s effective. And it is saving the Army $100 million this year alone on enterprise email operating costs, according to Mike Krieger, deputy chief information officer, G-6, U.S. Army. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 21, 2011 at 12:56 PM

House Committee Asks ‘Is OPM Meeting Its Mission?’ in USAJobs Aftermath

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A lack of institutional knowledge in developing IT systems was believed to be a leading cause behind the Office of Personnel Management’s troubled launch of its new government jobs search site, OPM’s inspector general testified at a House subcommittee hearing yesterday.

“I cannot stress how important it is to have the correct processes in place at the beginning of any project,” said Patrick McFarland at an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing that looked into whether OPM is meeting its mission. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 16, 2011 at 11:05 AM
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