Yearly Archives: 2014

Top Hurdles of Spend Analytics

With the stagnant economy, cost control has become the new mantra of every business. Businesses are deploying various strategies to contain costs and maintain profitability. Amongst such strategies is control and visibility into spending with external suppliers. Spend analytics is the process of aggregating, cleansing, and analyzing corporate spending data for the purpose of reducingRead… Read more »

A Smarter Approach to Public Safety

The job of a public safety employee never ends. First responders don’t have the luxury of clocking out at 5 p.m. Threats to public safety can happen at any given hour, and officers must always be alert and ready. Keeping citizens safe is a top priority for public safety officers, regardless the time of day.Read… Read more »

Leveraging Your Company’s Social Media

GovLoop recently hosted an online training session “Does Government Need an Exit Strategy for Facebook?” that explored ways to increase your organization’s outreach through social media. While the session was jampacked with information, only so much can be explained in 60 minutes – and registrants had many questions that unfortunately went unanswered. But we madeRead… Read more »

Building Stakeholder Relationships via Web Communications

By Lucas Pillman, Implementation Consultant For most public sector organizations, just having a website is not enough when it comes to engaging stakeholders and increasing stakeholder satisfaction. Government communicators need to be constantly driving traffic to that website through multiple channels so that their mission-driven content is consistently being engaged with and used by stakeholders.Read… Read more »

GovHack’s National Prizes – Analysis

I’ve done some work analyzing who actually won the National awards at GovHack based on the official results at govhack.org/2014-winners/, and this is what I’ve discovered…There were 87 National GovHack awards given out to Projects and Teams, with one GovHack subcategory (Best Science Reporting) unawarded. Of these, 66 awards were awarded to Teams for theirRead… Read more »

Cut Out of Your Spouse’s Annuity?

http://www.psretirement.com/cut-out-of-spouses-survivor-annuity/ Federal Retirement Survivor Annuity Eligibility This is a very sad story but true and eye opening. I recently had a woman come to me in tears about having some difficulty receiving herdeceased spouse’s survivor annuity. She said that she had contacted OPM after her husband’s sudden death and was told that she was notRead… Read more »

Phased Retirement’s Debut

http://www.psretirement.com/phased-retirements-debut/ The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued the final regulations on Phased Retirement on August 7, 2014. Phased Retirement will allow full-time employees the opportunity to work part-time while drawing retirement benefits. Phased-retirement debuted as a mentoring tool to preserve the government’s institutional knowledge. As I stated previously, it is a start to something becauseRead… Read more »

TSP Talk Weekly Wrap Up

After a couple of weeks of selling, stocks started to rebound from some extreme oversold conditions last week. The question now is whether we have seen the lows or if this is just a relief rally. Geopolitical events are still playing catalyst as solid gains on Friday quickly turned into losses when violence was sparkedRead… Read more »