The following item was posted by Nextgov reporter Gautham Nagesh.

Mark Hamilton, the Environmental Protection Agency's senior information management officer, has a lot of ideas about how technology can serve the agency's strategic plan to meet its mission.

First there's nano-technology. Speaking at the Industry Advisory Council’s Executive Session on May 7, Hamilton said the EPA is incorporating the use of technology with its operations teams to better track the status of natural disasters. Hamilton used the example of a recent encounter with an EPA field employee, who was assigned to cover the Port of Long Beach in Los Angeles, Calif. The employee was driving a mobile laboratory van when Hamilton approached him and asked to check out the inside. The employee explained to Hamilton that the EPA was using nano-sensors spread over the water’s surface to detect and isolate oil spills, work that used to be done visually from a helicopter – a practice that is "not too useful at night,” Hamilton said.

As for contractors, Hamilton used the nano-sensors as an example of how the EPA was using technology to further their mission. He said that while the main office in the Washington area was mainly concerned with policy, the 10 regional offices all feature operations teams eager to get their hands on new technology that could help with field response.

“There are tremendous business opportunities in supporting those environments at a regional level,” Hamilton said. Regional offices "are all somewhat autonomous and looking for innovative technology, for tools to do their jobs.”

A handheld computer is another. Hamilton talked about was the contamination of fresh water ground wells after Katrina. While trying to coordinate the testing of wells that may have been affected, EPA employees faced difficulty obtaining information regarding where the wells were, how many there were and which had been tested.

“Why can’t we use a handheld with real-time reporting,” to track that progress, asked Hamilton. “We need innovation from the side. That system is not available now; we need industry to provide that information.”

Other examples of technology that Hamilton said he would welcome would be devices that could remotely read a power meter or a real time sensor for water plants that would tell when they had been contaminated.

One of the barriers to progress according to Hamilton is the FedBizOps Web site, where agencies are required to post requests for proposals and other potential business opportunities. “One of our problems is sometimes we don’t know what to ask for,” he said. Hamilton called for more active engagement from industry to propose innovative technology that could be used to formulate requests for proposals. “I don’t have the time or inclination to achieve the rate of innovation the public expects,” Hamilton said, adding that is a viewpoint shared by many others in government.