It’s been about 10 years. Apple went from creating one of the most interesting and successful media playing devices, the iPod, to generating the flagship mobile experience for consumers. Of course, I’m talking about the iPhone. The iPhone is simple, elegant, user friendly, and it just works, but the trick in the iPhone and theRead… Read more »
In government, we often talk about the importance of building public-private partnerships. In San Jose, they aren’t just talking about building partnerships – they’re actually doing it. The Silicon Valley Talent Partnership, a facilitator of public private partnerships, is working on ways to leverage Silicon Valley’s highly skilled constituents for volunteer efforts to address someRead… Read more »
In the early 20th century, you could only listen to music by attending live performances. Then you could listen to it on recordings. Then radio, vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, Napster iTunes and now through various streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Spotify. If the technology to record and listen to music evolves so rapidly, whyRead… Read more »
No longer are we at the end of an IT lifecycle – we’re at the beginning of a new one In this day and age, we expect our financial transactions, social networks, cars and even our televisions to operate at lightning fast speeds, enable unlimited connectivity and deliver services at the push of a button.Read… Read more »
As the market for talent acquisition software evolves, government agencies typically move through a process of identification, proposals, testing and selection to determine the best fit for their organization. There are the usual RFIs, RFPs, solution bake offs and pilot testing, with the goal to bring in the solution that will best help the organizationRead… Read more »
Improper payments are always an area of concern for the federal government. These include overpayments, underpayments, payments made to ineligible recipients, or even payments that weren’t properly documented. While fraudulent payments are considered improper, not all improper payments are the result of fraud. For example, improper payments can be a result of mismanagement, errors, orRead… Read more »
It was great to see the recent blog of US General Services Administration (GSA) CIO Sonny Hashmi in which he establishes “open source first” as an agency policy: “Simply put, any solution developed using taxpayer dollars should be in the taxpayer’s domain (open source). At GSA, we believe that all code we developed should beRead… Read more »
When I meet with agency customers, I hear about the struggles we face to get IT acquisitions done efficiently and smoothly. Most government agencies–federal, state or local—face similar acquisition problems: How do we acquire IT faster? How can we continue to find savings? Can you make it easier to acquire mission-critical IT solutions? Can youRead… Read more »
This week it was announced that the U.S. federal government is creating a U.S. Digital Service team led by Mikey Dickerson with a goal to “improve and simplify the digital experience that people and businesses have with their government.” Personally, it’s exciting to hear about the announcement of this division (with some decent staffing fromRead… Read more »
You want every selfie and status update to get attention from your friends. But are all your friends seeing your posts? If they are, are you engaging them? Government organizations face this same challenge. Given Facebook and Twitter’s popularity in the last few years, federal, state and local organizations have worked to engage people onRead… Read more »