Christopher L. Smith, who is retires next month as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief information officer is taking up new duties as U.S. federal chief technology and innovation officer for Accenture Federal Services, officials at Accenture announced today.
Smith will assume the new position on April 9, following his April 7 retirement from USDA, where he served as CIO since 2009. Keep reading →
When it comes to food safety, the government’s ability to inform consumers fast with word of recalls due to contamination can make the difference between life and death.
To that end, the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is harnessing the power of technology and social media. Keep reading →
Microsoft officials revealed Thursday that the company is planning to develop a new dedicated multi-tenant, government community cloud computing environment.
The move is part of a broadening effort at Microsoft and its public sector division to meet emerging needs among federal agencies whose officials are trying to find faster, more economical and secure ways to migrate parts of their computing operations to the cloud. 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 →
The Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has launched a web-based system that identifies and keeps tainted meat, poultry and eggs out of the food chain.
Gone are paper reports and word-of-mouth alerts about unsafe and dangerous food detected by USDA’s food inspectors, whether its salmonella or sour milk that sends consumers to the hospital. Keep reading →
The White House has unveiled a new government web site section designed to help accelerate the environmental review and permitting process for 14 high priority infrastructure projects.
The new Federal Infrastructure Projects Dashboard is also intended to bring greater public attention to the projects, and the promise of jobs associated with them, said Jeff Zients, deputy director for management and chief performance officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget in a blog post yesterday. Keep reading →
The White House Office of Management and Budget declared today that it had made genuine progress in cutting wasteful and improper payments to the tune of $17.6 billion in fiscal year 2011, with significant decreases in payment errors coming from Medicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, and Food Stamps.
Combined with the improper payment cuts in 2010, administration officials said agencies avoided making over $20 billion in improper payments in the two years since President Obama issued an executive order initiating an aggressive campaign against wasteful payment errors.
OMB Director Jack Lew, in a press briefing today, attributed the progress to “an unparalleled commitment” by the White House, and the use of “forensic technologies” in rooting out sources of improper payments. Keep reading →
Federal agencies trying to plot their path toward a mobile future need to be willing to say “yes” to pilot programs even if the outcomes are hard to predict, said Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker today in a panel discussion at the Executive Leadership Conference.
But even if agencies move forward to embrace mobile technologies, they must also resolve,” How do we work around interagency silos to share these services,” said Gwynne Kostin, director mobile, GSA Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. Keep reading →
When it comes to buying and delivering government technology projects, few approaches seem to have caught the attention of federal officials the way agile development has.
And there’s good reason, according to management specialists from the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, the FBI and the General Services Administration who spoke at a Washington forum Oct. 14 about how agile development is making inroads in government. Keep reading →
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal CIO Council hosted a conference on the state of mobility in the federal government earlier this week that brought together top-tier industry mobility professionals across the U.S. federal mobile ecosystem to discuss the rapidly evolving adoption of mobile technologies.
For those of us who have been in this industry for many years like myself, the tone of remarks at the two-day conference, held Aug. 23-24, was a welcome return to reality and affirmation that security and data integrity should not be lost in all the recent hype over a new breed of powerful smartphones and tablet computing devices. Keep reading →