The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which undertakes a big chunk of the Federal civilian government’s pure science and research and promotes standards to drive U.S. innovation, has created a unified employee dashboard that gives their data-driven users the ability to see and obtain exactly what they need while driving a unified view for the NIST leadership team. […]

Imagine that you’re in charge of an organization with nationwide reach, one that regularly visits the front doorstep of every street address in America, and one that pledges delivery of service under any kind of condition including snow, rain, heat, and “gloom of night.” Today, keeping that promise requires maintaining the highest levels of visibility into IT issues to keep network functions online and manage advanced data analytics. […]

The U.S. Army is requesting information on contractors that can provide nationwide web-based public data services for the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division Command (USACIDC). […]

Federal government officials warned about the risks and challenges of rolling out 5G wireless networks – particularly in terms of the threat China poses in its global advancement of 5G – and emphasized that use of public-private partnerships in developing America’s vision for 5G networks will be critical for ensuring network security and staying internationally competitive. […]

During her keynote address at Monday’s Center for Strategic and International Studies event, Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., urged the U.S. government to increase its global engagement when it comes to tech–saying that was the only way to maintain U.S. technological leadership. With that in mind, DelBene offered a series of steps Congress can take to maintain U.S. global leadership. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

Federal agencies should look to implement more digital services in order to improve citizen satisfaction, an official from Adobe Systems said on a July 24 webinar organized by Adobe and Carahsoft. […]

Rod Turk, acting chief information officer at the Department of Commerce, said Thursday at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm that the commodification of IT is changing the service delivery model to make shared services an inevitability, and agencies need to shift their thinking to adapt. Turk outlined his guiding principles for priming agencies for the shared services revolution and provided a set of process questions to aid in implementation. […]

The Pentagon wants more hackers to take aim at its systems, launching another program that invites crowdsourced attacks from outside the Department of Defense (DoD) to help it identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in its networks and information systems. […]

A lot of the Army’s most high-profile modernization projects concern complex, expensive weapons systems that emerge from research and development, budgeting, and procurement process inside the halls of the Pentagon and other facilities and outside of the experience of most people. But some key elements of the Army’s efforts to keep pace with the demands of a changing world are so familiar to people at home, at work, or in a coffee shop that they take them for granted. An example of this is good, reliable Wi-Fi. […]

President Donald Trump last week issued an Executive Order on veterans’ health care that included an announcement that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) would adopt the same electronic records systems as the Department of Defense (DoD), signing off on what was already a done deal. Emphasis on “deal,” because although the departments are on board with a project that could cost $10 billion over 10 years, history raises doubts as to whether a unified health records system can actually be achieved. […]

In honor of National Veterans and Military Families Month, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetery Administration (NCA) is recommitting itself to its mission to “memorialize veterans in perpetuity.” The NCA is turning to crowdsourcing to revamp its outdated Nationwide Gravesite Locator, a web portal that allows users to access burial information for cemeteries across the […]

Much of the government has a fear of taking technological risks, and it is the role of digital services teams to snap agency leadership out of that way of thinking, according to Digital Services panelists at the AWS Public Sector Summit on June 13. […]

In the endeavor to create a digital government, agencies and organizations should not let new technologies supersede the wants and needs of their users, according to experts. […]

The Democratic National Convention, which meets in Philadelphia this week to nominate the party’s presidential candidate, released its party platform that deals with technology issues including broadband, open Internet, privacy, education, and cybersecurity. […]

Federal agencies 18F and the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) are desirable in theory but confusing and misdirected in practice, according to members and witnesses at the House Oversight Committee hearing on Friday. […]

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced a significant expansion of the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley-based experimental technology unit, including dedicated funding pipelines, a new partnership leadership structure, and plans to stand up a second unit in Boston. […]

The White House announced that 53 police departments have committed to an initiative designed to make local policing more transparent. […]

The General Services Administration is pushing Congress to get behind a plan to establish a third service branch, known as the Technology Transformation Service, that would be centered around GSA’s 18F digital service organization and would actively help manage the $3.1 billion IT modernization fund proposed by the White House, MeriTalk has learned. […]

The technology departments at Federal agencies are just as exciting as Silicon Valley startups, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith and U.S. Digital Service Administrator Haley Van Dyck told a panel at South by Southwest in Austin. […]

The White House on Wednesday called on all Federal agencies to establish so-called acquisition innovation labs to improve how the government purchases information technology products and services. […]

The Defense Department launched its Hack the Pentagon pilot program that will leverage commercial crowdsourcing to find trusted cybersecurity professionals to help uncover vulnerabilities in the Pentagon’s public Web pages. […]

Will the Federal government’s embrace of Silicon Valley actually achieve anything of importance? In a column published in Federal Computer Week, Cisco Systems executives Alan Balutis and Stuart Robbins raise concerns about a government partnership with Silicon Valley that is in danger of producing little more than a few new shiny apps and websites. […]

Federal agencies could save $40.7 billion in annual productivity by switching from legacy voice systems to a Unified Communications solution, a new MeriTalk survey found. […]

When it comes to mobile apps, don’t bite off more than your users can chew, say new findings gathered from the Federal CrowdSource Mobile Testing Program, a free service provided to Federal agencies by the General Services Administration (GSA). The program has been available since 2013 and has tested 14 agencies so far, with about […]

The FAA awarded a $109 million contract Monday to IT services firm CSC and its team of previous rivals — including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and other strategic business partners — to deliver cost-effective cloud services, data center consolidation and cloud migration capabilities. Under the contract, which could be worth $1 billion over […]