Digital Government
Letters
Offset, not windfall In his June 22 column, Bureaucratus stated that the windfall elimination provision (WEP) would go away if you transfer to the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) and stay in for five years. That provision applies to the government pension offset, not the WEP. If you ret
Digital Government
Treasury to codify IT managers' skill sets
The Treasury Department plans this fall to begin assessing and documenting the skills of its top information technology managers as a prelude to crafting training programs for current and future executives. The education plan, designed to carry out provisions of the ClingerCohen Act which demand t
Digital Government
Boeing protests GSA Seat shutout
Boeing Information Services last week protested the General Services Administration's decision to disqualify the company from its $9 billion Seat Management program earlier this month. Boeing is just one of several vendors claiming that agency procurement officials misled them into believing pricin
Digital Government
The Star Wars distraction
Congress' recent effort to resurrect the Star Wars missile defense system unfortunately will only divert muchneeded funds and attention away from more real threats to the United States: terrorists. DOD has been studying how it could deploy a National Missile Defense, or Star Wars, system since the
Digital Government
New group backs existing financial schedule
A group of vendors and public interest groups banded together this month in opposition to the government's attempts to change the way it purchases financial management system software (FMSS). Michael Canning, executive director of the Coalition for Federal Financial Accountability, said the softwar
Digital Government
Delivering the cutting edge
Having spent the past 26 years of his career at the U.S. Postal Service, William Orr, manager of the agency's Distributed Systems Central Management Facility in Raleigh, N.C., is intimately familiar with the challenges of an agency trying to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Orr is responsibl
Digital Government
Rep. criticizes SBA's loan monitoring system plan
The chairman of a House subcommittee this month said the Small Business Administration's plans for its proposed $20 million loan monitoring system are incomplete and unacceptable. As required, SBA submitted a report to Congress June 2 detailing its progress in carrying out an eightstep action plan
Digital Government
Documentum unwraps EDMS 98
Documentum Inc. last week introduced a new version of its Enterprise Document Management System, called EDMS 98, that is designed to manage the entire 'life cycle' of a document, from its creation to its eventual destruction or permanent preservation. Larry Warnock, vice president for corporate mar
Digital Government
OAG unveils intranet-based travel planning software
OAG Worldwide has expanded its government business unit and launched a product to meet the growing federal demand for employee travel planning software to replace traditional paperbased methods. The government business unit of the firm, which boasts customers from almost every federal agency, has
Digital Government
Intercepts
The Interceptor's antennas are folded again this week while he's off taking in the sights in foreign lands. The FCW staff who remain stateside, however, have set up dishes to intercept the latest IT scuttlebutt at DOD and civilian agencies. VIVE NIMA. For weeks, the buzz in geospatial circles has b
Digital Government
The security champ
Richard Guida returned to his computer science roots three months ago when he took over the post of champion for security of the Government Information Technology Services Board. Although he spent the last 25 years working in the Navy's nuclear propulsion program, Guida simultaneously earned a bach
Digital Government
Local exchange carrier lands AF contract
In a rare case of a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) beating out a major regional service provider, GST Government Systems Inc. late last month announced it defeated GTE Government Systems Corp. for a contract to provide local dialtone service to March Air Reserve Base, Riverside County,
Digital Government
The expanding world of enterprise storage
The enterprise storage market has become an information technology boomtown as customers begin to extend the concept of 'enterprise' from the mainframe to other platforms outside the data center and as the amount of data on all platforms continues to grow. The change is happening as customers expan
Digital Government
HP introduces Pentium II Xeon workstations
HewlettPackard Co. last week announced two new Windows NTbased workstations aimed at mechanical designers, software developers, financial analysts and multimedia authoring professionals who require maximum2D and 3D performance. The HP Kayak XW PC Workstation and the Kayak XU PC Workstation are
Digital Government
Feds not IDing key systems for Y2K fixes, GAO says
Although the Clinton administration has directed agencies to focus on fixing missioncritical systems for the Year 2000 bug, many agencies still have not identified what systems are mission critical, a top General Accounting Office official said this month. Since February 1997, the Office of Manag
Digital Government
Agencies should jump on PMAT wagon
In the book I wrote in the late 1980s about the problems with federal information technology procurement, I made a recommendation to partly base the performance evaluation of procurement on surveys of how satisfied IT and program customers were with the service they had received from contracting fo
Digital Government
PBS to outsource systems development
The General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service (PBS) plans to award in September one or more blanket purchase agreements for software development services serving its regional offices throughout the country. Paul Wohlleben, chief information officer at PBS, said the program, known a
Digital Government
Treasury studies outsourcing ATM
The Treasury Department is studying whether to purchase highspeed Asynchronous Transfer Mode transport services from commercial carriers through its telecommunications contractor rather than build a private backbone network as initially planned for its $425 million Treasury Communications System (
Digital Government
USPS taps US Bank for purchase cards
The U.S. Postal Service last week chose US Bancorp's US Bank International Merchant Purchasing Authorization Card Government Services Division to provide the agency's purchasing card program, which will help the agency push toward paperless contracting. The taskorder contract was awarded under the
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