This morning U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra released his ambitious 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management. Here’s number 10:
Gene L. Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) gave a presentation on November 2010 titled Acquisition Reform Challenges Facing Government. Referring to GAO’s strategic plan, Dodaro’s presentation addressed large-scale acquisitions as “targets of opportunity,” repeating the often-heard criticism that “… much of the government’s major investments have faced persistent cost and schedule growth.” His analysis is a very intelligent review of the challenges involved in reducing acquisition costs. Here I suggest an approach he doesn’t discuss but which is based on concepts he presents.
According to Defpro.news, a recent analysis by the United States Government Accountability Office has found that many reports of recent contract awards by Defense Department contract officers to the DoD’s Office of Public Affairs are incomplete. Quoting from the report,
An MIT Course on How Writing and Media "Reports from the Front" Have Changed
Recently while checking my blog’s log of referring web sites I discovered that several of my old blog posts on privacy and data ownership have been listed as resources for this MIT OpenCourseWare Course:
I skip around a lot in terms of listening to podcasts. I’m partial to history, technology, and the arts. Here are five I’ve been listening to regularly in recent months:
I’m wondering if the huge Federal deficit in the U.S. will help or hinder the adoption of collaboration and social networking technologies by Federal agencies.
I’ve come to believe that making it easier to share “friend” information across sites really provides more benefits to marketers and advertisers than to individual professionals such as myself. Here’s why.
According to the FederalTimes.com report 5 teams to tackle Gates call to improve efficiency, five Pentagon teams will focus on identification of Pentagon cost savings based on affordability, incentives, contract terms, metrics, and service contracts
What Google is doing with Google Instant is beginning to expose some of the inner workings of its internal processes in real time. Making the fine tuning of this process more “social” and also responsive to realtime user tuning could be next and might be one way that Google Wave based technology finds its way into Search.
Getting Real about Project Management, Collaboration, and Communication
I’ve recently learned — and re-learned — some useful lessons while working with clients and teams on projects and large proposals. These include:
Honest, I’m not against location based services!
Needed: Managing Variety in Technology Adoption Rates
I wrote Sometimes a phone is just a phone and a web site is just a web site because different people adopt different technologies at different rates. Those rates depend on need, cost, peer influence, job responsibilities, and many other factors.
Sometimes a phone is just a phone and a web site is just a web site...
I’ve been researching which smartphone to buy after my current Verizon agreement (and its associated dumbphone) expire. I’m not interested in broadcasting my whereabouts to everyone (no Foursquare for me) but I do recognize the value of mobile maps, search, and occasional email on the go.
In simpler times, elections settled things. You voted for a candidate. If that candidate lost you gritted your teeth and waited for the next election. In between elections you wrote letters and contributed money to your party. Maybe you even went door to door or made phone calls.
Twitter's Annoying WtF (Who to Follow) Feature
I’ve been using Twitter since the beginning. I enjoy it. Right now I’m “following” 885 people and 1,568 are “following me. Mostly it’s people in the DC area, people interested in topics like e-Government and collaboration, social media practitioners, and a smattering of academics and consultants whose specialties or interests overlap in some way with mine.
How Many Dead People Are On Your Online "Friends" Lists?
Here are some data on U.S. deaths by age group based on deaths per 100,000 of population:
Thanks to a tweet by @tacanderson I stumbled across the blog post Sunk Costs by venture capitalist Fred Wilson.
Wilson’s article is basically a repeat of the old advice, “don’t throw good money after bad” when there’s no hope of recovering what you’ve already sunk into a failing project or product.
Goodbye Washington Post (on Facebook, that is...)
I’ve decided to “unfriend” the Washington Post on Facebook.
Managing Collaboration Throughout the Acquisition Process: A Project Management Perspective
I’ve been researching how to measure the impact of improved collaboration on Federal procurement processes, starting with development of a “concept map” that organizes the major issues.