After a two-and-a-half-year tenure widely recognized for success in promoting Federal IT modernization – and superb performance in shepherding the government’s quick turn to telework during the COVID-19 pandemic – Federal CIO Suzette Kent said today she will step down from her post next month. […]

When an April tweet about pandemic relief funding from President Trump jolted an 8,000 percent increase in traffic on the Small Business Administration website, the agency was ready to take the strain, having moved the site from on-prem to cloud a year earlier. […]

Keith Bluestein is set to be appointed CIO at the Small Business Administration (SBA), knowledgeable sources confirmed today. […]

Maria Roat, who currently serves as CIO of the Small Business Administration (SBA), is being promoted to deputy Federal CIO at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by the end of the month, MeriTalk has learned. […]

How’s this for an emergency drill within the eye of the swirling coronavirus storm? As America social distanced, Federal IT has literally brought us together – as a government, and as a nation. As government IT operations achieve steady-state amid the demands of the pandemic, let’s begin to lift the veil on that story, starting with the Small Business Administration (SBA). […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) transitioned to telework “without missing a beat,” quickly implemented new programs, and scaled to adjust to a mass number of new users amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic thanks to prior IT modernization and cloud transitions, per CIO Maria Roat. […]

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) received praise from top Federal CIOs at ATARC’s TMF event on Nov. 20 but for agencies looking to score a grant, board members recommended proposing projects with government-wide significance. […]

The FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) Scorecard issued every six months by the House Oversight and Reform Committee could benefit from updates to some of its Federal agency IT scoring categories, several panelists said Oct. 22 at the ACT-IAC Imagine Nation 2019 conference. […]

Using cloud-based tools has helped the Small Business Administration (SBA) meet the intent of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program as budget constraints have caused SBA to be more creative with its resources, the agency’s CIO said today. […]

The board that reviews Federal agency applications for project funding provided by the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) has been highly selective with the applications it receives and has sent most applicants back to the drawing board to improve their requests, said one of the board members at the AGA/AFFIRM CFO/CIO Summit held on May 7. […]

Maria Roat, chief information officer at the Small Business Administration, provided a run-down of her office’s extensive to-do list during a keynote address on Thursday at the Veritas Public Sector Vision Day event, and emphasized the importance of laying the proper data-management policy groundwork before embarking on cloud deployments and forays into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]

Federal officials are looking at 2019 as the year of the hybrid cloud, as agencies shift from the Cloud First policy of moving pell-mell into as-a-service models to the Cloud Smart policy, which focuses more on making cloud work with legacy systems and serving agency missions. […]

If you take a close look at the Federal CIO Council website, you’ll likely see some new names serving in leadership positions. […]

Three members of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) board and Federal Deputy CIO Margie Graves spoke today about fund’s ongoing efforts including the transferable effect of some of the board’s decision principles and how they tie into the larger IT modernization ecosystem. […]

Maria Roat, smart business innovator CIO at SBA, knows her way around the jobs that define government IT–because she’s held most of them. She’s precisely the kind of professional we all want to see on the MGT Technology Modernization Fund board–a lean forward, pragmatist. Roat is a military veteran who has also walked a mile in the contractor’s shoes–she notes she’ll never drop an RFP before the Christmas holidays. Like Suzette Kent, she stresses the importance of the Federal workforce. […]

Federal CIOs and industry execs gathered on the Hill Thursday evening to celebrate the passage of the Modernizing Government Technology–MGT–Act and map the path ahead. Judging by the standing-room-only crowd, seems government, industry, and the Hill are betting big on the legacy IT euthanasia program to break Federal IT’s failing status quo. […]

What’s interesting and fun? Not enough. Join MeriTalk, Congressman Connolly, Maria Roat, CIO at the Small Business Administration, and a host of Federal CIOs, to raise a glass to celebrate the passage of MGT and talk about implementation plans. MeriTalk is hosting a reception on March 1, 5:30-8pm, in the Rayburn Building. […]

The cloud is not a one-size fits all solution, and, as such, the government is looking to invest in two or three cloud models to support the differing security and risk-tolerance postures of agencies and to leverage various shared services, according to the President’s IT Modernization Report. […]

The Inspector General of the Small Business Administration (SBA) found that the agency’s IT leadership needs to address the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) and cybersecurity threats. […]

When Maria Roat became the chief information officer of the Small Business Administration, she had a few goals to accomplish in the first year: Get on Microsoft Office 16 and Windows 10, get to four racks on the agency’s data center, and move from copper to fiber. For a small government agency, these goals were ambitious. In Roat’s first month at SBA, a third of the agency’s network was saturated. Roat partnered with Microsoft to make these goals a reality. […]

More than one-third of the Small Business Administration’s 120 circuits are overloaded. To resolve this issue, chief information officer Maria Roat plans to modernize SBA’s infrastructure by moving to a “pure Ethernet backbone.” She said Ethernet will help employees with Skype and virtual counseling, and will extend to all of the agency’s field offices. […]

The secret to the Small Business Administration’s success in going from cloud launch to receiving an authority to operate (ATO) in less than three months was to burn the bridge back to the old way of doing things and commit completely to cloud migration, according to SBA Deputy CIO Guy Cavallo and CTO Sanjay Gupta. […]

Although the Small Business Administration’s modernization efforts are well underway, they may not be reflected on the upcoming Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act scorecard, according to Maria Roat, the agency’s chief information officer. […]

When the cloud houses many single applications that aren’t designed to work with other servers, it can indicate communication problems within government agencies. The Small Business Administration uses the same application on two different cloud networks. “Two offices that never talk to each other, they’re doing the same thing,” said Maria Roat, chief information officer at the SBA, who spoke at Cloud Connect on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. “The problem right now is the cloud is really siloed.” […]

As Federal agencies move forward with big data and infrastructure initiatives, “we really have to assume that all of our networks are compromised,” said Ann Dunkin, CIO at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). […]