Nextgov

Copyright Application Delays

May 20, 2009 The ways federal technology projects can get into trouble appear limitless. What we encounter most frequently are projects where the contractor lacks the management and technical capabilities to do a good job. A well-known example of this from the 1980s was PRC's struggle to manage the patent automation project. Sometimes, ...

Black Swans in IT

May 18, 2009 IT has always been a risk-filled enterprise. That's because software development is a first-of-a-kind undertaking. Programmers write programs to make software and hardware systems function in new ways. Often, the novelty of the development effort is small, requiring minor adjustments to existing programs. In this case, development risk is generally ...

Deregulation, Free Markets, and Econ 101: Part 2

September 27, 2008 Three years after the crash of the stock market in 1929, the US banking system collapsed (1933). Congress determined that the mixing of commercial banking and investment banking contributed to conditions that led to the cataclysm. Consequently, in 1933 Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to build a wall between these ...

Deregulation, Free Markets and Econ 101

September 25, 2008 The week of 15 September 2008 saw the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system. It is clear that the economic problems we are currently encountering are tied to attempts to deregulate financial markets that began in the 1990s. Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, it has been an article ...

from govexec

Government in a Wiki World

September 15, 2008 The following article includes excerpts from a series of posts that J. Davidson Frame, who has studied government program management for 30 years, wrote for Nextgov.com's group blog, Tech Insider. We've included some of the online comments the series received. The items, which appeared between May 5 and June 25, ...

Government in a Wiki World, Part 6

June 25, 2008 What do the following items have in common? • Bill Gates retires as chief executive officer of Microsoft in July 2008 in order to spend time working on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of about $35 billion. • Warren Buffet pledges some $31 billion of his ...

Government in a Wiki World: Part 5

June 19, 2008 The Encyclopedia Britannica just announced that it is adopting a number of wiki principles in developing and offering its product. http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/06/ency.html For centuries (literally), Britannica has reigned as the world’s premier encyclopedia. Its entries have been deemed authoritative to the point that scholars are not embarrassed to footnote them in ...

Government in a Wiki World, Part 4

June 6, 2008 In a previous blog, I mentioned that Intellipedia is a success story in the world of Government wikis. After 9/11, the Director of National Intelligence recognized that in order to deal with terrorist threats to the United States, the US's 16 intelligence agencies need to share as much intelligence information ...

Government in a Wiki World Part 3

May 28, 2008 The wiki concept is a part of the larger concept of social networking. Given the astonishing success of Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking platforms, enormous attention is focusing on the potential value of social networking in the business and government arenas. Some argue that because far more ...

Government in a Wiki World, Part 2

May 6, 2008 Wiki forces are upon us. With the wiki concept, an individual posts an idea publicly. Then over time, subsequent contributors add to, adjust, or take away from the idea iteratively. Over time, with input from many players, what starts as a primitive idea can grow into a well-developed statement. The ...