Posts Tagged: technology

Top 5 Skills Needed to Advance Your Career

With the Baby Boomers exiting the workforce, the next generation of the workforce is preparing to take on more leadership roles. Entering leadership roles means new responsibilities will emerge for employees. I’ve identified five core skills needed for future leaders, and skills that will be needed to advance your career. I’ve listed my five skillsRead… Read more »

Market Connections and AOL Government Study Shows that Feds See Great Potential in Mobility but Warn of Inadequate Investment

Market Connections and AOL Government just released a report that shows how federal managers see a significant potential for mobile technologies to improve productivity and saving taxpayer dollars. However, respondents to the study expressed concerns that current investments are inadequate to achieve much of that potential. The findings were based on an extensive survey commissionedRead… Read more »

Government Adoption of Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails has quickly become the default web app development framework among the “hacker” and startup community since first releasing in 2004. Why? Because Rails was designed from the ground-up with programmer productivity in mind. It uses a variant of the Model/View/Controller architecture pattern to organize application programming. In addition to the MVC-based arch,Read… Read more »

BlueLightCamp: Weekend Camping (Pt1)

If you’re interested in use of social media by emergency responders, or ‘unconferences’, or both, you might like this blog post about BlueLight Camp in the UK: First thing in the morning on Sunday 15th April there was barely a cloud in the sky above Manchester. The sun shone, the sky was blue, and IRead… Read more »

7 Ways Government Can Drive Efficiencies

IBM recently released a great report, The Foundations of Efficiency; learning to do more with less is the new normal for government (Download Here). The opening of the report gives a quick synopsis of the dire financial situation facing governments. IBM observes: “Our current economic contraction is different from previous downturns. It is global. ItRead… Read more »

SUSOPS Project Blog #3: The Silver Lining of a Cloud-Based Conference: Financial and Expanded Benefits of the Virtual Meeting

By Lance Simon and Judith Nielsen http://gov.icohere.com In February, 2012, the United States Forest Service held a hybrid conference that was 96% remote, 4% on-site and 100% successful. It saved the Agency almost a million dollars in costs, doubled attendance rates, helped it “walk its talk” by saving hundreds of metric tons of CO2 emissions,Read… Read more »

From Over-the-Top to Over the Net: A Solution to Costly Conferences

By Lance Simon and Judith Nielsen http://gov.icohere.com If you think the United States Forest Service is just in the business of saving trees, think again. The nation’s conservator of forests and parklands is also pretty good at saving money, especially when it comes to government conferences. In its 2012 national conference entitled The Sustainable OperationsRead… Read more »

What Happens When Leaders Ask ‘Why Do We Do This?’

Young children are legendary for asking Why? Why? Why? when seeking to learn. Adults, however, tend to simply do what’s been done before without asking – why do we do this? An experience to consider. When appointed as head of operations years ago, I suspended a dozen reports compiled by the accounting department without announcingRead… Read more »