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 →
This story was updated March 6 to reflect additional details about Windows 8 for enterprise organizations.
Chief information officers from government, education and health sectors got the latest look at the converging world of mobile and workplace computing platforms – and the new beta release of Windows 8 –at a public sector CIO summit sponsored by Microsoft Corp. Feb. 29 in Redmond, Wash. 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Day, members of the DHS CIO Council and other senior IT program managers underscored the urgent need to modernize outdated systems for new mobile applications while maintaining the agency’s need for security and reliability.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 →
Federal technology managers foresee the use of tablet mobile computing devices by agency employees will nearly triple over the next two years, from 7% of employees in 2011 to 19% by 2013, and that smartphone use will increase from 35% to 43% of employees over the same period, as agencies look for alternatives to desktop PCs, according to a new survey. Keep reading →
Federal information technology officials are on a mission to hammer out a new, more coherent strategy for using mobile technology in government by the end of next month. But already, they are beginning to conclude that parallel efforts focused on outward-facing citizen services and inward-focused workforce productivity opportunities must be viewed increasingly from a larger, more integrated perspective, according to Richard Holgate.
Holgate, CIO and assistant director for science and technology for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), is playing a lead role in developing a new “federal mobility strategy” announced last month by U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel during the Consumer Electronics Show. Keep reading →
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 →
A Federal Communications Commission proposal that would effectively halt the launch of a new nationwide wireless network by LightSquared appears to open the door to a new and potentially disruptive debate on the need to develop receivers designed to coexist with new wireless networks.
Recent tests showed that LightSquared’s network would overpower GPS transmissions, prompting the FCC to reverse its prior approval and now block the plan. 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 →
The U.S. Government Printing Office reports that the mobile application it developed for this year’s release of the 2013 Federal Budget proposal to Congress drew 53,000 visits in the first 24 hours of being posted — a surprising volume given the arcane nature and scope of the annual budget document.
The GPO application, available at http://m.gpo.gov/budget, features mobile friendly text versions of the president’s budget message, along with additional commentaries on building the economy, cutting waste, reducing the deficit and investing in the future. 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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