President Obama was remarkably effective in applying IT during his presidential campaign and he continues to focus on IT since becoming President.
His FY10 Budget is focussed on using IT to make government
- More transparent through web 2.0 technologies;
- More effective
- More secure against natural and malicious threats;
- Less costly by promoting sharing of data and applications
Government 2.0
Legislation over the past 30 years has made IT an increasingly important Federal responsibility
- Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1996 (Clinger-Cohen Act) created Federal department and agency chief information officers
- Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980
- Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA)
- E-Government Act of 2002
- Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA)
Recently the President appointed a new Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Also Recovery.gov and Data.gov have been launched.
Web 2.0
Continuing his use of Web 2.0 technologies, the FY2010 budget explicitly refers to Web 2.0 technologies such as syndicated web feeds, video-sharing, podcasts, social networking and bookmarking, widgets, virtual worlds, and micro-blogs to increase transparency and citizen participation. These technologoies wil enable individuals to collaborate on web content and to create, organize, edit or comment, combine, and share information.
Cloud Computing
The President’s FY2010 budget plans extend the administration’s focus on Web 2.0 to cloud computing, by which is meant an “on-demand model for network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
Cloud computing is expected to help in sharing data and applications to improve innovation, efficiency, and effectiveness in Federal IT. The objective is to define departmental and agency architectures to enable enterprise-wide common services and solutions to eliminate duplicate operations at the agency level.
There are some who believe that the FY2010 IT plans are going to make it possible for smaller, more agile firms to win a bigger slice of the Federal IT pie as opposed to the IBMs, HPs, EMCs, and other large firms who have won a lion’s share of this work in the past.
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