Rules on outsourcing sometimes hinder the process
Once again, the federal government is wrestling with the who, what, when, how and whether of privatization. This has been a controversial topic at least since the 1966 inauguration of Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76, which sets out rules for competition between the public and private sectors. The circular helps define the type of work suitable for such competitions—everything except inherently governmental functions.
Colorado school reaches out through the Internet
Last month's massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., exposed a dark side of the Internet. Two heavily armed students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and a teacher, then apparently shot themselves to death, police said. The teen-agers had posted violent images and slogans on the Internet, and Harris' Web site includes detailed instructions for making bombs.
Commerce delays contract award to sort through a pile of bids
Overwhelmed by the number of proposals it received to a solicitation for its first governmentwide acquisition contract, the Commerce Department has delayed making an award until later this month. "We got more than 200 proposals for the Commerce Information Technology Services contract, more than twice the number under our very-best-case scenario," said Alan Balutis, Commerce's deputy chief information officer.
He flies by the seat at his PC
PENSACOLA, Fla.—Ensign Herb Lacy, a student aviator at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, wanted an edge as he began his flight training. With the help of Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 and some software add-ons he developed on his own, he found what he was looking for—and he never had to leave his chair.
VBA bids adieu to manual filing with free program
When it comes to paper, the Veterans Benefits Administration just says, No. Under the auspices of Highway 1, a nonprofit consortium that helps the government work more efficiently, seven information technology vendors collaborated to create the imaging and processing system that has let the agency boot manual filing of 2.5 million benefits claims a year.
GCN INTERVIEW | Jackie Fletcher, the Mint's COINS flipper
| She has experience running Mint systems projects over the last seven years. Most recently, she headed the management team that is rolling out the Consolidated Information System. COINS is the first enterprisewide system in government that integrates financial, manufacturing and marketing management functions. Fletcher started her career at the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve System. In 1988, she joined Treasury's Bureau of Debt, where she created and ran the Office Automation Branch. Later, she became
GSA gears for gas tax system| GCN
Federal employees will charge an estimated $100 billion worth of goods and services to government credit cards over the next 10 years. The General Services Administration wants to make sure that, in the process, agencies do not pay any state or local taxes on gasoline charged to its fleet cards.
It's no secret, so post it GCN
You've got to give credit to the Chief Information Officers Council—and particularly Social Security Administration CIO John Dyer—for proposing a policy on personal use of agency computers. It takes chutzpah to even touch this perennial third rail of government computing. The mere discussion of personal use of government equipment will conjure up visions of employees with their feet up on their desks, browsing Web shopping sites for hours, or Pentagon tunnel rats indulging in long games
Digital economy needs midsize buys on Net to emerge as big deal
It has been a year since the Commerce Department posted its report about the emerging digital economy at www.ggtech.com/eleccom.html. Such reports usually predict that it will soon become standard procedure to browse the Net for tank parts or paper clips. Have the reports made any difference in everyday government procurement?
Digital signature software lets agencies write off paperwork
Striving for the same level of trust accorded to ink on paper, two digital signature vendors recently announced advances in their software products. Silanis Technology Inc. of Dorval, Quebec, in March released ApproveIt 4.0 software. Earlier ApproveIt versions are in use by several military organizations to take the paper out of workflow. Cyber-Sign Inc. of San Jose, Calif., is entering the government market with its biometric signature authentication software after getting a start among health care
Letters to the Editor
Thank you for the article, "LAN project forces agency, vendor to meet in middle" [GCN, March 8, Page 8]. It draws attention to the massive, successful technology transformation that the Social Security Administration is undertaking as part of the Intelligent Workstation/LAN contract. Your story, like past articles you have run on IWS/LAN, focused on PC pricing. While this is interesting, you're missing the big picture: IWS/LAN is one of the largest, most ambitious information technology modernization
Patent database adds 20 million image files
The Patent and Trademark Office has launched one of the federal government's biggest online databases, a 2T colossus that houses both images and text of more than 2 million patents and 1 million registered and pending trademarks. The patent database, accessible at www.uspto.gov to anyone with a Web browser, previously contained only text. PTO added 20 million .tif image files to the system last month.
Tool bundles third-party resources under one roof
Help Desk 4.0 from Remedy Corp. incorporates several third-party products and has a new user interface like that of Microsoft Windows 98 and Web browsers. "A lot of federal organizations don't have time to do the help desk work themselves," said Keith Bigelow, director of product marketing and management at Remedy of Mountain View, Calif.
USPS system tracks customers' special deliveries
The Postal Service last month launched an electronic tracking option for priority mail customers who want to ensure the delivery of important letters or packages. The project cost the Postal Service $300 million to develop and implement. "It's a wonderful piece of machinery that really allows customers who deal in bulk mailings, like small and medium-size businesses, an added degree of control over their shipments," said Julie Rios, program manager
For Web page tools, change is the only constant
Getting to the Web If the move to the Web and PCs from electronic data interchange over legacy systems had a sound, it would be the roar of a tidal wave. The Web's ubiquity, flexibility and low cost all combine to make its use seem inevitable. But building a site is only the beginning. Keeping it working right presents
Justice lifts applet ban
In a continuing effort to give users access to information via the Web while protecting government systems from cyberthreats, the Justice Department has set a new applet use policy that has the approval of the National Security Agency. Four months after instituting a departmentwide ban on applets because of security concerns, Justice has lifted the moratorium on most of the script codes. The details of the new policy were included
EPA will open AIRS on Web
The Environmental Protection Agency's 10-year-old air pollution data retrieval system will soon have browser access, even though the Web is still in some respects "a pretty scary place," EPA's Tom Link said. "We don't know if we'll have 200 or 10,000 simultaneous users, but we'll find out this fall when we go into production," said Link, senior EPA manager for advanced data delivery systems in the Office of Air and Radiation.
Feds inch closer to privatizing Net management
The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers has named five new domain registrars to work the bugs out of the new Shared Registry System during a two-month test. The registrars will be the first to compete with Network Solutions Inc. of Herndon, Va., which has been exclusive registrar for the .com, .net and .org top-level domains under a 1993 agreement with the Commerce Department.
Acrobat 4.0 viewer reduces task time to maneuver PDF documents
The new Adobe Acrobat 4.0 viewer makes it easier to create Portable Document Format documents, use Web content, secure documents and recycle content within .pdf files, according to Adobe Systems Inc. officials. Users can download entire Web sites, for example, and distribute, edit, print and scale the sites within Acrobat 4.0.
Truth about PKI isn't always common knowledge
Public-key technology, viewed by some as the solution for authentication, data integrity and security needs for transactions over open networks, and by others as a half-baked technology looking for a problem, has developed substantial mythology about what it can and cannot do. The existence of this mythology itself demonstrates a certain maturity.
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