Smarter Gov Tech, Stronger MerITocracy
Cybersecurity cyber

Across multiple cybersecurity programs and efforts, the Federal government is prioritizing protection for its high value assets (HVAs), said speakers at ATARC’s Government Information Technology Executive Council (GITEC) conference on Monday, April 29. […]

voting, election security

Professional services company, Accenture, has won a blanket purchase order agreement contract – worth a potential $2 billion – from the Department of Energy (DOE), according to a news release on the company’s website. […]

workforce

As technology changes mission requirements, the management of human capital, and how work is done at the Federal level, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a new report today recommending how Federal agencies should remain cognizant of emerging tech’s impact on managing and maintaining their workforce.  […]

As CIOs look to overcome obstacles in modernizing their organizations’ IT systems across a spectrum of industries, making IT an issue of trust rather than cost has become key to driving CIO initiatives, according to Grant Thornton’s 2019 CIO Survey Report. […]

USDA
binary, data privacy, breach, data

Efforts to secure data under regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation have not improved protections, a Varonis report indicates. Varonis found an uptick in sensitive data availability to personnel this year versus last, after analyzing 54 billion files. The report found that 53 percent of companies have over 1,000 sensitive files open […]

EPA Environmental Protection Agency

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided an update on the 19 recommendations it made to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made in March 2018 and of those recommendations, the EPA has taken actions to improve on five of the recommendations as of April 2019. […]

Pentagon DoD Defense Military

The Department of Defense (DoD) is soliciting submissions for construction manufacturing that can be done autonomously. The proposed technology should be able to construct barracks, houses, and other buildings, along with mobility and counter-mobility tools like bridges, culverts, and anti-vehicle obstacles. […]

Blockchain binary
Shakespeare -min

Microsoft is getting into the SparkNotes game with its latest project. In an April 23 blog post, Microsoft explained that it is using AI to help decode 19 plays from William Shakespeare in an attempt “to shine a new light on some of the greatest pieces of literature, as well as make them more accessible to people who worry the plays are too complex to easily understand.” […]

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, today announced the observance by more than 170 countries of “Girls in ICT Day,” which aims to help bridge the digital divide in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector.  […]

Robotic Process Automation

As robotic process automation (RPA) takes root in the Federal government, a conservative approach on security and authority to operate certifications (ATOs) from agency IT organizations can be a roadblock to the adoption of RPA, said Gerard Badorrek, CFO at the General Services Administration. […]

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are becoming significantly more frequent and voluminous as attacks have become multi-vectored and transformative over time, according to an April 24 Neustar whitepaper. […]

health

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) doesn’t have any current plans to utilize artificial intelligence in its operations, but mostly because it hasn’t yet found a practical use for the technology. […]

Google HQ

The House Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai on April 23 for a lengthy list of details about historical consumer location information that, according to recent media reports, the company maintains internally and refers to as “Sensorvault.” […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is being careful about introducing any kind of unintended bias in its use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to Margie Graves, Deputy CIO at OMB, who said today that Federal agencies should be very judicious about the technologies’ “fit for use.” […]

Data Center Brainstorm
Acquisition

For the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and General Services Administration (GSA), acquisition of new technologies and methodologies requires making sure that all the right processes and controls are in place. […]

employee workforce federal worker-min

Grant Seiffert is the Wireless Infrastructure Association’s (WIA) new VP of workforce development and executive director of the Telecommunications Industry Registered Apprenticeship Program, WIA announced on April 23. […]

Federal CIO Suzette Kent said today she is “hopeful” that the Federal Data Strategy and guidance on the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act will be released “in the next 30 days” by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). […]

From the still-budding promise of automation technologies to the ever-growing threat of cyber vulnerabilities, partnerships both within the private sector and with the Federal government will shape the contours of large-scale IT advancement in the coming years, explained Yogesh Khanna, CTO at General Dynamics Information Technology, at GDIT’s Emerge event in Washington on Tuesday. […]

healthcare cyber-min

To make cybersecurity more effective in Federal healthcare, security professionals need to bring a broad swath of folks to the table to build security into technology from the beginning while still enabling the mission, said a panel of Federal chief information security officers and cybersecurity leaders at ACT-IAC’s Health Security, Privacy, and Practice Forum on April 23. […]

Federal CIO Suzette Kent emphasized in an address today to tech-sector officials the importance of scaling, sustaining, and “industrializing” technology advancements notched by the Federal government including those featured in the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) issued one year ago. […]

Dana Deasy, CIO of the Department of Defense, provided an update on the progress at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at GDIT Emerge today, including the initial project with a production version out to the service branches. […]

employee workforce federal worker-min

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