Weekly Round-up: November 01, 2013

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

Bill Eggers writes about “The Solution Economy” in Fast CoExist, arguing, “The companies working to better society and the planet are creating their own economy, but it’s up to us–and our governments–whether or not they succeed.”

HowTo.Gov publishes a Halloween edition of SocialGov content. It is “the fourth installment of an ongoing series charting the programs, events and people that make the emerging field of social media and data in government an exciting place to serve the public.”

The Department of Labor shared “6 Tips to make your social media posts accessible for all.” Bonus: Five flow charts to answer the question “Should I tweet this?”

Alex Howard reports on a McKinsey study that “estimates open data could add more than $3 trillion in economic value”

Dan Chenok

• Federal CIO Urges Bold Vision For Government IT:
• Procurement officials explain new normal to contractors:
• Will new budget negotiations unravel the sequestration riddle?

John Kamensky

• The DHS Management Cube. According to Jason Miller, Federal News Radio, the Department of Homeland Security is ambitiously attempting to integrate its management information into an enterprise-wide “management cube” of data: “DHS plans to officially launch the Management Cube in early 2014 with the goal of merging back-office data into one platform. Then, the agency will unleash data analysts to find trends and discover opportunities to improve mission investments.”
• REGO at 20. Bob O’Neill, executive director of the International City/County Manager’s Association, reflects in a column in Governing magazine about the impact that the Osborne-Gabler book, Reinventing Government, has had on local government.
• AGA’s Seminar on Citizen-Centric Annual Reports. The Association for Government Accountants has long promoted making local government annual reports readable to ordinary citizens. Dennis McDonald blogs about a recent webinar AGA sponsored and provides a terrific overview and video that makes it manager-centric, too!
• USAF Crowdsources Acquisition. It seems people will try to crowdsource anything these days! Jason Miller, Federal News Radio, reports that the Air Force is losing experienced contract officers faster than it can replace them, so they’ve adopted a new strategy: remaining staff should work together as a team.
• Re-Evaluating Security Clearances. With recent breaches in security, there is a new emphasis on the security clearance process, which costs $1 billion a year and covers 4.9 million people – government and contractors. New legislation is being proposed by several senators to engage the Office of Personnel Management more actively in periodic random reviews, reports FCW.
  
  And the Government Accountability Office is also engaging. It released two reports on the topic. One report describes the overall process and the need for better quality data. The other says that many people holding clearances also owe back taxes and the clearance process should do a better job of identifying these people during their clearances.

Michael Keegan

Air Force launches crowdsourcing-like approach to acquisition
Maj. Gen. Wendy Masiello said the goal of the new installation contracting agency is to share acquisition resources to make up for the loss of 700 years of experience over the last year.

Army launches partnership to tackle science of cybersecurity
The Army Research Lab is exploring the science behind cybersecurity. It has launched a five-year alliance with universities. In particular, they’ll look at human behavior on the Internet.

GSA consolidates data centers, IT ops – The agency has hit its aggressive target for closing non-core centers.

The Business of Government Radio Show: Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek

The Business of Government Hour features a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government.

Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek became director of the Defense Logistics Agency in November 2011. As such, he is responsible for providing the military services and other federal agencies with logistics, acquisition and technical services. These services include logistics information; materiel management; procurement, warehousing and distribution of spare parts, food, clothing, medical supplies and fuel; reutilization of surplus military materiel; and document automation and production.

Broadcast Schedule: The show airs Monday at 11 a.m., and Wednesday at noon, 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.