Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
Information technology vendors who can provide productive ways to protect against cybersecurity threats should find a welcome market among federal agencies. Cybersecurity is the major worry of government IT personnel, two recent surveys concluded. The "increased sophistication of cyberattacks" was a risk cited by 71 percent of respondents to a Cisco survey, and it ranked at the top of threat scenarios.
The new federal fiscal year started Oct. 1 with an old problem: an unsettled annual budget. Political wrangling over the proposed budget for 2012 — estimated at nearly $3.5 trillion by the Obama administration — meant that stopgap funding bills were required just to keep the government running. Uncertainty over funding has become a way of life for federal agency managers.
The U.S. government’s program to improve federal information technology not only involves different types of electronic tools, such as cloud computing — it also involves improving the talent pool of federal IT personnel. A new initiative designed to attract the best and brightest talent underscores the federal effort to upgrade the government IT workforce.
Federal agencies are woefully deficient in using modern information technology tools to manage their financial data. Despite calls from Congress and the White House to improve financial data management, agencies "employ a tangled web of disparate manual processes to generate the data," states a recent report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
A major initiative to improve federal information technology management, including IT procurement, got a boost recently, even though the person behind the reform had left federal service. Just days after taking over as federal chief information officer, Steven VanRoekel posted a blog supporting a new role for federal agency CIOs.