Through the leadership of Mayor Thomas Menino, the city of Boston tracks an extensive amount of data in an effort to answer three questions: 1) What is City government doing?2) How well are we doing it?3) How can we do it better? Since 2010, the City of Boston has created a Performance Management Scorecard forRead… Read more »
On Monday Dec 3rd I attended the Lean Startup Conference. And get this – the first two speakers at the conference – were from the Government! Todd Park on Lean/Agile Government Todd is the CTO of the Federal Government. A lot of what he covered in his talk can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows Key points:Read… Read more »
The current brouhaha over the impending Fiscal Cliff is yet another example of a national culture that waits for crisis before taking action. The irony in this current example is that our political leaders actually created the cliff to force themselves to address this complex economic issue. In other words, because they couldn’t work togetherRead… Read more »
After using all three in a professional setting for a few years, I think these are some general notes that can help new government contract specialists. Phone Negotiations First, I prefer phone negotiations. They’re usually faster than the alternative and don’t give either side much time to delay, meaning neither side overanalyzes its interests toRead… Read more »
We live in a unique time. The internet has grown from a technology into a global canvas for human expression, education, and information. We have a tool at our disposal that allows us to connect to each other on a deep level, instantaneously. Family members on opposite sides of the world can communicate in real-time.Read… Read more »
The digital information revolution has handed the U.S. intelligence community a slew of new challenges that are nowhere close to resolution, a new study says. The 21st-century problems range from mountains of data to accelerated pace of change to competing information flow from nongovernmental sources to fears of violating privacy and civil liberties, according toRead… Read more »
Are U.S. public cloud providers European data-centers able to keep your data safe? On a recent return trip from overseas, I was waiting in the U.S. Immigration line, part of the airport’s preclearance facilities where U.S. Immigration agents do the full check before you get on the flight, rather than doing all the checks whenRead… Read more »
Some small business owners have been slow to realize many of the practices they were schooled on by the past generation are no longer viable in the age of the Internet. Often the difference between making it and breaking it as an independent business is by employing lean modern methods to limit the needless overheadRead… Read more »
The hacker collective Anonymous has long been a supporter of WikiLeaks, due to their mutual goal to unearth government secrecy. But that relationship seems to be fading away. Due to the obvious anonymity of Anonymous, few details are available, but Tweets like, “We…withdraw out support (of WikiLeaks)” point to a break-up. The recent disagreement betweenRead… Read more »
Lately, Amazon has been catering to the high number of government customers that depend on the site. A respectable 1,800 government employees are regular Amazon visitors, and the site is committed to providing a stellar experience for civil servants. The majority of these visitors (1,500) are educational employees who are quickly adopting cloud computing. ThusRead… Read more »