Government

How easy is it to sell a house, shop for a mortgage, select a mutual fund -- or even make a plane reservation? Sometimes it's not very easy: Mortgage offerings are numerous and complex, and choosing among thousands of mutual funds can be overwhelming. Enter the broker -- or the travel agent. Broker...

U.S. government agencies are trying to meet fast-track goals to improve the acquisition and management of information technology resources. In a government setting that inherently involves myriad checkpoints, protocols, policies, and an exasperating budget process, change does not come easily or qui...

The burgeoning market for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is not only affecting consumer use of information technology, but also having an impact on the private sector workplace. The mobile IT market is clearly hot. Worldwide shipments of major brand smartphones increased by 50 percen...

Good customer relations management involves a two-way process -- making sure that customers are consulted as well as targeted. In fact, it is far more likely that a vendor will hit the target if consumer input is part of the marketing process. Two recent surveys have taken the measure of the ultimat...

The U.S. government's push to utilize cloud-based technology will eventually lead to some blockbuster contracts -- many well over $10 million and others for even more than $100 million. Consider that just one contract in the current batch -- a cloud deal for email services at the U.S. Interior Depar...

In the heyday of harvesting forests in the U.S., lumberjacks often used dynamite to break up clusters of timber that formed when thousands of logs were floated on rivers to market. In the last 18 months, the U.S. government has floated hundreds of pages of proposals into a river of policy "reforms,"...

The U.S. government is determined to find new and better ways of using information technology. As part of that effort, different approaches to IT contracting are in the offing for vendors providing hardware, software, consulting and other services, including social media and mobile device solutions....

It starts in kindergarten. Three playground swings and 15 kids. The teacher introduces the concept of sharing the swings by limiting the time per child. Fast-forward 30 years and those same children are hugging their IT servers and programs and clinging to "their" silo stash of legacy equipment and...

Botnets represent a major security threat to e-commerce. The effectiveness of this malicious software has gone far beyond the realm of simple annoyance and inconvenience to a major global, technical and economic challenge. The botnet security issue has become so difficult that federal agencies and t...

U.S. government agencies are looking everywhere they can to cut costs -- including the cost of information technology. Tight budgets will be the dominating factor in federal IT procurement over the next several years -- at least. Yet in the face of budget discipline -- and even slightly projected de...

The U.S. government's pursuit of cloud-based technology has been characterized by a blizzard of policies, directives, technical studies, proposed contract vehicles and conferences. The federal "cloud first" initiative, requiring agencies to give priority consideration to cloud solutions for IT opera...

The U.S. government is learning quickly that achieving the next big thing in information technology depends upon implementing a huge number of little things. For federal IT managers, that big thing is the cloud. Federal agencies have busily pursued cloud solutions since December 2010, when the gover...

E-Commerce buzz words sound great in theory, but innovation often founders on the shoals of "getting there from here" as IT managers slog through the details of converting to new systems and programs. Federal agencies have been turning to shared services, data consolidation, commodity IT and, especi...

President Obama initiated an Open Government program on his second day in office, pledging to make government information more accessible to the public. Three years later, that program has achieved significant success in many forums. However, the effort of making more federal information even more a...

Information technology vendors seeking business from the federal government are well advised to keep an eye on the requirements of big agencies such as the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security. Within big departments, there are big components -- such as the Food and Drug Admi...