Digital Discourse / Archives for Mike Hettinger

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

October 25, 2012 By

Top IT Trends, Part I: Regardless of who wins the Presidential election on November 6th, we know technology will be driving a large part of the economy for years to come. So what will be driving technology for the next 5 years? This week, Gartner released its top 10 list of tech trends that will be driving the agenda. It includes:

  • Organizational entrenchment and disruption
  • Software-defined networks
  • Bigger data and storage
  • Hybrid cloud services
  • Client and server architecture

For the full list see the report from Forbes.

Top IT Trends, Part II: Now that we know what the top overall IT trends are for the next five years, what can we expect for government in 2013? According to the Government Business Council, the research arm of GovExec, it’s more of what we have been seeing over the past couple of years. That means: cloud, big data, data center consolidation, mobility, cybersecurity and health IT. Read the full report here.

OMB reporting big savings from PortfolioStat: OMB savings estimates resulting from the coordinated effort to identify and eliminate wasteful IT spending across government will total $2.5B over 3 years as a result of PortfolioStat. The savings come by reducing federal commodity IT spending and leveraging innovative tools like big data to maximize the efficiency of existing IT resources. See more on the OMB blog.

Sequestration makes its way into final Presidential debate: As Washington continues to try and figure out the potential impact of “sequestration” on agency budgets, should Congress and the White House fail to reach a deal to avoid it, President Obama vowed Monday night that it would not happen. The proposed cuts, totaling $120B, which go into effect on January 2nd, are already reportedly slowing contracting by some agencies, as uncertainty causes concern. Politico has a story.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, Government, PSIG, Software, Software Events

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

October 18, 2012 By

Federal News Radio CIO Survey: In August Federal News Radio survey 130 federal CIO personnel on key issues affecting government IT today. Among the key findings: budget issues are driving CIO priorities, DOD views cloud differently than do civilian agencies (they see more savings), and many CIOs are concerned about the impact of sequestration on IT spending. See the full summary from FedNewsRadio.com here.

George Washington University hosts discussion on Rep. Issa’s IT reform proposal: On Thursday, GWU’s Law School hosted an open discussion on House Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) Chairman Darrell Issa’s proposed reform of the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act, which governs federal IT acquisition. The proposal, which is not expected to be introduced until early next year, would empower federal CIOs by giving them budget authority, as well as codifying a number of the Obama Administrations proposals from the 25 Point Plan to Reform Federal IT Management such as data center consolidation and FedRAMP. Ecommerce Times has a story. See the draft bill on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee site.

FedRAMP continues to make progress, news: FCW / 1105 Media released a report this week on the challenges of implementing the FedRAMP program. FedRAMP, which reached its initial operating capabilities in June has not yet approved a single Cloud Service Provider under the program. FedRAMP has approved 15 third party assessment organizations (3PAOS) to work with CSPs to meet the baseline control requirements and expects to grant provisional authorization to 3 CSPs by the end of this year. Read more with a link to the survey here.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, Government, PSIG, Software

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

October 12, 2012 By

New GovWin Consulting report shows growth of electronic storage: A new report from Deltek GovWin shows a continuing increase in spending on electronic data storage. GovWin targets the current size of the market at just over $1 billion, representing an increase of 22% over the last three years. The market is being driven by an explosion in the amount of electronic data federal agencies collect and store, with the Defense Department leading the way. Read GovWin’s blog post describing their findings and methodology here.

Intelligence Community Accelerating Move to Cloud: Earlier this week, Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper updated plans for the IC’s move to cloud computing, stating at the GEOINT Symposium that the IC would reach initial operating capability on shared IT infrastructure by March 2013 and moving the entire IC infrastructure to the shared platform by 2018. The move to shared IT services will include a IC-wide common desktop being developed by DIA and NGA. Among the outstanding questions impacting the move is how to handle software licensing and it appears the Intelligence Community will work together to develop a new licensing model that will take into account a more services-oriented technology environment. Federal News Radio has a full story.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hosts Public Sector Summit: On Wednesday, AWS held its 3rd Annual Public Sector Summit and announced continued growth in the public sector, with some 300 government agencies (federal and SLG) and 1500 educational institutions now using the AWS Cloud. They also announced increased capabilities for the AWS GovCloud, a dedicated community cloud for federal customers. Chief among those features is high-performance supercomputing capability made available through Amazon’s Compute Cluster Instances. Information Week has a good wrap up.

SIIA Federal Cloud Survey Goes Live: Last week SIIA’s Public Sector Innovation Group launched its inaugural Federal Cloud Survey, seeking to aggregate data on the federal government’s progress in adopting cloud computing, mobile technologies, and data center consolidation. Federal government IT professionals are encouraged to have their voice heard by responding to the survey, which can be found here. The findings of the survey will be published as part of SIIA’s Cloud/Gov Conference in Washington, DC on February 12, 2013. Learn more about Cloud/Gov here.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, PSIG, Software Events

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

September 28, 2012 By

GAO Report highlights need to Leverage EA for cost savings: Earlier this week GAO issued a report highlighting the need for government agencies to better utilize enterprise architecture. GAO points out that “effective use of enterprise architecture is a hallmark of successful organizations and can be important to achieving operations and technology environments that maximize institutional mission performance and outcomes. Among other things, this includes realizing cost savings through consolidation and reuse of shared services and elimination of antiquated and redundant mission operations, enhancing information sharing through data standardization and system integration, and optimizing service delivery through streamlining and normalization of business processes and mission operations. Moreover, the use of architectures is required by the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and by OMB.” See the full GAO report here.

DOT to take mission critical apps to the cloud: This week DOT announced that it is migrating mission-critical applications connected with the agency’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to the cloud. Apps to be moved to a cloud-based environment include FMCSA’s driving record database and related systems. These will be migrated to a FISMA-certified cloud data center run by Virtustream, which has partnered with OBXtek and MicroTech on the effort known as the Gateway Augmentation Project. Read more from GCN.

New report says $4.8 billion will be spent on cloud and related IT in next five years: A new report from Pike Research says spending by city governments who are under increasing pressure to do more with less, will cumulatively add up to nearly 5 billion between now and 2017. The majority of this is aimed at what the report terms smart technology, including cloud, data analytics, application development and related. See the full report here.

Cloud broker issue continues be debated: This week, Mike Hettinger, Director of the SIIA Public Sector Division was featured on In Depth with Francis Rose on Federal News Radio. The topic, what are cloud brokers and how would the concept work for the federal government? Here the interview here.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, PSIG, Software Events

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

September 20, 2012 By

Issa Posts Discussion Draft of IT Procurement Reform Bill: On Thursday, Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee posted a discussion draft of legislation aimed at improving IT acquisition practices. View the draft here. In response, SIIA issued a statement applauding Chairman Issa for his effort and acknowledging that we look forward to working with the Committee to craft a final bill that will improve IT acquisition for the benefit of vendors and the federal government. View the blog post here.

Cloud Brokerage RFI: This week SIIA’s Public Sector Innovation Group submitted formal comments in response to GSA’s Cloud Brokerage RFI. The comments highlight the need for GSA to work with industry to better define the cloud broker concept, ensure competition in the federal procurement process, optimize the value of software licensing and avoid potential conflicts of interest. The full comments can be viewed here.

NJVC Opens Cloud Brokerage for Federal Government: In related cloud broker news, NJVC, an IT consulting and managed services firm operating in the defense and intelligence arena, launched a multi- cloud broker service for the federal government that will let agencies try, design and price an array of services from cloud providers before spending money and committing to large-scale migration. See GCN’s coverage of it here.

FedRAMP Update: Since the announcement of the first 10 accredited third-party assessment organizations (3PAOs) in June, GSA has added 6 more to the approved list, the latest being Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, which was announced this week. To date no company has received its provisional authorization under the FedRAMP program although GSA expects to have 3 companies approved under the program by the end of the calendar year. See more on FedRAMP here.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud/Gov, PSIG, Software Events Tagged With:

SIIA Applauds House Effort to Reform IT Procurement, Submits Comments on Cloud Brokerage

September 20, 2012 By

SIIA applauds House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) for his recognition that there needs to be a substantial improvement to federal IT procurement practices to keep pace with evolving technology. Today, Rep. Issa posted a discussion draft of IT procurement reform legislation. As SIIA has said previously, we share the goal of developing a cadre of specialized IT acquisition personnel and are pleased that the bill acknowledges that cloud computing is becoming mainstream in the federal government.

On a related note, SIIA submitted comments today to the General Services Administration (GSA) in response to the Cloud Brokerage RFI, an area that is addressed in the bill, and we encourage those comments to be considered by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as they look at that area of the legislation. We look forward to working with Chairman Issa and the Committee as they move forward to craft a final bill that serves to improve IT acquisition practices to the benefit of vendors and the federal government.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Policy, Policy - Cloud Computing, PSIG Tagged With: , , ,

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

September 14, 2012 By

New proposed rule requires basic security for contractors: DoD, GSA, and NASA are proposing to amend the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to add a new subpart and contract clause for the basic safeguarding of contractor information systems that contain information provided by or generated for the Government (other than public information) that will be resident on or transiting through contractor information systems. The new rule requires that federal contracts over $100,000 will have to include a clause requiring the contractor to implement basic data security protections for any non-public data provided to the contractor by the federal government or generated by the contractor for the government. Adoption of the rule would mean that any non-public information passing through a contractor’s information system from the government would have to be secured from unauthorized access. Those contractors who work in the classified and national security space have had to address similar requirements for a long time but this is the first I’ve seen such a broad reaching measure, potentially extend to contractors of all sizes. Comments are being accepted through October 23rd at www.regulations.gov and you can read the original notice in the Federal Register.

U.S. House Releases Six-Month Continuing Resolution: As we approach the end of the government fiscal year, not a single annual appropriations bill to fund government operations beyond September 30th has been signed into law and with the looming election, there is not much chance of that changing. This week, to make sure the government is funded beyond the end of this month, the House Appropriations Committee introduced a six-month continuing resolution, funding the government at $1.047 trillion. The bill keeps the government funded through March 27, 2013. See the full summary.

Update on Cloud Brokerage RFI: Late last week, with the deadline for submissions looming and many government contractors still with an interest in weighing in on the RFI, but apparently not quite ready, GSA stepped in and extended the deadline for comments until September 21st. SIIA will be weighing in on this important issue, as will a number of our members. Read more about it.

Federal CIO Council and DHS to Conduct Survey on IT Workforce and Cyber: DHS announced earlier this week that it has partnered with the CIO Council to conduct a survey on cybersecurity and the IT workforce to get a better sense of what skills they have and what are needed. The survey is anonymous and open to all federal employees with IT responsibilities. It’ll go live sometime in October. Read more from Nextgov.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: PSIG
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