For FITARA to reach its full potential, Federal agencies must dissect the real problems and attract stronger CIOs, Dave Powner, Director of IT Issues at the Government Accountability Office, told MeriTalk’s FITARA Forum in Washington, D.C. […]

March is U.S. Women’s History Month, which celebrates the historical and scientific contributions made by women. These 10 women have made profound contributions to the history and development of government technology. […]

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department has begun its search for a new Chief Information Officer, two months after HHS lost its previous CIO, Frank Baitman, who worked to establish HHS within the 2014 FITARA guidelines. […]

A group of senior IT executives and former CIOs are attempting to direct the presidential candidates’ attention to the urgent needs of IT policy in the Federal government. They released a report, titled “Tech Iconoclasts – Voting for America’s Success in a Network World,” an open letter to the candidates that outlines five key needs in Federal IT and recommends policy to address these needs. […]

Feb. 11 is the U.N.’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
In the government, many women have had powerful and profound impacts on Information Technology. Here are 11 women in Government IT you should know about. […]

Alongside the release of the proposed 2017 budget, the White House released its annual Analytical Perspectives of that proposal. MeriTalk spotted five important trends in the IT world and describes how the Federal government plans to address them. […]

The White House is looking to fill the Federal CISO position in the very near future. The posting for the job, which is designed to establish the direction of Federal cybersecurity policy and strategy in accordance with the Federal CIO, closes on Feb. 26. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs is moving aggressively to institute a new system to plan and manage IT projects, effectively replacing the agile development methodology championed by former chief information officers Roger Baker and Stephen Warren. VA CIO LaVerne Council told a MyVA Advisory Committee meeting last week that she has hired the second of three senior executives to lead the new IT Account Management organization. […]

Shawn Kingsberry, who led the first Federal technology system, Recovery.gov, to the cloud, will head Unisys Corporation’s global government practice division. Kingsberry will provide guidance to Federal clients as they transition from manual and analog processes to digital government techniques. […]

air force

Juniper Networks announced that it has been selected as the original equipment manufacturer on four contracts to modernize the U.S. Air Force network infrastructure, partnering with Affigent and ThunderCat Technology. […]

The Situation Report has picked up strong signals from our Office of Management and Budget outpost that senior administration officials are “pissed off” at Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., for inserting language into the omnibus spending bill that passed in December. Alexander is responsible for inserting a paragraph into the omnibus spending package that granted the […]

Will the Federal government’s embrace of Silicon Valley actually achieve anything of importance? In a column published in Federal Computer Week, Cisco Systems executives Alan Balutis and Stuart Robbins raise concerns about a government partnership with Silicon Valley that is in danger of producing little more than a few new shiny apps and websites. […]

A MeriTalk survey finds that Federal agencies are in need of an efficiency jump-start, and 78 percent of Feds believe DevOps will help agencies innovate faster responses and services. Legacy systems are slowing agencies down, and new apps just add to the inertia. […]

The Government Accountability Office, in a new report, said the Small Business Administration needs to do more to upgrade IT security. The SBA, which hands out billions in loan guarantees to small businesses, said it has fixed more than 30 recommendations. […]

Federal agencies could save $40.7 billion in annual productivity by switching from legacy voice systems to a Unified Communications solution, a new MeriTalk survey found. […]

With the deadline looming for Federal agencies to submit final implementation plans for FITARA, the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, it’s a good time to look back at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s scorecard, released in November. With no As in sight, what does success look like? […]

Federal employees have greater job satisfaction for the first time in four years, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration remained the top Federal agency to work at, according to the Partnership for Public Service’s 2015 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government. The Partnership released the study Tuesday. The study, the Partnership’s 10th […]

Federal agencies and other organizations are increasingly relying on analytics to detect and stop fraud, but experts recommend they start with small projects and small data sets to pinpoint risk. Learn how the U.S. Postal Service, World Bank, General Services Administration, and IBM approach the use of big data analytics to prevent fraud in government. […]

Just a handful of agencies have accounted for the nearly $2 billion saved by closing Federal data centers through the first five years of the program, according to scorecards distributed by Congress, and that trend is likely to continue. The Treasury Department, Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Commerce Department saved a combined $1.652 […]

The U.S. Postal Service found more than it expected when it began using big data and analytics to detect mail theft. The postal service’s office of inspector general used analytics to set up trip wires, which set parameters around data to help detect anomalous activity. That allowed postal inspectors to determine that a carrier was […]

The majority of Federal agencies still rely heavily on legacy systems with little funding to buy new systems. But the good news is, most agency IT managers feel they can still squeeze a few more years out of their current systems, if given the right application upgrades, according to a new report from MeriTalk. The […]

This article originally appeared Nov. 10 as a LinkedIn post and is printed here with the permission of the author. In late June, I was honored to testify before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government on the recent Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breaches. My testimony focused on the broader […]

The U.S. Census Bureau is running out of time to upgrade its IT systems ahead of the 2020 head count and could save $1.4 billion by using administrative records instead of foot soldiers that go door-to-door to find nonresponders, the Government Accountability Office says in two new reports. Enough is enough, the report says as […]

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