The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report today that shines a light on nine Federal agencies for 12 practices the agencies adopted to help them more effectively implement FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) provisions. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is searching for information on improving its data repository and user interface design. […]

The latest batch of priority open recommendations released April 11 by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) calls out existing IT and cybersecurity issues at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the IRS. […]

During a panel on the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Wednesday, Anil Cheriyan, the head of the General Service Administration’s (GSA) Technology and Transformation Services (TTS), said that GSA plans to add three new agencies to the Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative by the end of the year. […]

If you take a look at MeriTalk’s newly released FITARA Dashboard, be ready to find some clear success stories across the seven categories of the FITARA Scorecard – as well as areas where improvement still is needed. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) updated their goals on modernizing its information technology through an action plan that is focusing on customer-focused, evidence-based, and tax-dollar efficient technology. […]

An updated cross-agency priority (CAP) Goal Action plan was released yesterday, designed to modernize technology to increase productivity and security, reduce costs, and establish a modern IT workforce. […]

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would like to offer up to $600 million dollars in loans and grants, through their ReConnect Program, to assist rural areas in building their broadband infrastructure. […]

IT officials from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) detailed progress their agencies have made so far in utilizing grants awarded by the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), and highlighted the benefits of TMF funding including the ability to repay the working capital fund through cost savings. […]

Data from the Federal government’s IT Dashboard website appear to indicate that Federal CFO Act agencies have made some progress but are still more than 1,000 data centers short of their intended closure goals for 2020 under the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI). […]

Kelly Olson, the new acting director of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) organization, spoke Thursday about ongoing progress with the Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative that’s being run out of TTS, providing a glimpse into the maturation and coming expansion of the program. […]

Agriculture Department CIO Gary Washington laid out his agency’s IT modernization journey today, beginning with USDA’s work as the lighthouse agency for the Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative, and continuing with the agency’s selection as one of the first three to receive an award under the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced the launch of an interactive data tool to display substance abuse data along with other public information, allowing local leaders to “build grassroots strategies to address the opioid epidemic,” the department said in its announcement. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today launched a new webpage highlighting the importance of rural e-connectivity, as well as ways USDA is helping to deploy high-speed broadband infrastructure in rural America. […]

As Federal agencies adopt DevOps practices to shorten development cycles and increase deployment frequency, security must be interwoven into every aspect of the process from design, through coding, testing, release, and operation. […]

Unifying end-user operations and communications can help Federal agencies provide a consistently higher level of service to both employees and citizens, participants at a July 18 GovExec webinar said. […]

When government agencies plan a secure move to the cloud, they should look to existing guidelines and regulations to protect data, and look to established solutions to ease the move, said panelists at an FCW webinar on June 21. […]

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) Board on Thursday announced the first three Federal agencies that will receive the initial round of funding authorized by the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act. […]

Government IT leaders may feel a little punch drunk lately. Between new mandates, an understaffed workforce, and aging systems–they are getting hit from all angles. Indeed, Chad Sheridan, CIO for USDA’s Risk Management Agency kicked off his keynote at last Thursday’s Veritas Public Sector Vision Day in Washington, D.C. by quoting Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” […]

Another important piece of the emerging Federal IT modernization ecosystem is in place now that the General Services Administration (GSA) has given four companies the greenlight to start work on the first of five IT Modernization Centers of Excellence (CoEs). […]

Acronyms abound with a seemingly endless stream of Federal IT regulations and guidelines related to cloud and cyber security. Trying to make sense of the madness? On March 8, at “Cyber Convergence: Security, the Cloud and Your Data,” Federal visionaries will crack the code on some of the most critical developments in government’s IT agenda – from cloud-based application security to MGT, FITARA, and more. […]

On the heels of naming Suzette Kent as the new Federal CIO, Agriculture announced that acting CIO, Gary Washington will become the permanent CIO. Washington has served in acting capacity since September of 2017. […]

Usually agencies want to speak highly of their IT operating systems, so to hear Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Steve Censky call the USDA operating model “splintered and out of date” on Dec. 14 was a bit of a shock.   […]

The Internet of Things has spawned many changes within the Federal government, including new methods of data collection at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), new policy considerations at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a realignment of the Office of the CIO (OCIO) at the Department of Commerce. […]

Hundreds of people have submitted feedback regarding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s redesigned website since its March 6 launch, according to Peter Rhee, the agency’s director of Digital Communications. […]

Gregory Reams, leader of the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program, said that the open data sets his office makes available are unlikely to suffer the same fate as the animal welfare documents that disappeared from the Department of Agriculture website. “It’s been supported for 80 years and used by a wide constituency,” Reams said at Esri’s FedGIS conference. […]

Federal chief financial officers want to have access to data analytics tools during the next administration, according to a survey from the Association of Government Accountants and Grant Thornton. […]

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its annual Technology Transfer Report on Nov. 22, revealing the new inventions researchers, universities, and small businesses created in the past year. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation announced the winners of the first Innovations in Food and Agricultural Science and Technology prize competition on Nov. 1. […]

At MeriTalk’s webinar on Preparing for the Federal Data Deluge, big data experts said that data storage and protection, which includes managing data centers, is a balancing act that only gets harder as the amount of data increases. […]