Digital Government
Feds lose in Congress' tug of war
Hopefully you'll be back to work when you read this column and not on furlough No. 3. The backtoback furloughs demonstrate the low regard accorded federal employees by the current congressional leadership. The Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate funds for various purposes but res
Digital Government
GE, X-Change offer bidding tool to ease EC tasks
GE Information Services and XChange Software Inc. have teamed up to make electronic commerce (EC) less of a chore for bidders who do not understand the bits and bytes of the service itself. XChange Software Inc., Oakton, Va., offers a product call XBid, which lets users respond to an agency's re
Digital Government
Army to scan 17 million Gulf War records
When President Clinton formed an advisory group last year to examine evidence of illness among Persian Gulf War veterans, it meant the Defense Department would have to review and declassify millions of records from the 1991 conflict. The Army responded to this mandate by fielding a new imaging and
Digital Government
Auditing system guards DMS
As part of a groundbreaking computer security plan, the Defense Information Systems Agency plans to build a $200 million global auditing system to protect the Defense Message System from skyrocketing numbers of network attacks. DISA now depends on network and security administrators in the field t
Digital Government
DOD tries on wearable computers
Not content with handheld computers, military computer users moving through confined spaces such as tank turrets and ship scuttles are demanding something different: wearable processors. A small number of vendors have developed wearable computers that combine headset video and voice activation soft
Digital Government
Lockheed/Loral combination would be tops in integration
Lockheed Martin Corp.'s plan to acquire the bulk of Loral Corp.'s defense business will catapult the combined company to the top of the federal integration market. The companies earlier this month announced their "strategic combination," in which Lockheed Martin will buy Loral's defense electroni
Digital Government
ROSTER
Maj. Gen. (select) Michael V. Hayden assumed command of the Air Intelligence Agency, Kelly Air Force Base, Texas, earlier this month. Hayden previously served as director of intelligence for the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany. He succeeds Maj. Gen. John Casciano, who moved to the Penta
Digital Government
Desktop V delayed
The Air Force postponed the award of its $1 billionplus Desktop V PC contract until April, after winnowing down the list of bidders to offerors who made the "competitive range" cut. Despite the delay, the Air Force Standard Systems Center (SSC) wants to keep the program on a fast track, telling
Digital Government
Lockheed Martin grabs $100M fingerprint pact
Lockheed Martin Corp. last week captured a sixyear, $109 million contract to develop the core fingerprintmatching software for the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). The AFIS component the last big contract to be awarded under the IAFIS program will allow
Digital Government
Armchair quarterbacks: How would you spend the budget?
How hard could it be to balance the budget? Judge for yourself by connecting to "How Would You Spend the National Budget" at "http://ux1.cso.uiuc.edu/ kundert/taxes/taxdollar.html" and "Federal Budget Simulator" at "http://garnet.berkeley.edu:3333/budget/budget.html." Neither of these budge
Digital Government
Cohen, Clinger departures create leadership vacuum
The top two GOP advocates for procurement reform and information technology programs are retiring from Congress at the end of the year. Sen. William Cohen (RMaine) and Rep. William Clinger (RPa.) will leave behind no obvious successors to champion the use of IT in the federal government. Cohen wa
Digital Government
U.S. know-how brings telecom to peacekeeping in Bosnia
U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia have constructed one of the most extensive and complex field communications networks ever put together by the military, a voice/video/data infrastructure that stretches all the way from Bosnia to the Pentagon. Some 600plus soldiers of the U.S. Army 5th Signal Command
Digital Government
Vendors form policy group
IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are among the 14 companies that are pooling their public policy efforts within the Business Software Alliance, a Washington, D.C., software industry organization. The companies last week formed BSA's Policy Council. In addition to IBM and Microsoft, the council consist
Digital Government
Middleware eases client/server challenges
Federal agencies that have moved away from mainframes and into client/server computing have discovered that the world has become a bit more complicated. While mainframes may have been more expensive to maintain and inflexible, they offered a homogeneity and a discipline lacking in the distributed e
Digital Government
New policy pushes pacts to SDBs
The Defense Department has proposed a new policy to promote contract awards to small, disadvantaged businesses (SDBs) that would expand the use of price preferences for these firms and grade prime contractors on their work with minority and womanowned suppliers. The proposed amendment to the Defe
Digital Government
Standard Supports Faster Transfers
Most of today's infrared ports operate at the standard 115 kilobit/sec specified by the Infrared Data Association (IrDA). The association, however, recently approved two extensions to the standard that will allow higherspeed file transfers and will open a new application for IR as a network con
Digital Government
GTE nabs $200M networking pact
In a move that surprised the information technology vendor community, the Justice Department last month named GTE Government Systems Corp. the apparent winner of an estimated $200 million office automation contract. GTE topped five other vendors to win the sevenyear Justice Consolidated Office Net
Digital Government
SPSS ships for Windows 95
SPSS Inc. last month began shipping a Microsoft Corp. Windows 95 version of its statistical software. SPSS 7.0 for Windows is available on SPSS' General Services Administration schedule, the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Personal Workstation Acquisition Contract through Telos Corp., and
Digital Government
AT&T fires off protest against DISN
On the last day before bids were due on the multibilliondollar Defense Information Systems Network contract AT&T filed a protest against the procurement with the General Accounting Office. Reaction from DOD was sharp. Emmett Paige Jr. assistant secretary of Defense for command control communicatio
Digital Government