Electronic Surveillance and WiFi Sniffing Without Warrants and More

Here is today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news: The House of Representatives passed the renewed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allowing electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant. More here. Panelists at the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies testified that American civilian infrastructure is not prepared for electromagnetic pulses.Read… Read more »

Making The Point

I was trying to get through M Street at New Hampshire and a bicyclist ran through a red light, running over several pedestrians. He was a young yup going home from his policy job, and he started yelling at the pedestrians, the drivers, the air. He was also stopping two roads with nothing but aRead… Read more »

Forgiveness Research

Stanford University has something very interesting called the Standford Forgiveness Projects, which as of 2010 was headed by Dr. Frederic Luskin. According to Dr. Luskin: Forgiveness has been shown to reduce anger, hurt, depression and stress and lead to greater feelings of optimism, hope, compassion and self confidence. Those who know me well know thatRead… Read more »

The Carriage Return

Why is it that training is the last item considered in planning for change, and the first item to be scrapped when the budget gets tight? Change drive progress – and when we change, we need to learn how to use the new tool or features to achieve better results, greater speed, or use lessRead… Read more »

Why Lowest Price Technically Acceptable Awards are Bad for America

In the late 1980s, when my daughters were in elementary school, I worked at a large government professional services provider. Like many other contractors, we were forced to create separate organizations and cost centers to compete for an increasing number of Lowest Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) contracts. It started with less skilled tasks but eventuallyRead… Read more »

A reaction to the Amazon Kindle Event

The 7″ Kindle Fire comes in two variants, both WiFi which offer a huge upgrade over last years version Last week, Amazon wowed the crowds at their recent event with some amazing products. They released a new “Paperwhite” Kindle e-reader, with an updated display for better reading and interaction. They released an updated Kindle Fire,Read… Read more »

Recorded Future Monitors the Crises in Cairo and Benghazi

Recorded Future creates an index of past, present, and predicted events from over 150,000 online sources and provides visualization tools to help analysts harness the predictive power of the web. They applied these capabilities to monitor the current crises in Cairo and Benghazi by analyzing events leading to the attacks and protests, monitoring the momentumRead… Read more »

General Services Administration in the News

factors change so quickly nowadays in federal acquisition, and the General Services Administration (GSA) is no exemption. although, is it important for contractors to keep told on federal topics? And how do contractors keep up on the most up-to-date GSA news? This blogpost will focus on these questions. Is it important for contractors to keepRead… Read more »

Can you talk to the business in business terms?

I wrote last week on the importance of running your IT organization like a business and what I got back was that I had fallen into the classic trap of providing advice on what to do, but no insight into how to do it. This week I’m going to try to fix that by talkingRead… Read more »

Government Reform: The Colombia and South Africa Examples (Part 3)

Several developing countries are making seemingly breathtaking progress in developing performance management frameworks from scratch. What can we learn from them? Today’s focus is on Colombia and South Africa. The World Bank seminars this past Spring on international progress in performance management continue to have me mulling about the progress of the performance movement internationally,Read… Read more »