Digital Government
Reform empowers Air Force, Navy
One of the most basic underlying themes of the reinventing government movement has been greater empowerment of the federal workers to use their heads to come up with ideas for how to make government work better and cost less. A highly educated, generally publicspirited federal work force had for t
Digital Government
Reno launches public/private security partnership
Attorney General Janet Reno and the Information Technology Association of America today unveiled a set of initiatives designed to combat computer crime.
Digital Government
Financial group lays security groundwork
The financial industry group working with the Treasury Department on protecting the nation's critical systems has identified its top priorities and is beginning to carry them out.
Digital Government
FAA updates plan for modernizing nation's air system
The Federal Aviation Administration today released a longawaited updated version of its plan to modernize the National Airspace System (NAS), which includes air traffic control towers, radar, and communications and navigation systems.
Digital Government
Navy charts own network course
The Navy took another step toward running its own networks last week with the release of a draft planning document that said the service may acquire longhaul telecommunications on a competitive basis rather than sticking with Defense Departmentwide networks operated by the Defense Information Syst
Digital Government
GTSI, Intellisys win $300 million Army pact
Government Technology Services Inc. and Intellisys Technology Corp. won the battle for the Army's $300 million Personal Computer3 (PC3) contract by offering highend desktop machines from HewlettPackard Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. Steve Baldwin, president of Intellisys a Fairfax, Va.based
Digital Government
Senate threatens to outsource trust fund management
The Senate last week said it may opt to turn over to one or more private companies the management of American Indians' trust funds, which the United States has overseen for more than 100 years, because of ongoing management failures.
Digital Government
DOT offers agencies option for security
Anticipating a shift in focus toward security services and away from Year 2000, the Transportation Department plans to establish an office that will offer agencies governmentwide security services ranging from risk analysis to how to recover from a cyberattack. DOT's Transportation Administrative
Digital Government
Share in savings not a cure-all
A newfangled procurement process called share in savings seems like a logical next step in the march to reform the sluggish and costly process for buying information technology in the federal government. But like every new idea, the revolutionary concept has its limits. At the extreme, share in sa
Digital Government
Air Force awards key IT contracts
Despite its controversial strategy to use blanket purchase agreements in place of its information technology product and service contracts, the Air Force's Standard Systems Group today awarded BPAs worth hundreds of millions of dollars to six vendors covering a wide range of computer and networking gear.
Digital Government
SQL Server 7.0 boasts features, power
Microsoft Corp. has packed new features and significant performance enhancements into SQL Server 7.0, which was released with much fanfare last fall. After testing the software for two months, we found it to be a solid choice for any government agency looking for a powerful Windows NT database serv
Digital Government
EMC builds storage network
EMC Corp. last week rolled out a new set of storage solutions aimed at letting customers consolidate their data storage across multiple computing platforms. The product line, called the Enterprise Storage Network (ESN), would let users capture data from many more servers across a wider geographic a
Digital Government
Feds ramp up Gigabit Ethernet use
By most accounts, 1999 will be the year Gigabit Ethernet will become more widely used throughout government. Late last summer, the industry ratified a standard for this highspeed networking technology. Vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc. have begun to offer products based on this standard. Noting t
Digital Government
Marines to build enterprise net
The Marine Corps last month kicked off an 18month, $226 million project to develop a worldwide, highspeed network and a new approach to delivering and managing network services. A ceremony held last month at the new Marine Corps Materiel Command, Albany, Ga., marked the initial phase of the Marin
Digital Government
Intercepts
ASD/C3I MAIL CLERKS? Art Money, the longterm senior civilian official acting as ASD/C3I, pleaded with Rep. Stephen Horn (RCalif.) to think twice before he issues any more Year 2000 report cards to the Pentagon. Money told Horn, who has spearheaded House probes into the Year 2000 bug, that the hig
Digital Government
Roster Change
Tony Trenkle has been named director of electronic services at the Social Security Administration, replacing John Sabo, who recently retired from government. Trenkle is currently director of the General Services Administration's Electronic Commerce Office. He begins work at SSA on March 15. Bill G
Digital Government
Clinton Administration to Develop Y2K Contingency Plans
The Clinton administration announced that it will develop contingency plans to keep federal/state social programs operational in case stateowned computers fail because of the Year 2000 computer problem.
Digital Government
VBA establishes IT-based training support
The Veterans Benefits Administration last month awarded blanket purchase agreements to Computer Sciences Corp. and Interactive Media Corp. to support its information technologybased training programs. Under the BPAs part of the VBA's Training and Performance Support Systems (TPSS) program and po
Digital Government
How we tested HTML conversion software
We decided not to perform formal speed tests on these HTML conversion tools. This was done for two reasons. First, the programs were not capable of dealing with the same sets of legacy file formats, so it was impossible to assemble a single meaningful set of test files. Second, because HTML conversion is generally a chore performed by a Webmaster or systems administrator rather than by end users, small differences in processing times are not critical.
Digital Government