Government agencies at all levels, from the smallest town to the biggest federal offices, are struggling with filling job vacancies and retaining workers, especially for in-demand skills such as cybersecurity and IT management. For the U.S. government, strategic human capital management has been identified as a serious problem for more than 20 years. State and local agencies continue to feel the effects of both the pandemic and competition wit...

In June 2019 the Office of Management and Budget released MemorandumM-19-21, directing all Executive Branch departments and agencies to transition to fully digitize all permanent records by Dec. 31, 2022. But many agencies are going to miss that deadline. Between the scope of the requirements and the effects of the pandemic, fully one-third of agencies have indicated they are going to miss the deadline. The challenge is not simply digitizing r...

Modernizing the Federal Acquisition Lifecycle As Federal procurement policy and processes become more complex, agencies must adapt their business processes and technology solutions to better enable their acquisition professionals to maintain compliance and efficiency while executing mission-critical tasks. IT modernization initiatives empower acquisition professionals and leadership to make better-informed decisions throughout each phase of th...

Government’s Journey to IPv6 – What It Means for Agencies Federal agencies have been mandated to migrate to IPv6 – the next-generation Internet protocol, designed to replace version 4 (IPv4) that has been in use since 1983. The depletion crisis that exists with IPv4 unique addresses requires the shift to the robust, 128-bit IPv6 with its 340 undecillion or 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses. The explosion of Inte...

5G for Government – From Warehouses to Virtual Reality The advent of 5G – fifth-generation mobile communications – is creating a host of opportunities for government applications. A "smart warehouse" at Naval Base Coronado is delivering on optimization of the facility’s operations, including identification of materials and supplies, organization, storage, retrieval and transportation. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is develop...

Just as the pandemic changed the American workplace, it had a major disruptive effect on colleges and universities across the country, forcing them to adopt new remote learning initiatives and revealing the technological shortcomings that campuses faced. At the same time, it opened opportunities. During the pandemic, Carnegie Mellon University used a rapidly deployed private wireless solution to power live video streams on high definition came...

Two years of pandemic living made clear the depth and breadth of the digital divide – states lacking robust internet and wireless infrastructure discovered the gaps that made it far more difficult to provide essential services in a work-from-home world. Today, states and localities are considering investment in such diverse areas as IoT, emergency preparedness, school security, and strengthening their logistics and supply chain managemen...

Federal agencies, both civilian and military, are seeing opportunities to expand their mission to serve the public through the application of new technologies. Leading the way: Unlocking the potential of 5G to power leading-edge IoT applications. Many agencies now have multiple sensors and edge computing devices that need blazing fast, low-latency, stable connections, particularly if they are in remote or hard-to-reach locations. For instance,...

Agencies are trying to move faster than ever to modernize and transform their systems and processes. For federal financial service agencies, from the Internal Revenue Service to the Securities and Exchange Commission, accelerating the development of new applications and the modernization of legacy ones is a critical part of meeting their mission. From Agile to DevSecOps, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) automation to robot...

There is a lot of emphasis on IT modernization in the federal government, from the push to grow funding for the Technology Modernization Fund to Army efforts to modernize IT for multi-domain operations. On another track, the President's Management Agenda identifies workforce transformation as its top priority. There is a clear connection between these two broad initiatives – modernizing IT is a way to streamline how programs are managed...