Digital Government

Intercepts

The ASD/C3I sweepstakes continued. Chris Mellon a former Senate intell committee staffer for Defense Secretary William Cohen with excellent credentials (great family name and soninlaw of Sen. John Warner) has emerged as the latest possibility to succeed Emmett Paige Jr. Mellon's getting a lot of

Digital Government

Owens makes rich career in integration

Retired Adm. William Owens earlier this month was named president and chief operating officer of Science Applications International Corp. But for Owens this integration post is just the latest stop in a professional life that has revolved around the subject. Owens a former vice chairman of the Join

Digital Government

Agencies seek new sources of vendor info

Enter "scanners " "color" and "desktop" into your favorite Internet search engine and you will get 1 000 hits maybe more. This is part of market research postBrooks Act style but federal agencies are learning that there is more to searching out the latest commercial technologies than surfing

Digital Government

USPS taps Northrop Grumman

The U.S. Postal Service recently chose Northrop Grumman Corp. to build a system that will track thousands of service requests ordered off USPS' soontobeawarded network services contract. The Northrop Grumman contract is valued at about $520 000 and is the first under the company's master orderin

Digital Government

Vendors debut videoconferencing, ATM products

Switches videoconferencing gear and network administration tools were among the products announced earlier this month at the ComNet show in Washington D.C. In switching N.E.T. Inc. unveiled a new family of Asynchronous Transfer Mode products representing the company's first major venture into that

Digital Government

HUD pilot project takes bids on-line

The Department of Housing and Urban Development last year began a pilot project that requires all real estate brokers bidding on foreclosed HUD properties to submit bids via the Internet or telephone saving the department time and money. Under the online bid submission pilot which is being tested

Digital Government

Web tracks budget bloat

Before reading the 2 384 pages that make up the fiscal 1998 Budget of the United States which President Clinton submitted to Congress this month drop in at the Bureau of the Public Debt home page (www.publicdebt.treas.gov) to put everything in perspective. The debtminders at Treasury have a tothe

Digital Government

GAO Releases High-Risk List for 1997

The General Accounting Office last week issued its periodic series of reports on "highrisk" management problems facing the government. This year's series the third since 1992 tracks progress or the lack of it in 20 program areas and flags five new areas that GAO has concluded make the govern

Digital Government

Fedwire

NASA cancels telecom contract NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has canceled its $100 million requirement for a commercial telecom services contract. The buy which was to have provided services equal to the existing Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network will be rolled into NASA's Consolid

Digital Government

IRS, Oregon to test joint filing initiative

The Internal Revenue Service and the state of Oregon plan to test this year the joint filing of federal and state tax returns by asking businesses to use a single paper form that the state would scan to capture data electronically and then forward to the IRS. The project's main goal is to help smal

Digital Government

Intercepts

Latham rides again? My wideranging Beltway mobile unit keeps picking up signals that Don Latham has a good chance of returning as ASD/C3I with OMB's Bruce McConnell (an ardent ASD/C3I wannabe) slotted as Pentagon CIO and a DASD. To those out there in C3land who find this preposterous please reme

Digital Government

Going backward through revolving door

A private individual raised the following topic: I am employed by a federal government contractor. However I am thinking of resigning to take a position with one of the agencies with which my company contracts. Would this create problems for me or my company? Do I need to do anything to avoid poten

Digital Government

DISA's Edmonds plans to step down

Air Force Lt. Gen. Al Edmonds director of the Defense Information Systems Agency last month announced plans to retire though he did not set a date. Edmonds who became the second director of DISA on July 29 1994 said in an interview that he will leave the agency satisfied that he has met the major c

Digital Government

Sleuths in cyberspace

In his inaugural address last month President Clinton touted the phenomenal development of the Internet which he described as the 'mystical province of physicists' only 10 years ago. Indeed the Clinton administration through its National Performance Review and other projects has used the Internet t

Digital Government

Firewall vendors fight off hostile applets

SAN FRANCISCO Six of the world's largest firewall vendors some with significant presence in the federal market have partnered with a Santa Clara Calif.based security startup to incorporate technology that defends against hostile Java applets into their various products. CheckPoint Software Tech

Digital Government

Tools extend reach of management platforms

Administrators of federal networks responding to edicts for downsizing have found a helpful tool in a new generation of products that work in tandem with network management platforms to monitor systems and applications. Until recently federal network managers working from a central site had only li

Digital Government

NIH to launch ECS follow-on

The National Institutes of Health plans this week to launch the recompete of its popular Electronic Computer Store contracts this time as a fiveyear program potentially worth several hundred million dollars. The current ECS program has far surpassed the $96.8 million in sales that NIH anticipated

Digital Government

AWARDS

American Management Systems Inc. A $100 million award to provide engineering and technical consulting for the Surface Ship Maintenance Improvement Program Naval Sea Systems Command. Computer Based Systems Inc. A $6.3 million award for CIO facilities management and enduser support services. Patent

Digital Government

Federal Bytes

Pretty bad privacy A contest that pitted hackers and security experts against each other in a race to crack the federal government's encryption standard? That's what RSA Data Security Inc. conducted in conjunction with its security conference in San Francisco last week. RSA offered more than $50 00

Digital Government

Hill OKs changes to thrift plan

The Thrift Savings Investment Fund Act of 1996 (S. 1080) which passed just before Congress adjourned last year expanded the retirement investment options available to federal employees through the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). The legislation added a small capitalization stock index investment fund an