OMB Delays Passback Creating Uncertainty for CIOs:The ongoing debate on Capitol Hill over how to resolve the looming fiscal cliff has delayed OMB’s budget guidance, also known as passback, making it difficult for agencies to plan expenditures for the remainder of FY2013 and budgets for FY2014. Particularly in limbo, according to this Federal News Radio article are agency CIOs who have been tasked with modernizing IT systems, enhancing network security and moving commodity IT to shared service centers but feel they haven’t been provided enough information to effectively plan. Further complicating this is that once the situation is resolved, the timeframe for requests, negotiations and appeals related to the FY2014 budget cycle will be compressed.
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 10th Anniversary of the E-Gov Act Event: This week marked the 10th 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 3rd 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.
Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.
David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy.
Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at
Mark Schneiderman
Laura Greenback