Weekly Round-up: August 04, 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

• It Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing. Steve VanRoekel will succeed Vivek Kundra as the nation’s CIO. Federal Computer Week has a good report.
• Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss. Alex Howard has a thorough piece on GovFresh about VanRoekel’s challenges and accomplishments at the FCC, and rounds up reactions from across the Web.
• That’s What We Said! The Huffington Post reports that VanRoekel’s biggest challenge now is “to do more with less.” Meanwhile, GovLoop members are debating what they think the new CIO’s priorities should be. And don’t forget about all those dashboards!
• We Do These Things because They Are Hard. Giga Om discusses why shutting down 800 data centers won’t be an easy task (one that VanRoekel will have to confront). Related: the new Energy.Gov makes overhaul look easy, but we imagine it most assuredly was not.

Dan Chenok

• Hacking for the Government can be cool!
• Agencies need to focus on security and privacy in use of social media.
• Senator Carper pushes the cloud.

John Kamensky

• OMB Appoints Members of Transparency Study Board. President Obama signed an executive order in July directing the creation of a governmentwide board to explore ways to expand the lessons learned from the Recovery Act Transparency Board to all government spending. The members of the Government Accountability and Transparency Board were appointed. They have until mid-December to produce a report with their recommendations.
• GAO report on managing the use of social media in government. GAO has released “Social Media: Federal Agencies Need Policies and Procedures for Managing and Protecting Information They Access and Disseminate.” It examines how the 24 largest agencies use Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and how more thought is needed on policies regarding records management, privacy, and security. The good news? They announced the report’s release on Twitter!
• GAO is 90 and “Accountability” is its middle name. . . .and they’re on YouTube! They’ve got 70 videos up so far. Here’s their 90th anniversary video (and for fun, here’s IBM’s 100th anniversary video!).

The Business of Government Radio Show: The Business of Government Magazine, Spring 2011

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