In a virtually unnoticed message to Congress this month, President Donald Trump outlined his new guiding principles for reforming the Selective Service process, as called for by the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. And the Trump approach calls for a renewed focus on “critical skills.” […]

The government doesn’t need “nongovernment culture” to improve cybersecurity. What it needs is to recruit a workforce with a long-term vision of service and innovators driven not by the prospect of living a life of success but of living a life of meaning. Nowhere is this more apparent than at NASA.

MeriTalk sat down with Cameron Chehreh, chief technology officer at Dell EMC Federal, at the MeriTalk Data Center Brainstorm to discuss how Federal IT modernization efforts will affect agency data centers and operations.

Catch up on some reading this weekend. Here are a few interesting items from MeriTalk

The problems associated with an antiquated government infrastructure replete with duplication and redundancies of mission and support services have been well documented. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report discussed the operation of 661 information technology investments in human resources management alone. More recently, at my request as a staffer on the Oversight and Government Reform […] […]

The June 2015 breach of the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) employee records demonstrated a real vulnerability in Federal IT. With legacy systems dominating the Federal landscape, securing sensitive government data has become very nearly impossible. Fortunately, Congress and the Trump Administration seem to be coalescing around a straightforward crisis response plan: IT systems modernization. […] […]

Catch up on some reading this weekend. Here are a few interesting items from MeriTalk.

A truly stunning detail overlooked by most observers during the confirmation process of David Shulkin to become secretary of Veterans Affairs is that the VA is going to hire a chief health informatics officer to lead the agency’s electronic health record strategy.

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives unanimously passed the Energy Efficient Government Technology Act (HR 306), which requires agencies to deploy energy-efficient technology in their data centers. Under the bill, every agency must use advanced power management tools – building information modeling, energy-efficient data center strategies, and more to reduce the data center footprint. […] […]