Words like “bureaucracy” and “red tape” often come to mind when folks think about government, but the quality of customer service is changing – for the better. In December 2021, the White House issued its "Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government." In conjunction with the President's Management Agenda addressing customer experience, agencies ha...

On January 19, 2022, the White House issued National Security Memorandum 8 (NSM) to improve the cybersecurity of National Security, Department of Defense, and Intelligence Community Systems. The memorandum requires National Security Systems to employ network cybersecurity measures equal to or greater than those required of federal civilian networks in Executive Order 14028, issued in May 2021. The NSM builds on several parts of the EO, includi...

Here in the United States, one of the most visible actions taken to address climate change is the federal government’s focus on zero-emission vehicles and the supporting infrastructure. This is an area where the government plans to lead by example. Listen as experts from both the public and private sectors discuss the concept of Future Histories, Laws of Zero in planning for an electric vehicle future. Topics covered include: electrifyin...

Better customer experiences build trust in government programs When the White House issued its Executive Order on “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government” in December 2021, almost three dozen agencies across 17 departments were designated High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) – agencies which, because of their large customer bases or critical services (or both), have a sig...

Government agencies everywhere generate massive amounts of data. For many agencies, it is the core of their operations, whether processing benefits applications, screening financial transactions for illegal activities, measuring the impact of weather events, or myriad other uses. Data is critical to making DevOps (DevSecOps, too) work. It is the reason migrating to the cloud opens up such possibilities for new services. It is why setting up a...

It has been a tough few years for state and local agencies to deliver services to their constituents. The pandemic shut down physical offices, forcing employees to work from home and requiring agencies to completely rethink how to provide services. Data breaches and ransomware attacks have harmed agencies’ operations just as they became dependent on online delivery of services. Now agencies are being warned of the possibility of new wave...

The Cybersecurity Executive Order released in May 2021 uses the word “data” more than two dozen times, referring to both data generated by the mandated cybersecurity measures and the government’s data more broadly. This increases the requirements for agencies to identify, classify, manage, and protect all their data, with particular emphasis on sensitive data. This webinar will feature thought leaders from government and indu...

Military and first responder deployments in harsh or hostile environments require enterprise-grade technology to deliver secure comms as well as compute to power applications critical for the demands of highly distributed tactical operations. It is also vital that these rugged IT systems are easy to deploy and can be managed with field operators, and not IT specialists. Agility is key and the days of packing in separate rackmount solutions for...

In the midst of the pandemic, just days after the state of Maryland discovered its first Omicron cases, the Maryland Health Department website had to go offline, reportedly because of a ransomware attack. Just a week later, the Virginia agency that provides IT and tech support for the state legislature, had to respond to its own ransomware attack. And agencies and companies alike are dealing with an attack on a third-party payroll company just...

On the evening of Jan. 20, 2022, President Biden will make his first State of the Union address – a good time to assess the condition of federal IT, particularly with regard to policy prescriptions that agencies must adopt, such as zero trust, to achieve greater cyber resilience. The foundation of the May 2021 Cybersecurity Executive Order is the directive for agencies to implement a zero trust architecture to strengthen their cyber defe...