Forced by the pandemic and remote work requirements, agencies at all levels of governments made a pivot to digital services quickly in 2020. Now, many organizations are pausing to evaluate their progress so far and create a strategic plan to target new opportunities, evaluate customer expectations and experience, and address workforce training needed in the new environment. As part of this digital re-evaluation, agencies will need to get buy-i...

The nation’s defense systems and capabilities are challenged as never before-- on the ground, in the air, on the seas, in cyberspace and real space. The military must rise to those challenges on all those fronts to ensure the nation is secure. Information technology remains warfighters’ and defenders’ powerful primary tool for their jobs. From cloud computing, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, to machine learning and...

Data has become the lifeblood of federal, state and local agencies’ missions, allowing more nimble, informed and effective operations and service. It drives almost every aspect of government services, from cyber threat detection, to mission critical support operations at civilian and military agencies, to externally-facing customer services. Understanding how to harness that data and use it in new, innovative ways remains a continuing ch...

The COVID pandemic spurred agencies to move their data and applications to the cloud quicker than many had planned to make it more accessible for a remote workforce and to protect it from intensifying cyberattacks. More than a year into the new normal world of remote work, agencies are evaluating the best ways to secure the hybrid and multi clouds and their data troves to make sure it can meet the increased challenges. In May 2020, the Biden A...

In just a few short years, Robotic Process Automation has gone from a few scattered pilot projects to an essential tool deployed by dozens of agencies. Hundreds of thousands of staff-hours have been saved, and organizations are increasingly looking to leverage artificial intelligence to automate more-complicated workflows. Automation at scale comes with challenges, however -- from credential management to siloed systems to ensuring that outdat...

Although it got an encouraging $1 billion funding shot in the arm from the American Rescue Plan Act in early 2020, the effort to modernize and transform an aging infrastructure remains a complicated task that takes coordination, executive buy-in and detailed security and data strategies to make it work. The $1 billion set aside for the Technology Modernization Fund in the ARP smooths some modernization budgeting issues for agencies, which have...

Federal agencies must shift fully to electronic records management by December 2022, when the National Archives and Records Administration will stop accepting new paper records. Successfully making that transition entails far more than simply digitizing existing documents. Meeting the goals set by M-19-21 demands changes to current business processes, dramatically different approaches to content classification, new systems that are digital thr...

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), the government-wide plan to secure cloud products and services, is almost a decade old. It is still evolving, however. Early in 2021, the House of Representative passed a bill that would have codified a number of its provisions into law, standardizing its processes for agencies to on-ramp cloud computing technologies. To date, the Senate has not acted on the bill. At the same tim...

The companies on the Washington Technology Top 100 are coming off a year like no other. Many feared that the COVID-19 pandemic would devastate the market, grinding work to a halt as offices closed and access to customers was greatly curtailed. But that did not happen. If anything the past year has been a triumph for government contractors and their customers as they found new ways to work and communicate. The result is a group of companies tha...

The Department of Defense's cloud strategy aims to transform virtually every aspect of the warfighting effort, and has resulted in a rapidly growing ecosystem of both general-purpose and fit-for-purpose clouds. Some of those efforts are unique to DOD, reflecting the scale, missions and austere operating environments of military operations, while others are readily transferrable to most any agency. All, however, hold valuable lessons for those...