November 21, 2005

Grants.gov and Macs — update

Over at Partial Recall, Rob gives us an update on what NIH is doing regarding PureEdge’s inability to provide a Mac client to Grants.gov. The latest news is that the Mac client will be available in November 2006. Now, I could be…

Justice gets lower IT budget

Also from GovExec.com, I see a report on the FY06 State-Justice-Commerce appropriations bill, which effectively cuts the Department of Justice’s IT budget. It already looks like IT will be a primary target as Congress tries to get the country’s budget back on some…

eGov funding just got harder

GovExec reports today that Congress has included language in the Transportation-Treasury FY06 spending bill that requires all agencies to give Congress 15 days notice of any intention to transfer money to other agencies for e‑government projects. OMB had been pushing…
November 17, 2005

PMA Scorecard shows eGov disappointments

OMB released the PMA Scorecard for September 30, 2005, and grades on e‑government have dropped for six agencies, as FCW reports here. Meanwhile, Transportation and Labor maintained their green status, and HHS and Treasury moved from yellow to green on…
November 15, 2005

Spending bill has stiff telework requirements

I see that Rep. Frank Wolf (R‑Va) has written some stiff penalties into a new spending bill for certain agencies to prove that their use of teleworkers is increasing. We at TCG have been advocates of teleworking for many years but…
October 18, 2005

Challenging Torvald: Specs Are the Language of Negotiation

According to an article in SYS-CON, Linus Torvald posted a message on the ‘net saying that specs don’t help in software development, that they are a needless level of abstraction. Torvald may be right when the developer is the client, creating a program…
October 14, 2005

Recycling business detritus

When in the course of business events it becomes necessary for one party to dispose of that which once seemed necessary, the question is always: What the heck do I do with all this stuff? It used to be easy to…
October 5, 2005

Better proposals — feedback from evaluators

Captureplanning.com has a great insight into what proposal evaluators are looking for, what they do not like to have to read through, and what type of information delivers the strongest proposal. There is a wide range of evaluator types included in the…
October 4, 2005

Small Business Report leaves questions

An article at FCW.com points out that the Small Business Administration may have overstated the percentage of federal contracts going to small businesses in a recently released report. An Aug. 25 SBA report states that the government awarded small businesses $69.2…
October 3, 2005

The Information Pioneers

Last week I attended the a reunion of the NSFnet crowd — lots of people whose names you probably don’t know (and a few whose names you’d recognize immediately, like Dave Farber), who 20 years ago developed the standards and the systems that…