Hiring efforts pay off for IRS
The IRS is continuing to raid industry to build its systems staff. Albert E. Mazei was senior vice president and chief information officer of BTG Inc. of Fairfax, Va., before he joined the IRS last year as assistant commissioner of the Program Management and Engineering Office. Mazei will be a principal adviser to IRS CIO Paul J. Cosgrave, who came to the service last year from American Management Systems Inc., also of Fairfax.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
I seldom write letters in response to articles I read, but this one was impossible to resist. The opening line of the story "Software training is on course" [GCN, Dec. 14, 1998, Page 33] gives a very disturbing statistic. The line is: "A distance-learning initiative has cut the Education Department's training expenses by nearly 4,000 percent, an agency official said." In the next sentence of the article the actual costs are discussed. These have dropped from
DOT seeks employees' views
"I wanted to do surveys using the Web and found SurveyWin very difficult," he said. EZSurvey 98's $399 price—low when compared with other survey packages, which had price tags as high as $5,000—persuaded him to give Raosoft a second shot. Woodmansee, a personnel management specialist in human resources automation at the office of the Transportation secretary, used EZSurvey 98 to query 100,000 civilian and Coast Guard employees via DOT's Web site.
Feds find that reliability is in the cards
Government Computer News survey: network PC Cards Overall Reliability Ease of Use Speed Full-duplex capabilities Price Documentation and help 3Com Corp. 76 91 85 84 73 58 64 Compaq Computer Corp. 67 88 88 63 63 50 50 Xircom Inc. 61 76 76 59 53
Army will fall short of OMB 2000 deadline
The Army will not meet the governmentwide deadline mandated by the Office of Management and Budget for having 100 percent of systems year 2000-ready, according to a senior service official. About 94 percent of Army installations will meet year 2000 compliance come March, Browning said. But all weapons systems, including tanks, helicopters, aircraft and field artillery, will be fixed by the OMB deadline, she said.
Wang Federal wins contract to consolidate NASA's networks
Wang Federal Systems this month won a 10-year, $453 million contract to run NASA's networks. The McLean, Va., company will consolidate NASA's WANs and support data distribution for the agency's four strategic R&D enterprises: Aerospace Technology, Earth Science, Human Exploration and Development of Space, and Space Science. Aerospace Technology develops aeronautical and space transportation technologies. Earth Science studies the Earth's environment. Human Exploration and De velopment of Space focuses on space exploration. Space Science studies the mysteries
BREAKING NEWS
Kathleen Monahan, project manager for NPR's Balanced Measures Project, said the guide will show agencies how to use the balanced scorecard method to measure performance. The balanced scorecard approach takes into account both an agency's mission and services as well as customer satisfaction and employee training, she said. "If you just focus on business results, you're not going to be fully successful," said Monahan, who is on assignment to NPR from the Housing and Urban Development
NIH fields data warehouse
The National Institutes of Health spent three years building a 27G data warehouse to answer frequent calls for management data from its own staff, Congress and the public. After assembling the NIH Data Warehouse, the agency's Information Systems Branch is looking for a sharp drop in demands on its time as managers get more familiar with the warehouse's self-service data marts.
Army plan to accelerate vital systems buys falters
An Army program designed to hasten the purchase of 11 high-priority systems for the service's digital battlefield initiative has fallen short of its objectives, according to a recent General Accounting Office report. The Army began the Warfighting Rapid Acquisition Program in 1996 to speed up the fielding of new technologies needed by soldiers. By making funds available faster than would be the case through the standard budget process, WRAP was
MKS Toolkit's centerpiece supports graphical shell scripts
Developers who make the transition from Unix to Microsoft Windows often discover, from long and painful experience, that the Unix way of doing things doesn't work. They nevertheless want to take their Unix skills with them, and organizations want to leverage their investments in Unix shell scripts.
USPS tries data mart technology to help maintain sales, inventory info
The Postal Service is testing a retail data mart that will help post offices track their sales and decide what items to stock. The data mart will use information gathered by the service's Point of Sale One program. The POS ONE systems record sales at individual post offices. USPS officials said the data mart will let the service mine data in new ways.
White House sets up task force
The government will increase its efforts to use information technology to improve training for government employees. To that end, President Clinton this month signed an executive order forming the President's Task Force on Federal Training Technology. Clinton and Vice President Gore announced the training initiative this month at the two-day Global Forum on Reinventing Government in Washington.
Readers expound on copyrights, telephony and security threats
Some of the most interesting bits of information I see come via e-mail from readers who challenge or elucidate on products and issues mentioned in this column. Here are some that recently fell out of my e-mailbag: Section 105, however, does allow the holder of a copyright to assign ownership to the government. Prue Adler, assistant executive director of federal relations and information policy at the Association of Research Libraries, told me this occasionally happens when
MCI takes 2nd FTS 2001 pact
The General Services Administration this month awarded its second and final FTS 2001 long-distance networking contract to MCI WorldCom Inc. of Jackson, Miss. The contract will slash voice rates to less than 1 cent per minute in its final year. "We think we achieved the lowest prices in history, even lower than what we talked about in December" when Sprint Corp. won the first-round contract, said Dennis J. Fischer, commissioner
Domino 5.0 will have secure PKI components
ORLANDO, Fla.—The successor to Lotus Domino Server 4.6 will have secure public-key infrastructure components and a standard interface for synchronizing with other vendors' PKIs. Although Lotus Development Corp. officially launched Domino Server 5.0, Notes 5.0 and Domino Designer 5.0 at the LotuSphere trade show here last week, it has held back their release a few weeks for "last-minute polishing," chairman Jeff Papows said.
With deals like these, who needs RFPs?
What's "in" in procurement? RFP avoidance. To satisfy needs not easily met by schedule contracts, agencies are turning to big existing requirements contracts rather than drafting requests for proposals for midsize buys, said Bob Dornan, senior vice president of Federal Sources Inc. of Vienna, Va. "Everybody pretty much accepts that as the trend," Dornan said.
New Congress needs to revisit patent reform
Along with the poisonous hangover of partisan politics that the 105th Congress left for the 106th are pieces of decidedly nonpartisan high-technology policy. One leftover is of particular importance to anyone who buys or uses technology, or anyone who invents and markets it. I'm referring to the last-minute demise of patent reform. The House bill, HR 400, had flown through in 1997, pushed by Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.)—both
Interim systems will tide IRS over as it modernizes
The systems switch will change how the IRS processes checks. Side bars & related Snapshot stories The IRS' new Integrated Submissions and Remittance Processing system can capture scanned images of tax payment checks and vouchers but not tax returns.
Transportation looks to repeat success with ITOP II
26 vendors will sell services on ITOP II The Transportation Department this month awarded 34 contracts that add up to a jumbo governmentwide acquisition vehicle. Transportation awarded the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts, worth up to $10 billion over seven years, under its Information Technology Omnibus Procurement II program, a follow-on to its successful ITOP program.
CIO says goals are achievable
Cosgrave joined the IRS in July as an expert consultant and became CIO in August. He left a consulting start-up in New York to join the IRS. Before that, he was chairman and chief executive officer of Claremont Technology Group Inc., a systems integrator in Beaverton, Ore. Cosgrave has bachelor's and master's degrees in industrial engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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