DHS Releases Continuous Monitoring RFQ:  In cybersecurity news, DHS, working through GSA, released a final RFQ this week seeking bids to meet requirements  of the new Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation program and for continuous monitoring as-a-service.  The BPA includes 15 tools and 11 task areas aimed at improving DHS’s IT security.  The BPA has an estimated value of $6 billion and responses are due January 28, 2013. Federal News Radio has the details.

PSIG Members Featured in 10^th Anniversary of the E-Gov Act Event:  This week marked the 10^th anniversary of the E-Gov Act and SIIA PSIG Members Doug Bourgeois of VMware, Mark Forman of Government Transaction Services and David Mihalchik of Google all were featured prominently in the event marking the anniversary.  Other SIIA members were included as well, including Dan Chenok of IBM and former Congressman Tom Davis, now of Deloitte.  C Span covered the event, which focused on the advances made in government technology since passage of the E-Gov Act.  See the video here.

 Appian Receives FISMA Moderate Certification from GSA:  Appian announced this week that it had received FISMA moderate certification from the General Services Administration for a major business process management application, built on Appian Cloud.  Appian Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services.  See the press release for more information.

Federal News Radio to host live chat with CBP CIO:  Our friends at Federal News Radio are hosting a live chat on January 3^rd at 11am with DHS Customs and Border Protection CIO Charlie Armstrong and are encouraging interested parties to submit questions in advance.  See the link for more details.

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

Mobile still a hot topic for government: The CIO Council released a report this week detailing federal agency use of mobile technologies and making recommendations that aim to reduce the cost of secure mobile technologies, as directed in the White House’s Digital Government Strategy. The report, which can be accessed here, is the result of a collaborative inter-agency effort that involved almost two dozen Federal departments and agencies and was led by the Information Security and Identity Management Committee (ISIMC) of the Federal CIO Council.

Government IT priorities are changing but legacy systems still pull the money: A recent report from GAO shows that despite the efforts of the Obama Administration to focus most of its information technology attention on promoting the adoption of innovative new technologies and reducing the overall cost of IT, legacy systems still account for the vast majority of the federal government’s IT spending. According to the GAO report, in FY2011, 26 federal agencies spent $79 billion on IT with $54 billion or nearly 70% going to maintain existing systems. This is the challenge to modernizing our IT infrastructure that will need to be addressed as agency budgets are further restrained in the coming months and years. FCW has more.

Carper officially named Chairman of Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC): The Senate Democratic Steering Committee announced on Wednesday that Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) has officially been named Chairman of HSGAC, taking over for Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who retired. Carper was Chairman of the panel’s Federal Financial Management Subcommittee and has been a strong advocate for government reform over his years in the Senate. The Hill reports.

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

House Small Business Committee Questions GSA Move on Schedules: House Small Business Committee Chairman, Sam Graves of Missouri sent a letter earlier this week to GSA expressing his concern that the recent move by the agency to restructure the multiple award schedule to a Demand Based Model (DBM) would have a negative impact on small business viability in the federal marketplace and would not help the agency operate more efficiently or effectively. According to GSA the DBM strategy would allow it to shift resources to the areas of highest customer demand or pull resources away from areas where demand has declined. A lot of questions remain. FCW has a story on the debate.

OMB Data Shows DOD Making Progress on Data Center Consolidation: A recent OMB report shows that the Department of Defense is making significant progress in shuttering underused data centers, keeping them in line with OMB guidance under the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). To date, DOD has shut down 114 of its approximately 1500 data centers, with more closures expected over the next few years. Predictions on savings to be achieved from the overall FDCCI effort, which aims to close more than 1200 federal data centers, range from $2.4 billion to upwards of $5 billion. Data.gov has the latest numbers

House of Representatives Settles on New Committee Chairs: The House leadership appointed committee chairs for the 113th Congress this week and there are a number of changes affecting the technology industry. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) will lead the House Judiciary Committee next Congress, while current Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) will move over and Chair the Committee on Science, Space and Technology. On the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) will take over the gavel of the Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee, a key subcommittee for the tech industry. The Hill has the wrap up.

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

Elections have consequences, Part I: Despite the fact that President Obama was reelected and the House and Senate remained under the control of the same parties that were in control before the election, there will be a number of key changes affecting the technology industry. From a government IT standpoint, the President’s reelection means a continued focus on using technology to make government more efficient and effective, leveraging cloud computing, big data and consolidating data centers. See more from E-Commerce Times.

Elections have consequences, Part II: Expect big changes to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee with current Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) retiring and current Ranking Member Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) term limited in that position. Also expect some changes to the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee structure as there are two vacant subcommittee chairmanships – Oversight and Investigations and Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade – and a number of members vying for those posts. No decisions on chairs expected until after the Thanksgiving holiday at the earliest. See SIIA’s election blog post for more.

Blackberry earns FIPS certification: Government’s affinity for Blackberry devices has been driven in large part by security. With other device makers stepping up their security in recent years, we have seen a shift to other devices in the government market. The announcement last week that the new Blackberry 10, scheduled for release in the 1st quarter of 2013, has received FIPS 140 certification is a good sign for Blackberry fans. GCN has a post.

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

All of this bodes well for “innovation” and we expect to see a continuation of the effort to move agencies to cloud computing, consolidate the existing data center infrastructure and better leverage government data. We also expect to see a continued focus on performance and mission-oriented goals and increased attention paid to the need to reform federal IT procurement.

As for federal IT personnel, we know there will be changes at the agency CIO level and probably at other places like GSA and OMB where federal IT policy is driven – we just don’t know what they are yet. All indications are that Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel is planning to stick around for a while as should Federal CTO Todd Park (pure speculation on my part, but I haven’t heard anything to the contrary). We know that President Obama will have to appoint a permanent OMB Director sooner rather than later and that could trigger a reshuffling of some responsibilities and priorities at OMB.

On Capitol Hill, there will be a significant change to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee leadership, as current HSGAC Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) retires and current Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) has to step down as RM because of term limits. Tom Carper (D-DE) appears to be in line to be Chairman and Tom Coburn (R-OK) to be Ranking Member. Both Carper and Coburn have focused in the past on reducing government waste and maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of government, so we can anticipate some focus there. Sen. Carper’s ascension to the Chairmanship, along with Sen. Coburn’s new role leaves vacancies on the Federal Financial Management Subcommittee. Sen. Brown’s (R-MA) reelection loss and Sen. Akaka’s retirement leave a couple of other subcommittee spots to be filled. Other members of the Senate who can play a key role in government technology are Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and newly elected Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), both of whom represent the tech heavy Commonwealth of Virginia.

The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee will be more stable than its Senate counterpart with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) remaining Chairman and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) remaining as Ranking Member of the full committee. The key Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement will continue to be led by Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), with Gerry Connelly (D-VA) likely to remain as Ranking Member.

The Government Reform Committees are going to play a significant role in the look and shape of federal IT over the next two years as Chairmen Issa and Lankford move forward with legislation to reform federal IT acquisition. The bill, known as the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) which has yet to be introduced seeks to empower federal CIOs and speed the acquisition process. This bill will likely draw a lot of the federal IT community’s attention next year and I expect Rep. Connelly to play a key role in this debate, with his newly drawn 11th Congressional District heavily populated by tech contractors.

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

EPA Awards Contract for Email, Collaboration in the Cloud: On October 31st, EPA awarded Microsoft and Lockheed Martin a $9.8 million contract to migrate existing EPA email and related applications to Microsoft 365, their cloud-based email and communication platform. Under the terms of the contract award more than 25,000 users will be transitioned to Microsoft Office 365 for Government, a new multi-tenant service that stores U.S. government data in a segregated community cloud and includes e-mail, calendars, scheduling and collaboration tools for internal and external use. See the press release here.

Next 4 Years to Bring Continued Innovation to Government IT: Nextgov has a profile on what the next four years will look like for Federal IT, regardless of who wins next week’s election. Their point and it’s an accurate one, is that four years ago as President Obama came into office, there was little discussion about cloud computing, agile development, mobile apps for agencies, or bring your own device. Today, agencies have moved mission-critical applications to the cloud and we continue to debate a host of key IT issues such as BYOD, collaboration and how to better empower federal CIOs. Read the full take from Nextgov.

Cloudy Election? Did you know that some states, including battleground states Virginia and Florida allowed residents of their state living overseas to cast their primary votes using LiveBallot, an online balloting website based on Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform? No word on whether or not the general election will allow that same technology. Information Week has the story from earlier this year.

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

• 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.

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.

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.

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.