Steve Harris runs Dell EMC Federal. His office in McLean, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital, is a long way from the tiny town where he grew up: Wellsville, New York – population 7,000. I sat down with the one-time aspiring professional golfer to discuss how he got into IT, and his vision for Dell Technologies’ position in the changing Federal market. A fellow USO-Metro board member, Harris is hitting a hole-in-one at Dell EMC Federal. […]

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced today that Clare Martorana would replace a retiring David Garcia as CIO. […]

Less than two weeks after the end of the partial Federal government shutdown and with the looming threat of another such disruption coming on Feb. 15, will Federal government IT officials in large numbers be making the trip out west to the U.S.’s preeminent cybersecurity conference next month? […]

While their committee assignment paths have diverged since Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January, Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Gerry Connolly, D-Va., pledged Wednesday night to continue their close working relationship on Federal IT issues both on the policy and funding sides of the equation. […]

At MeriTalk’s FITARA Awards ceremony on Wednesday night, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s Government Operations Subcommittee, offered his views on what Congress needs to tackle next in Federal IT, and previewed three likely pieces of legislation. […]

MeriTalk has announced the winners of its FITARA Awards for the seventh iteration of the FITARA Scorecard released in December, recognizing seven agencies for their progress in IT modernization. […]

Participants described how their participation in Jack Voltaic 2.0, a joint exercise between the City of Houston and the Army Cyber Institute held in July 2018, opened their eyes to the threats of a combined cyber and physical attack on critical infrastructure. […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the appointment of Christine Calvosa as the new CIO of the agency. […]

If you take a look at MeriTalk’s newly released FITARA Dashboard, be ready to find some clear success stories across the seven categories of the FITARA Scorecard – as well as areas where improvement still is needed. […]

If recent events are any indication, we could be seeing big changes to agency cloud migration plans in 2019. The Federal government could be rethinking its role in owning and operating its own data centers, strongly questioning whether that is a job best left to government employees. […]

Technology experts speaking at the State of the Net conference today agreed that comprehensive legislation and enforcement is necessary to better protect consumer data, and that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should play a bigger role in that enforcement. […]

MeriTalk today announced the launch of its FITARA Dashboard, a publicly-viewable resource that brings the latest congressional scoring of Federal agency information technology modernization progress into clearer focus, and provides analytical tools to perform detailed comparisons of how 24 major Federal agencies have achieved progress toward their goals over the past three years. […]

The Federal IT market grew by 9.5 percent in fiscal year 2018 to reach a total of $64.7 billion dollars, which marks an all-time high, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Government. […]

A former Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Thursday she believes that while the agency’s core cybersecurity operations are holding up through the partial Federal government shutdown, other important IT security initiatives appear to be lying fallow until the agency receives funding to operate and pay its employees. […]

Yesterday, 13 Democratic Senators signed and sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Joe Simons expressing their concerns over the FTC’s ability to monitor and respond to phone spam and robocalls during the partial government shutdown. […]

Dorris Consulting International is seeking nominations for its 2019 Service to the Citizens Awards, which aim to recognize “those public servants who demonstrate excellence in their delivery of services that impact the public’s lives” through the organization’s Champions of Change Program. […]

Federal IT oversight will be the domain of the Subcommittee on Government Operations in the House Committee Oversight and Reform, and there will be no IT Subcommittee this session of Congress, said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations, during an interview on Tuesday’s episode of Government Matters TV. […]

The “End The Shutdown And Secure The Border Act,” touted by President Trump as a “commonsense compromise” funding bill to end the partial federal government shutdown and set to be introduced in the Senate, includes $25 million in FY 2019 funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) – mirroring the funding level set in H.R. 648, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, set to be considered in the House this week. […]

A House-Senate conference committee has pegged FY 2019 funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) at just $25 million, according to text of legislation made public by the House Rules Committee and set to be considered by the committee, and possibly by the House, next week. […]

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Kennedy, R-La., reintroduced the Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act on Thursday, which would strengthen privacy notices and breach disclosure requirements for online platforms. […]

Members of the House and Senate are giving the bipartisan Securing Energy Infrastructure Act another go in the current Congress, after passing the bill in the Senate in December 2018 but failing to get the bill through the House before the 115th Congress ended. […]

As Federal agency leaders look to modernize networks and provide better citizen services, they need to have a “Citizen First” mentality, rather than “Cloud First” or “Cloud Smart,” Claire Bailey, director of Federal, State and Local Mainframe Solutions at Compuware, told MeriTalk. […]

With emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain continuing to reveal their capabilities to the marketplace, Federal IT leaders discussed the potential–and the pitfalls–of implementing new technology in government during a Thursday session at an event hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). […]

MeriTalk recently connected with Ted Girard, Vice President Public Sector, Okta, on how agencies can get the most out of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program to navigate on-premise, cloud, and mobile security. MeriTalk:  How does CDM align with the transition from legacy systems to the cloud? Ted Girard:  While the initial CDM phases […]

The Federal CIO Authorization Act of 2019, spearheaded by Reps. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., and Will Hurd, R-Texas, was added to the list of bills up for consideration this week late Friday evening. Rep. Kelly’s office confirmed to MeriTalk that the bill was on the House’s docket, but said given the snow that blanketed D.C. this weekend, things may shift around. MeriTalk previously reported that Rep. Kelly’s office believed that the legislation would be shelved until after the government reopened, but things appear to have shifted later in the day on Friday to move the legislation back on to the schedule. […]

The bipartisan Federal CIO Authorization Act, sponsored by Reps. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., and Will Hurd, R-Texas, will likely be shelved until after the partial Federal government shutdown ends. […]

Federal agency demand for CDM (Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation) security technologies has plenty of room for continued growth based on a GAO report released in late December, which showed mixed progress on agency deployment figures for the first half of 2018. The report underlined the importance of CDM progress and chided Federal agencies for being slow to implement the government’s approach to network security. […]

Sens. Mark Warner, D.-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced legislation on Friday to create an Office of Critical Technologies & Security at the White House to coordinate action across Federal agencies and develop a “whole of government” strategy to combat theft of U.S. technologies by state actors including China, and to reduce risks to “critical supply chains.” […]

Whether the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) will receive any funding for fiscal year 2019 remained an open question late Thursday as the House voted to approve a full-year FY 2019 appropriations bill that includes no funding for TMF. […]

Reps. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., and Will Hurd, R-Texas reintroduced today their Federal CIO Authorization Act, which is intended to elevate and reauthorize the role of the Federal CIO. A previous version of the legislation passed unanimously out of the House on Nov. 30, 2018. […]