Weekly Round-up: February 11, 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

• Saba alcher! صباح الخير! Good morning! The State Department is now tweeting in Arabic
• Land-based Broadband Is 2000-and-Late. President Obama wants 98 percent of the country to have wireless access to the internet by 2016.
• Trillion-with-a-T? Sounds Fishy to Me. This infographic claims that Americans receive 200 Trillion text messages a day. To put that in perspective, that would mean that every American would have to recieve 666,666 texts a day. That math seems off. Here are their sources. Let’s crowdsource this factcheck!

John Kamensky

• Federal Customer Service Enhancement Act re-introduced. Cong. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) re-introduced a bill to require agencies to set and follow customer service standards. The bill passed the House in the last Congress but stalled in the Senate pending a GAO report on potential implementation issues. The GAO report was supportive, and the new bill incorporates some proposed revisions.
• Will Valentine’s Day Be Budget Cut Day? Republicans released a partial list of $100 billion in proposed cuts for this year’s budget, which is still pending an expiring continuing resolution on March 4th. But the President’s FY 2012 budget is supposed to be released on Monday, with rumblings of some serious cuts there, too.
• Tool Kit to Guide Troubled IT Projects. Federal Times’ Nicole Johnson writes about a new OMB guidance designed to help agencies better manage their IT projects: “The TechStat toolkit . . . includes an implementation guide, a template for the TechStat team to craft letters notifying the investment manager and business owner about the review session, and a seating chart to ensure key stakeholders, such as the CIO and project manager are at the table during the sessions.”

Dan Chenok

• Preview of Monday’s Budget.
• Interesting initiative on innovators.
• Social Media being integrated into agency business.

Business of Government Radio Show: Conversation with Author Series with Professors Gwanhoo Lee and Young Hoon Kwak

The Business of Government Hour features a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The executives discuss their careers and the management challenges facing their organizations. Past government executives include Administrators, Chief Financial Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Operating Officers, Commissioners, Controllers, Directors, and Undersecretaries.

This week on the radio show: a conversation on an open government implementation model – moving to increased public engagement

Each week, The Business of Government Hour interviews government executive who are changing the way government does business. The show airs four times a week on two radio stations in the DC Metro Area. If you can’t wait, though, we also put it online. You can also search our audio archives for your favorite interview.