Rep. Issa kicks off 113th Congress talking about federal IT: The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee kicked off the 113th Congress with a hearing focused on wasteful information technology spending. The hearing, which included testimony from former Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, as well as Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel and GAO’s Dave Powner and a panel of industry thought leaders, focused on creating efficiencies by leveraging cloud technologies, the need to optimize and consolidate data centers and how open data leads to innovation in government. The hearing was billed as a high level look at federal IT and it held true to form. Future hearings will be held to drill deeper into some of the key issues impacting federal IT acquisition, using Rep. Issa’s draft legislation to reform federal IT acquisition as a baseline. There was a good deal of news coverage on this hearing, such as this article from FedNewsRadio.
Technology replacing humans? The advance of technology, specifically related to cloud computing and the collection of data is again bringing up the age old argument of people vs. machines. As technology advances, we are seeing more and more tasks that were once done by people being done by machines, everything from reading your electric meter to potentially driving your car. As government’s look to do more with less, technology is a driving force behind creating efficiency. But how do we achieve the right balance? Omaha.com has a look at how data, cloud and smarter machines are reshaping the economy.
States looking at enterprise IT, cloud and other innovative solutions: According to recent report from our friends at NASCIO, state CIOs are worried about interoperability, IT funding and public safety broadband as they enter into 2013. They are calling on the federal government to modernize the regulations and funding streams for IT and asking agencies to modernize how they work with states to deliver key services such as Medicaid, Medicare and Homeland Security. States, like the federal government, are also turning to innovative solutions like cloud, virtualization and shared services to help solve budget and IT problems. Read the full story at Government Health IT.
DHS is 10 Years Old: It seems like yesterday but DHS is 10 years old this week. The original legislation creating the Department was passed by Congress in November of 2002 and the Department was officially stood up in January of 2003. The 22 component agencies came aboard on March 1, 2003. Former Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen shares his thoughts on how far DHS has come and how much more there is to do.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.