TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT
05/29/09 04:48 pm ET
President Obama's speech today and the release of Melissa Hathaway's 60-day cybersecurity review are clear signals that cybersecurity is finally getting the attention it deserves, especially given its strategic importance to national security.>>
05/29/09 11:57 am ET
The White House has posted its 60-day cybersecurity review.>>
05/28/09 12:06 pm ET
The Washington Post has an interesting story up today regarding the implementation of facial recognition software by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. For the system to work, the DMV has banned people from smiling in their driver's license photos:>>
05/27/09 06:37 pm ET
Just this winter, Supreme Court pick Sonia Sotomayor was part of a unanimous court decision that limited the use of the 2001 Patriot Act to silence Internet service providers who are contacted by federal authorities for customer phone and Internet records.>>
05/27/09 06:03 pm ET
The Social Security Administration, for the most part, has been on the cutting edge of government's online technology. It was one of the first federal agencies to launch a Web site (in 1994). And SSA.gov routinely places at the top of the most popular government Web sites as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index compiled by the University of Michigan.>>
05/26/09 06:09 pm ET
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters today the results of the Obama administration's 60-day review of the federal government's cybersecurity posture will be released Friday.>>
05/26/09 05:17 pm ET
It's a bit of a hackneyed question that reporters ask a top executive every now and then: "What keeps you up at night?" It's been asked of federal information technology managers, too, and the answer typically has been the lack of cybersecurity. Information security seems to be the cause of a lack of sleep for President Obama, too.>>
05/22/09 04:32 pm ET
As the Beltway transparency movement cheers on President Obama's open government initiative, some Washington watchdogs say the arguably admirable feat overlooks important aspects of public disclosure.>>
05/22/09 02:32 pm ET
It didn't take long after the launch of Data.gov for the public to recognize the potential of the newly available data. Today we saw the first entrant to Sunlight Labs' Apps for America 2 contest, which challenges the public to come up with innovative uses for the site's data feeds.>>
05/21/09 05:19 pm ET
The Obama administration launched Data.gov on Thursday to "open government and democratize information." Some of the initial reviews:>>
05/20/09 05:43 pm ET
The day that recommendations for a more open government are due to the president, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) plans to file a request for public input, prompting questions galore.>>
05/20/09 04:32 pm ET
Ever wonder what happened to all of the information that was housed on whitehouse.gov before the Obama Administration took over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when former President George W. Bush was still in office? We were promised the Web pages would be preserved for historians, researchers and the public, and it seems that promise has been realized with georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.>>
05/20/09 01:10 pm ET
The ways federal technology projects can get into trouble appear limitless. What we encounter most frequently are projects where the contractor lacks the management and technical capabilities to do a good job. A well-known example of this from the 1980s was PRC's struggle to...>>
05/19/09 05:34 pm ET
Federal Chief Technology Officer nominee Aneesh Chopra garnered little attention from lawmakers examining his and other presidential appointments on Tuesday, raising the question: How important is the first-ever federal CTO?>>
05/19/09 02:58 pm ET
The federal government's efforts to use social media to improve communication have officially gone global. At a press conference today to announce $110 million in humanitarian aid for displaced residents of Pakistan's Swat Valley, State Department Secretary Hillary Clinton discussed a plan to use cell phone text messages to inform local communities about the assistance efforts:>>
05/18/09 01:16 pm ET
IT has always been a risk-filled enterprise. That's because software development is a first-of-a-kind undertaking. Programmers write programs to make software and hardware systems function in new ways. Often, the novelty of the development effort is small, requiring minor adjustments to existing programs. In this case, development risk is generally low. To the extent that the programming entails exploring truly new territory, then development risk goes up.>>
05/16/09 10:05 pm ET
Open government groups say as early as Monday they plan to send the Obama administration a letter that asks the White House to "to open the Open Government Directive process" to the public. Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra must submit recommendations for the...>>
05/15/09 01:43 pm ET
New York Times columnist David Brooks jumped into the long-running argument over the likelihood of President Obama's health care reforms actually reducing health care costs.>>
05/14/09 06:28 pm ET
A Republican House member proposed a measure on Thursday that would demand banks receiving bailout funds hand over business results in a special format that is easily accessible, after many open government advocates had urged the administration to require such formatting.>>
05/14/09 05:50 pm ET
One lesson learned from the swine flu outbreak is that cross-marketing the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention on other federal Web sites helped drive more citizens to sign up for emergency e-mail alerts, according to GovDelivery, a company that manages public communications for government agencies.>>
05/14/09 04:57 pm ET
An editor at Government Executive came across this video today, which is apparently part of a campaign to raise public awareness about the benefits of increasing adoption of health information technology.>>
05/13/09 05:28 pm ET
Most information technology executives were counting on President Obama to goose federal tech spending when he took office. The reasoning goes this way: Technology helped fuel his run for president during the campaign and he's basically a technophile.>>
05/13/09 03:36 pm ET
The Census Bureau's ongoing address canvassing exercises have been a topic of public interest lately, because it will be the only opportunity for the bureau to make use of the handheld computers it spent $800 million developing.>>
05/12/09 03:57 pm ET
While the fiscal 2010 budget plan for federal IT investments cites efforts to build Recovery.gov, a federal site for tracking stimulus spending, it is silent on the extent to which subcontractor funding and performance will be disclosed. Lawmakers and interest groups are seeking more specifics on such transactions.>>
05/12/09 02:39 pm ET
A Senate panel plans to examine on May 19 the nomination of Aneesh Chopra as the first-ever federal Chief Technology Officer, a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy official said on Tuesday.>>
05/11/09 06:51 pm ET
Bev Godwin, director of online resources at the White House, discussed last week how the Obama administration is using social networking to open government and provide information on a number of issues at a Government Executive Leadership Breakfast Series panel. She presented data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web site that shows how the public accessed information on the swine flu as of May 3.>>
05/11/09 06:16 pm ET
Permit me a shout out to my alma mater (and Nextgov senior reporter Jill Aitoro's as well), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The NCAA men's national basketball champs visited the White House on Monday to meet President Obama, who picked the Tar Heels in his bracket to win the championship.>>
05/08/09 05:28 pm ET
USAjobs.gov recently posted federal jobs created by Presient Bush's stimulus package -- the 2009 American Recovery Reinvestment Act (ARRA). A search using "ARRA" as a keyword brought up 192 jobs. Not too mnay of those jobs are federal information tech posts, however. A search consisting of "ARRA and information technology" produced just six hits, with two jobs in the Agriculture Department, two in the Housing and Urban Development Department, and one each in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and General Services Administration:>>
05/08/09 05:05 pm ET
Getting rid of tax evaders is a good thing. But spending more money on technology to catch them after-the-fact is not, say some federal contracting advocates.>>
05/07/09 03:02 pm ET
Lurita Doan, the head of the General Services Administration for two years in the Bush administration and now a commentator on Federal News Radio, has a weekly feature on the station's Federal Drive program during which she offers up her "cheers and jeers" for the federal community.>>
05/06/09 04:59 pm ET
It may seem as if a new breach of some computer system or network is reported every couple of months; but actually, one security expert says it's worse than that.>>
05/05/09 12:03 pm ET
With all the excitement surrounding electronic health records in the new administration, including the $19 billion in the stimulus bill set aside to further their adoption, it's easy to forget the potential risks of moving our health information online.>>
05/04/09 05:21 pm ET
In February I reported that the General Services Administration planned to shift the federal government's official Web portal, USA.gov to private servers, a strategy known as cloud computing. The move was expected to cut costs in half and serve as a model to other agencies considering making the leap to software as a service.>>
05/01/09 05:32 pm ET
President Obama joined Facebook, MySpace and Twitter -- all burgeoning online communities -- on Friday in what some are calling an effort to calm hysteria surrounding the swine flu outbreak.>>
05/01/09 04:39 pm ET
Before he was elected to the White House, Sen. Barack Obama was a proponent of putting more information about government contracts, grants and loans online, teaming up with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to introduce the 2006 Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which requires full disclosure on a Web site maintained by OMB of all organizations receiving more than $25,000 in federal funds.>>
05/01/09 01:52 pm ET
GovLoop, the social networking site for federal employees, announced it signed up its 10,000th member in less than a year of operation.>>
05/01/09 11:04 am ET
Results and recommendations of the Obama administration's 60-day cyber review will be revealed in the next few days, perhaps as early as Tuesday, said Melissa Hathaway, senior director for cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security councils.>>
