Weekly Round-up – September 02, 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

Mobile, Apps, and Embedable Maps

• Bryan Yurcan reports that financial institutions are turning to social media to communicate with their customers during disasters, while Neal Ungerleider reports that the Navy is turning more and more to Google+ for its communications needs.
• FEMA, meanwhile, has released an app for use in preparation for and in the event of a disaster, which is fitting, as Joseph Marks reports on a survey finding that more Americans want to access government through apps than social media.
• Location, location, location. The State Department’s Noel Dickover shared a link to Eric Gundersen’s article about embedding maps with layers other than traffic and red light cameras. In his piece on Idea Lab, for example, he embeds a map of the famine ravaging the horn of Africa. NB: The irrespressable Alex Howard scooped him by a mere ten days.

Dr. John Bordeaux

• Vivek Kundra in his first non-fed Op-ed: “Tight Budget? Look to the Cloud.” Raises something rarely admitted – if I.T. policies are obstructionist, staff will work around them. And the consumerization of these work-arounds are becoming insanely easy to adopt.
• What I’m calling “Human buoys” provided an emergent sensor network as Hurricane Irene trudged up the East Coast. Also last week, graphics captured tweets about the East Coast earthquake spreading faster then the seismic waves. How social media demonstrates network effects.

Dan Chenok

• Found: the flaw that led to RSA’s major security breach:
• Mobile apps must be continuously renewed, or they’ll become obsolete very, very quickly.
• Intelligence community seeks technology to improve predictive capability.

John Kamensky

• Crowdsourcing the Effort to Save the Postal Service. Here’s an interesting website. The congressional committee responsible for overseeing the Postal Service has opened a website, “Saving the Postal Service,” and is asking the public for ideas on how to save it! It also has a countdown clock showing how much time is left before the Postal Service defaults on its debt obligations . . . This could be more interesting than the SAVE Award that OMB hands out once a year! . . . Maybe start by reading the USPS IG’s report on how one quarter of USPS space is wasted.
• This Week’s Most Downloaded Report from GAO: Climate Engineering: Technical Status, Future Directions, and Potential Responses. Some people must think this is an important topic!
• Cautionary Tales from Reorganizing Government. The Partnership for Public Service released a report assessing the reorganization efforts resulting in the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: “Securing the Future: Lessons from 9/11.” . . . The usual recommendations: Strong Leadership, Clear Mission, Strong Management, etc. . . Why is it that the usual recommendations in theory are so unusual in practice??

The Business of Government Radio Show: General Anthony Zinni

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.

General Anthony Zinni discusses topics such as:

• For the United States to be an effective world leader, how must it strategically balance all three aspects of its power – defense, diplomacy, and development?
• What are the strategic threats facing the U.S. today?
• How can the use of smart power address some of these complex and perplexing global problems?

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.