This year’s 100 most influential executives in the government IT community were honored at a a gala tonight at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C.
The Federal 100 Awards recognize government and industry leaders who have played pivotal roles in the federal government IT community and who “have made a difference in the way technology has transformed their agency or accelerated their agency’s mission.” Keep reading →
When Susan Lawrence quit her waitressing job in her hometown of Ida Grove, Iowa, to enlist in the Army, smart phones and network-centric warfare were not part of the common vernacular.
Lawrence enlisted in what was then the Women’s Army Corps one week after her 18th birthday, specializing in home economics, typing and shorthand. Today, Lawrence is a lieutenant general and chief information officer of the Army overseeing a $10 billion information technology budget. Keep reading →
As the Government Accountability Office detailed in their public report this month on potentially duplicative investments at the Departments of Defense and Energy, duplicative IT systems exist throughout the federal government.
By their nature, duplicative IT systems are inefficient; they increase costs, prevent standardization, limit collaboration, and inhibit information sharing among and across the federal enterprise. Reducing duplicative IT systems is critical for the efficient operation of our government. Keep reading →
For Teri Takai, the key to overseeing cybersecurity for the world’s largest defense organization is striking a delicate balance between enabling mobility and safe-guarding information that is often crucial to national security. In her role as the Department of Defense’s chief information officer, she must also convince a widely diverse group of constituents that a shared approach is best.
DOD has always had a highly mobile workforce, but the proliferation of mobile devices is radically altering the department’s already challenging security environment.
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This article originally appeared in the latest edition of CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government‘s Leadership journal. For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, follow us on Twitter @AOLgov.
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Soldiers might be able to ditch awkward goggles or helmets to access data while in the battlefield in favor of virtual reality contact lenses.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to enhance soldiers’ vision with virtual reality contact lenses, according to Federal Computer Week. The technology involves contact lenses with built-in systems that would allow soldiers to focus on distant targets and overlay their vision with tactical information. Keep reading →
The Government Printing Office has just recently released its latest edition of the CIA’s World Factbook–which marks its 50th anniversary in 2012 for the classified version and more than 40 years of publishing the public version.
The 810-page public edition of the CIA’s World Factbook provides not only a timely and valuable source of global information, it also allows us a glimpse into the times and events that necessitated its production. Keep reading →
Consider this: At the beginning of the day you’ve got two computing devices sitting in front of you, a laptop and an iPad. Which do you turn to first?
The laptop’s undoubtedly more powerful, but to use it, you’ll likely need to press the power button, wait a few minutes for it to fire up, wait a few more minutes for various programs to load, then take a few more minutes to find what you’re looking for. The iPad, on the other hand, sips energy ever so slowly and hardly ever needs to be powered down. Everything is easily accessible with the touch of a finger, and apps launch almost instantaneously. And, as portable as the laptop is, the iPad is even more so. Keep reading →
It’s an all-too-familiar refrain in the United States these days: “Solar is too expensive.”
Supporters of solar power have long had to face the argument that conventional energy sources are simply cheaper. This economic reality is a substantial portion of what underlies the sizable government subsidies to solar companies such as Solyndra in the U.S., and why the Chinese government is vigorously subsidizing its own solar industry. Keep reading →
The Federal government is now on track to close 1,080 data centers by 2015 among 3,133 in operation as part of a broader administration effort to reduce duplicative spending and to do more with less.
Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel, however, has signaled a new emphasis on doing “more” — by investing in technology creatively–rather than focusing primarily “on the less” that is typically associated with cuts, including data center closures. Keep reading →
The Department of Defense’s deputy chief management office (DCMO) has just released a Request for Information (RFI) that reminded me of an Breaking Gov story I did about 4 months ago, in which now-retired Gen. James Cartwright and Deputy Chief Management Officer Beth McGrath said semantic interoperability will drive DoD’s information environment.
I was asked how this RFI, which deals with the semantic web, can help DOD in particular and perhaps the federal government on a broader scale because I have worked on semantic interoperability for the government for the past 10 years and on a DOD Enterprise Information Web the past 6 months. Keep reading →