The Animal and Plant Health Service (APHIS) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing to add a new system of records notice to its current inventory of records systems.
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) made its first investment under its ReConnect pilot program to support broadband availability, offering $2.85 million to a local service provider in Tennessee, the department announced October 18.
More than 20 telecommunications and utility industry groups, as well as state and local government organizations, banded together to urge congressional leaders to continue funding broadband deployment in rural America in FY2020.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has continued its progress toward modernizing IT and data analytics capabilities across the agency in accordance with the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) with a set date of Sept. 30, 2019, to “provide USDA leadership with instant access to key data on program activities and trends.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is seeking Federal employees to apply for a new program the department is launching to train new CIOs and CISOs.
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken implementation of FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) to heart, making it part of performance plans, department policy, and gaining visibility across its IT environment, USDA officials explained July 31 at an ACT-IAC event.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) CIO Gary Washington said today that his agency is focusing on boosting its FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) grades by the time the House Oversight and Reform Committee issues its next set of scores – expected in December – and is confident that the agency can accomplish that goal.
Gary Washington, CIO at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), spoke enthusiastically today about the agency’s ongoing approach to emerging technologies – including robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain – and said the technologies have the potential to become “a very large part of our future.”
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is seeing strong results from its effort to expand data analytics across the agency, and is meeting targets and exceeding goals on stakeholder buy-in, according to a June 20 update to the agency’s goals under the President’s Management Agenda.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is searching for information on improving its data repository and user interface design.
The Technology Modernization Fund’s (TMF) website shows minimal or no spend thus far on the projects for which $89 million of funding has been awarded.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) updated their goals on modernizing its information technology through an action plan that is focusing on customer-focused, evidence-based, and tax-dollar efficient technology.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would like to offer up to $600 million dollars in loans and grants, through their ReConnect Program, to assist rural areas in building their broadband infrastructure.
Agriculture Department CIO Gary Washington laid out his agency’s IT modernization journey today, beginning with USDA’s work as the lighthouse agency for the Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative, and continuing with the agency’s selection as one of the first three to receive an award under the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF).
The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced the launch of an interactive data tool to display substance abuse data along with other public information, allowing local leaders to “build grassroots strategies to address the opioid epidemic,” the department said in its announcement.
Matt Lira, special assistant to the president for innovation, policy, and initiatives at the White House Office of American Innovation, has a unique visualization exercise to help consider how we should address problems in the Federal IT space.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today launched a new webpage highlighting the importance of rural e-connectivity, as well as ways USDA is helping to deploy high-speed broadband infrastructure in rural America.
Unifying end-user operations and communications can help Federal agencies provide a consistently higher level of service to both employees and citizens, participants at a July 18 GovExec webinar said.
The White House isn’t doing enough to address in a public forum a range of artificial intelligence issues and needs to institute a public process to seek comments on AI-related issues, said a group of six industry groups and more than 80 individuals from academia and the private sector in a July 4 letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
When government agencies plan a secure move to the cloud, they should look to existing guidelines and regulations to protect data, and look to established solutions to ease the move, said panelists at an FCW webinar on June 21.
Federal agencies might not meet the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) data center closure goals, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Based on current projections, only 7,221 of the 12,062 data centers that agencies reported in August 2017 will be closed by September of this year.
On the heels of naming Suzette Kent as the new Federal CIO, Agriculture announced that acting CIO, Gary Washington will become the permanent CIO. Washington has served in acting capacity since September of 2017.
Usually agencies want to speak highly of their IT operating systems, so to hear Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Steve Censky call the USDA operating model “splintered and out of date” on Dec. 14 was a bit of a shock.
Hundreds of people have submitted feedback regarding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s redesigned website since its March 6 launch, according to Peter Rhee, the agency’s director of Digital Communications.
The U.S. Forest Service’s Visitor Map 2.0, an open data platform informing people what services national forests have to offer, received 22,000 unique page views during the month of February.
Gregory Reams, leader of the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program, said that the open data sets his office makes available are unlikely to suffer the same fate as the animal welfare documents that disappeared from the Department of Agriculture website. “It’s been supported for 80 years and used by a wide constituency,” Reams said at Esri’s FedGIS conference.
Federal chief financial officers want to have access to data analytics tools during the next administration, according to a survey from the Association of Government Accountants and Grant Thornton.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its annual Technology Transfer Report on Nov. 22, revealing the new inventions researchers, universities, and small businesses created in the past year.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation announced the winners of the first Innovations in Food and Agricultural Science and Technology prize competition on Nov. 1.
Federal agencies have increased the amount of money they spend on outdated IT systems, according to a study from the International Data Corporation.