Mobile technology will clearly take a higher profile role as federal leaders develop IT plans in the coming year, but it was clear from several who spoke on the topic Thursday that strategies vary widely between agencies.
Speakers at a mobile government summit at the Hotel Monaco in Washington, D.C., said mobility plans must be integrated into ongoing efforts rather than evolving as a separate entity. (See related story, “Federal Mobility Plan Takes Shape.”) Keep reading →
Though historically a place where ink meets paper, the Government Printing Office now produces nearly all of the country’s most important documents in digital form and is currently pursuing technologies to broaden its reach across agencies and to the public.
Chief Technology Officer Richard Davis said efforts are under way to migrate troves of digital information in the Federal Digital System created in 2006 to Extensible Markup Language (XML). The first of which was the fiscal 2013 budget released Monday via a collection of documents published by GPO. The rest of GPO’s data will migrate during fiscal 2012. The move will essentially allow users to use and pass on the information more easily and could eventually allow GPO to generate revenue through new digital products. Keep reading →
Federal spending on information technology is scheduled to decrease by 1.2%, or about $586 million, in the next fiscal year, according to the president’s fiscal year 2013 budget, with most of the reduction coming from cuts in the Department of Defense. Keep reading →
The TechAmerica Foundation, which has helped define cloud computing and IT policy discussions in the public sector, announced a new leader today.
Jennifer A. Kerber, considered an expert in technology policy, was named by the Foundation’s board to be the organization’s new president. Keep reading →
The names of this year’s 100 most influential executives in the government IT community were released by Federal Computer Week magazine this morning.
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 →
Government agencies are savings billions of dollars from virtualization; and those savings are projected to grow as workloads in virtualized server and desktop environments are expected to double by 2015. But agencies must overcome funding uncertainties, concerns about legacy systems and other barriers to achieve virtualization’s full potential, according to a new industry survey of government IT executives.
The new study found that 82% of federal and 77% of state-and-local IT professionals say their agencies have already implemented some degree of server virtualization, where computing work is done in artificially-created, software-controlled work spaces. Keep reading →
The federal workforce, 2.1 million strong, has been the subject of growing criticism as of late. Much of the criticism is unfair. There are many dedicated people working in the federal government; though there are certainly some clinging to the status quo. In any case, in a terrible economy, public calls for federal workforce accountability are entirely reasonable.
One reform measure would be to change what has become tantamount to an indefinite tenure system for the federal workforce. Renewable, four-year term appointments for new employees entering government would increase the accountability of federal positions without causing major disruption. This would begin to counter the criticism. Keep reading →
What do well-balanced information security professionals look like, and why should the government be hiring them?
With the release of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Framework and much talk about the cyber human capital crisis, one question that keeps coming up is “what type of information security professional should agencies be hiring?” Keep reading →
This is one in a series of articles highlighting Breaking Gov’s best stories of the past year. As we reflected on our 2011 coverage of innovation, technology and management amongst the federal agencies and workforce, this was among the stories that stood out as delivering key insight into the top issues facing today’s government community.
The past year has seen the 200-year-old U.S. Postal Service in crisis and its future remains grim. Keep reading →
What do the Green Bay Packers and the Army Installation Management Command have in common? They both use the same computer software to make critical decisions.
The Packers use decision-making software from Decision Lens Inc. to more systematically weigh a variety of criteria in evaluating potential draft picks. Depending on priorities, those decisions can often be too close to call. Keep reading →