Recently I was honored to serve as a “digital strategy” consultant on the National Academy of Engineering’s Changing the Conversation project.
In Preparing your agency for big cuts ahead, Tom Fox wrote this about the coming Federal agency staff reductions:
Back in February 2009 in Challenges Facing Recovery.gov and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board I wrote the following about making Federal stimulus spending data more accessible and “transparent” to the public:
Honest, if you want to poison your kids and rot their teeth with this stuff, that’s your prerogative.
Why Do We Have to "Innovate"?
In Innovation Policy + Deficit Reduction = Politics As Usual? I described some of the policy debates concerning the appropriate role of the Federal government in promoting the types of innovation that can eventually simulate the U.S. economy and U.S. employment. There are many different practical, political, and philosophical issues involved in these debates that seem, to me, to boil down to basic and longstanding disagreements about the roles of the Federal government and the private sector.
Last year my favorite DC-based thinktank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), launched a blog titled Innovation Policy Blog, subtitled “Innovation is Not a Partisan Issue.”
Well, innovation may not be a partisan issue, but I learned today that innovation policy certainly can be.
Federal Computer Week recently published my op-ed piece Why best practices won’t fix Federal IT. I’d be very interested in hearing from GovLoop members what they think of it.
Using Roku: Week 4
I’ve been using the Roku box for over a month now.
I like this product a lot.
In December 2010, federal CIO Vivek Kundra released an ambitious “25-Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management.” No. 10 on that list is: “Launch a best practices collaboration platform.”
FCW (http://s.tt/1arcp)
Recently a friend asked for tips, on behalf of a friend, for doing medical research into a medical condition her friend’s son has.
This chart shows the distribution of the past month’s visits to Dennis McDonald’s Web Site, by operating system, as of January 18, 2011:
Using Roku: Week 1
I’ve been using the Roku box for about a week now. At first I just saw it as a replacement for the Xbox 360’s streaming of Netflix. But there’s a lot more programming available via the Roku that I’m still exploring.
Robo-Tweets and the Internet of Things: A Survey
I always thought when seeing the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind that the musical conversation between the alien Mothership and the humans was cut short when the aliens realized they were no longer playing with a human but with a computer program.
Please scroll down below and take the survey (the survey questionnaire is also available here):
Defining and Measuring Enterprise Collaboration
Recently while consulting on a collaboration metrics project for the World Bank Group in Washington D.C. I updated my definition of collaboration:
My Top 20 Posts for 2010
In descending order, here are my top 20 Managing Technology posts for 2010, based on a tally of pageview counts provided by Google Analytics:
As deficits increase, unemployment continues, and tax revenues decline, government has to shrink. An important question is, will government “shrink smart”? Or will the axe fall randomly or primarily on the weak and unconnected?
In the November 25, 2010 online edition of SupplyManagement.com I was quoted by journalist Nick Martindale in his article titled Work and Play: Social networking tools are helping buyers to research suppliers and markets, raise their profiles and keep in touch with vendors.
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.