Weekly Round-up: May 18, 2012

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

The business world was all 
atwitter about Facebook, but my round-up is about Twitter this week.


• Twitter in the US and the UK. Brunel University published “An Overview Study of Twitter in the UK Local Government,” and the IBM Center released “Working the Network,” a Twitter guide for federal agencies, written by Syracuse University professor Ines Mergel.
• To Tweet or Not to Tweet? What a question! As if in response to Daniel Schuman’s article I posted last week (Should Ambassadors Tweet?)
Alice Lipowicz reports on the 
EPA’s version of an 
Air Force flow-chart that answers the question: should we respond to this tweet?
• Seeing (or Making) the Big Picture. On Huffington Post, 
Ben Hecht writes about John Tolva and Brett Goldstein, the CTO and CDO of Chicago (respectively). One of the things they’re doing is examining ” ‘predictive analytics’ or the possibility of finding patterns in 311, 911 and other municipal, large data sets in order to predict everything from health, crime and economic growth.” Related: The Next Web writes about a set of tools to 
create your own data visualizations.

Dr. John Bordeaux

• The Wisdom of Slime
– experimenting with nature’s networkers to solve human systems? Fascinating look at how a networking organism would create lines of communication along the US highway system. The Santa Fe Institute has been working with computational complexity for years, my own research involved the creation of agent-based algorithms to explore efficiencies for air attack. But using biological systems to run these experiments? 
Just brilliant. 

• From military industrial to security industrial base? Pentagon
 extends cybersecurity to contractor firms.

• What do you know about your decision-making process? The more you know, the more you learn “we have no idea what we’re doing.” 
A humbling thought for your weekend. 



Dan Chenok


• It’ Cyber week — in honor of Howard Schmidt’s announcement that he is 
leaving as White House cyber security leader, ceding the post to a most talented successor in Michael Daniel, here’s a focus on key issues in cyber security today.
• Agencies 
getting more experience in how to implement continuous monitoring.
• GSA Releases 
List of Approved Cloud Security Assessment Organizations under Fed RAMP program.
• DOD Cyber Information Sharing 
could expand massively.
• NIST releases 
new supply chain security guidance.

John Kamensky


• Life Cycle Government, in the Works. Other countries have organized the delivery of citizen services around the stages of life when citizens interact with government the most (i.e., birth certificates, marriage certificates, drivers licenses, death certificates). A technology consortium is now 
proposing a variation for the US, with some interest from OMB.
• Conference Spending (Don’t), and More. While GSA has held its first “conspicuous austerity conference” (i.e., no ice cream socials), and many other 
conferences have been cancelled, OMB has come out 
with additional guidance that not only limits conferences, but it also cuts travel costs by 30 percent; bans new, net real estate purchases by agencies; and requires agencies to keep vehicles in their auto fleet at least 3 years or 60,000 miles.
• At Bipartisanship Lives at the State, Local Levels. Here’s a 
great YouTube clip of New Jersey Governor Chris Christy and Newark mayor Cory Booker hamming it up, using a Seinfeld-style approach, to spoof Booker’s hands-on style of governing.


The Business of Government Radio Show:
 Robert Reisner

Federal News Radio 1500-AM

Mondays at 11 a.m., Wednesdays at 12 p.m., Fridays at 2 p.m.


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.

Robert Reisner
 answers questions about government transformation, such as: What is transformational leadership? How have government leaders successfully led transformational change? When should government leaders consider undertaking transformation initiatives? Mr. Reisner is the author of “A Leader’s Guide to Transformation: Developing a Playbook for Successful Change Initiatives.”


Broadcast Schedule: The show airs Monday, May 21, at 11 a.m., Wednesday, May 23, at noon, and Friday, May 25, at 2:00 PM on Federal News Radio 1500AM WFED

If you can’t wait, though, you can listen to (or download) this week’s program and all our previous interviews at 
businessofgovernment.org and by 
searching our audio archives.