Author Archive
Insights
The State of Internal Workplace Communication
Are federal employees comfortable being candid when emailing their supervisors and colleagues? How often do they use personal email for government business? GBC surveyed 412 feds to learn the answers to these questions and more.
Insights
Smart Command Town Hall Series
Booz Allen Hamilton and GBC partnered to conduct a series of town hall events exploring how defense leaders can rapidly and effectively supply warfighters with interoperable technologies.
Insights
Improving Mission Effectiveness Through Better Information
Real-time data and analytics can empower agencies to act quickly and more effectively to achieve their missions -- from infrastructure protection, to environmental conservation, to disaster relief.
Briefings
Federal Workspaces Are Changing, the Question Is How?
Budget pressures, mandates to reduce space, and promises of productivity are urging agencies to reassess where--and how--people work.
Insights
Improving Information Collection to Enhance Mission Effectiveness
From military vehicles and weapons systems to federal facilities and utilities, information collection is increasingly essential for federal agencies' missions. To achieve their ambitious goals, ranging from Pentagon audit-readiness to sustainable infrastructure, agencies will need to boost information collection capabilities.
Insights
Enhancing Federal Mission Effectiveness Through Wireless M2M
Information collection is becoming increasingly important to program management, compliance, and performance monitoring across federal agencies, but federal leaders indicate serious challenges to improving collection.
Insights
Information Collection: The Key to Better Decision Making
Information on equipment, facilities, utilities, vehicles, and other assets has never been more important for agency mission execution, but collection continues to pose a challenge. To make information collection more efficient and effective, federal agencies can take advantage of existing communication technologies.
Insights
Bridging the Disconnect: The Government-as-Integrator Approach to Streamlining the DoD Acquisition Process
Shrinking budgets and a quickly evolving threat landscape have prompted senior leaders in the Department of Defense and Congress to push for defense acquisition reform. Though DoD has begun making changes, a fundamental restructuring of how governments works with industry to supply the military may be necessary.
Industry Insights
Improving Collaboration through Identity Management
Driven by recent events and several White House and Congressional directives, federal agencies are focused on identity management like never before. With all this pressure, agency leaders face a difficult task ensuring secure access to agency resources by the right people, at the right time, and for the right reasons, without restricting the organization’s operational effectiveness.
Industry Insights
7 Myths Challenging Shared Service Adoption
Though some federal agencies have made progress in shared service adoption and at least nine federal shared service providers (FSSPs) have emerged across various lines of business, widespread concerns over the implications of shared services are slowing further implementation of the 2012 Federal IT Shared Services Strategy. This in-depth study analyzes the myths challenging shared service adoption.
Insights
Defending from Within: How Insiders Threaten Data Privacy
In the age of increased information collection, analysis, and storage, nearly all organizations struggle to respond to and prevent ever-increasing threats to their data. Personally identifiable information, health and financial data, trade secrets, and national security assets must all be protected, but traditional security measures are not enough.
Insights
Information Integration: The Key to Leveraging Open Data
Four years into the Open Government Initiative, Government Business Council examined how agencies can overcome the remaining challenges to full implementation.
Industry Insights
Federal Survey Results: 6 Key Challenges to Adopting Shared Services & How to Overcome Them
The Federal IT Shared Services Strategy requires that federal agencies first look at existing systems and services before considering new IT investments, but many are having difficulty with the transformation. In a recent Government Business Council survey of 300 federal managers, just 44 percent of respondents indicated that their agencies are really “shared-first.” Identifying which services should be moved to a shared model and finding existing providers are among the top challenges facing today’s federal leaders.
Industry Insights
Protecting the Past & Leaving Room for the Future: Challenges Facing Federal Records Management
The Presidential Directive on Records Management outlines a clear future path for the proper storage, destruction and maintenance of paper and electronic agency records. The type of accurate and complete recordkeeping detailed by the Directive is also essential to compliance with other initiatives, including sequestration, the “Freeze the Footprint” Real Estate Mandate, the Executive Order on Open Data, continued progress on the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) and a new focus on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Despite the high priority many federal leaders place on records management, agencies are in various stages of implementation.
Industry Insights
Data Analytics: The Prescription for High Health Care Costs
Ask anyone today and you’ll hear that health care costs are astronomically high. National health care expenditures nearly doubled from 2000 to 2011, from $1,377.2 billion to $2,700.7 billion, and they continue to climb. Escalating health care costs have both direct and indirect effects on federal finances. Though agencies may not be able to affect the price of care themselves, steps can be taken to ensure that dishonest activity does not add to already inflated costs. With the uncertainty associated with the Affordable Care Act, curbing unnecessary spending is a top priority.
Industry Insights
The Need for Self-Service Data Tools, Not Scientists
Data science is one of today’s hottest fields and one that is rife with competition. Projections indicate that employer demand requires that the United States increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent. The federal government is one of the organizations most in need of data scientists, but hiring freezes, slashed training budgets and a lack of qualified candidates have all hampered the ability to recruit these types of professionals. Faced with such obstacles, agencies have been developing creative solutions to fill the hiring gap.
Industry Insights
3 Signs You Need to Upgrade Your Agency's IAM System
Though 83 percent of the 24 major federal agencies have IAM systems in place, a March 2013 FISMA report revealed numerous gaps in agency implementation. Here are 3 signs you may need to upgrade your IAM system.
