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The routine is almost universal. Every day, millions of workers turn on their computers, take a second or two for a sip of coffee as their desktop or laptop "boots up," and then get to work. In those few seconds, the basic input-output system (BIOS) of the computer loads the protocols that actually run the PC -- in effect, acting the same as the shot of coffee that helps the worker wake up and start functioning. Pretty simple...

Just how much information about the U.S. government is available on the Internet is anybody's guess. But U.S. citizens should be comfortable knowing that if they are persistent enough, they should find much of what they are looking for regarding the federal government online -- whether it's tax information from the Internal Revenue Service, benefits data from the Social Security Administration, or some obscure economic table...

Cybersecurity is such a pressing issue that the U.S. government will be dedicating a good chunk of its annual information technology budget to protecting data systems from breaches, hackers and other threats. The number of cybersecurity incidents reported by federal agencies has increased from 5,503 in 2006 to 41,776 incidents in 2010, an increase of over 650 percent, according to a recent report from the General Accountability Office (GAO)...

Federal information technology managers -- often cited for poor execution of procurement practices -- now have some project role models to follow for successfully managing IT investments. The federal General Accountability Office has issued a report on seven case studies of successful government IT procurement projects. ...

Cloud technology is supposed to greatly increase the efficiency and productivity of electronic information systems. For federal agencies, though, cloud migration has been a bit of a "catch-22" proposition. All the intense preparation work for migrating to the cloud -- including efforts to resolve important data security issues -- consumes scarce time and resources and has a potential for introducing a counterproductive element in adopting the cloud...

Software programmers work hard to produce secure, error-free code. Of course, bad things can happen -- but really, with increasingly diligent effort, how many things can go wrong? Quite a few, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) ...

In a rare showing of bipartisanship, members of Congress and the White House are trying to breathe new life into the effort to enact national cybersecurity legislation. In a recent flurry of activity, mainly between the Obama administration and the Senate, the issue got back on the legislative track. ...

Choppy Waters Ahead for the Federal IT Market, Part 1 ...

Children often focus on neighborhood role models as their first glimpse of what they want to be when they grow up. School nurse, perhaps. Or firefighter. Or police officer ...

The big number always seems to be there. The big number is the amount of money the U.S. federal government invests in information technology. In constant dollars, that number has hovered slightly above or slightly below US$80 billion per year since 2007, according to TechAmerica ...

The U.S. government's plan to shift major chunks of existing and future information technology programs to cloud-based systems has proven to be easy to say but harder to do. Technical, cultural and financial issues are frequently raised by agency managers as barriers to adopting cloud technology ...

A market valued at nearly US$80 billion per year certainly gets the attention of vendors hoping to participate in it. For the information technology sector, the notion that the U.S. government spends about $79 billion per year for IT has gained credence as the figure often cited by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and in references from the federal chief information officer (CIO)...

Think about what has happened in information technology in the last 15 years. The inventors of Google began their collaboration in 1996 but did not adopt the brand name until 1997. The BlackBerry mobile device came on the market in 1999. And the Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA) was enacted by Congress in 1996 for the purpose of improving the way the federal government manages information technology...

The potential for saving money through data center consolidation among federal agencies is so great that the newly installed federal chief information officer has now challenged information technology managers to move further and faster to implement the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel revealed on Oct. 7, 2011, that he was "expanding the project to more aggressively consolidate our data center footprint." ...

Prospects for enacting an ambitious and comprehensive national cybersecurity protection program during this year's congressional session may be fading. That's the bad news. The good news is that various approaches to a cybersecurity agenda may be melding into a program that is acceptable to politicians of both parties and to e-commerce businesses as well.

Information technology vendors who can provide productive ways to protect against cybersecurity threats should find a welcome market among federal agencies. Cybersecurity is the major worry of government IT personnel, two recent surveys concluded. ...

The new federal fiscal year started Oct. 1 with an old problem: an unsettled annual budget. Political wrangling over the proposed budget for 2012 -- estimated at nearly US$3.5 trillion by the Obama administration -- meant that stopgap funding bills were required just to keep the government running. ...

The U.S. government's program to improve federal information technology not only involves different types of electronic tools, such as cloud computing -- it also involves improving the talent pool of federal IT personnel. A new initiative designed to attract the best and brightest talent underscores the federal effort to upgrade the government IT workforce...

Federal agencies are woefully deficient in using modern information technology tools to manage their financial data. Despite calls from Congress and the White House to improve financial data management, agencies "employ a tangled web of disparate manual processes to generate the data," states a recent report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee...

Providers of apps for mobile devices are just as responsible as other electronic commerce vendors in terms of protecting the privacy of customers. In a recent enforcement action, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) signaled that mobile apps fall within the agency's jurisdiction, and that it will not hesitate to investigate potential privacy violations associated with mobile apps...