Weekly Round-up: February 22, 2013

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

This week was Social Media Week DC, and lots of #SocMed stories (and more) developed.

• The General Services Administration wants to help agencies use and measure social media more effectively. Information Week's Elena Malykhina has a good write-up. Bonus: Government Leader's Guide to Social Media.  And speaking of government leaders. . . .
• Alex Howard  interviewed Jonah J. Czerwinski, the senior advisor to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and director of the VA Innovation Initiative.  They talked about the launch of the VA innovation center, and how innovation can help the VA better fulfill its important mission.

Dan Chenok

• Government finds many potential benefits from analytics and big data.
• Federal employees weigh in on how to improve agency performance.
• Tracking cyberattacks as an industry service.

John Kamensky

• DHS after 10 years.  GAO issues a 10-year anniversary report on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.  After issuing 1,300 reports and testimonies on DHS, its anniversary report has the classic GAO report title “Progress Made, Work Remaining.”
• Climate Change Risks. Andy Medici writes in Federal Times on how the Pentagon, FEMA, GAO, and other agencies are beginning to focus on how climate change will affect their missions, and what they can do to manage these new risks.

Michael Keegan

DOD takes first steps toward furloughs 
Pentagon officials on Feb. 20 notified Congress of plans to furlough nearly 800,000 civilian Defense Department employees as part of planning for $46 billion in potential cuts that could come this year under sequestration. 

Sequestration clock ticks down the final days 
President Obama, shown on Feb. 19 speaking against the sequester, warns that the 'meat-cleaver approach' could devaste the military and the economy. As the window narrows for government leaders to undo sequestration's automatic spending cuts, leaders are ramping up opposition to the measure and warning of the grave impact that the cuts would bring. Meanwhile, other groups say it might not be such a bad idea 

Clapper: Sequestration 'quite damaging' to national intelligence 
Defense leaders have been raising the alarm about sequestration, the automatic budget cuts slated to go into effect next month that would lop nearly 10 percent from the Defense budget. But the head of the nation's intelligence community — a conglomeration of 17 agencies across six Cabinet departments — has mostly kept quiet. No longer. Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper has said the automatic spending cuts, coming so late in the fiscal year, would "dramatically" reduce the funding needed to carry out critical intelligence work. 

High risk longevity: A graphic look 
What programs have been on GAO's High-Risk List the longest? The farther from the center a program is on this diagram, the longer its tenure. (FCW graphic.) 

Summit stresses value of metrics in social media 
Nearly every agency makes use of social media nowadays, but the next step in social government is for feds to evaluate the impact and value of their social media efforts. That step may have come Feb. 19 at the Social Government Summit in Washington, D.C., at which a General Services 

Transforming the National Archives: A Conversation with David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
How do you transform the nation’s record keeper? David Ferriero, archivist of the US has a plan. Why make 12 billion pieces of paper available to the world? Ferriero thinks it is mission critical. 

Navy finds billions of dollars in under-the-radar IT expenses 
More than a dozen years after the Department of the Navy awarded a contract to build what it has touted as the military's first true large-scale enterprise network, the Navy is discovering hundreds of networks and tens of thousands of applications that have been operating for years under the radar, outside the scope of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet and beyond the oversight of the maritime services' headquarters. NMCI, which was first conceived as a way to eliminate information technology stovepipes and reduce the number of disparate, purpose-built applications in the naval services, hosts more than 700,000 users across the Navy and Marine Corps. The DoN is expected to award NMCI's successor, the Next Generation Enterprise Network(NGEN), later this year. 

The Business of Government Radio Show: Patrick G Findlay

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The Business of Government Hour features a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The executives discuss their careers and the management challenges facing their organizations.

Patrick Findlay is the is the Assistant Director, Facilities and Logistics Services Division, of the FBI.  He has more than 35 years of experience in leadership, construction, and real estate and has overseen a combined federal real property portfolio of over 80 million square feet during his career.  

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