The General Services Administration is building more than a dozen virtual meeting rooms in federal buildings and hopes to have them operational later this spring, a senior GSA official said recently. Mary Davie, assistant commissioner in GSA’s Office of Integrated Technology Services, said the agency is adding 15 additional “telepresence” centers  to the agency’s stable [...]

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence this week bestowed one of its top honors on former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who resigned her congressional post to take over as CEO of a Washington, D.C., area think tank. Harman, who served for more than a decade and a half as representative of California’s 36th [...]

Executive Mosaic, ExecutiveGov’s parent company and publisher of GovConExec magazine, a publication geared toward news and analysis of government contracting, will launch a special issue devoted to one of the most important issues facing both the government and the private sector: cloud computing. The latest issue, which marks GovConExec’s second year of publishing, features a [...]

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ 2012 budget request for technology has taken a hit compared to the department’s request last year. VA is requesting $3.16 billion for IT for the coming fiscal year, which represents a decrease of about $3.3 billion from the 2011 budget request, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki told the Senate Veterans’ Affairs [...]

The 345-page Government Accountability Office report, revealing “unnecessary duplication, overlap or fragmentation” in federal programs, landed with a thud on Congress’ doorstep earlier this week. And, as observers pick through its findings, detailing more than 30 general areas of overlap and a host of duplicated programs, they will find a number of federal IT programs [...]

The Obama administration has made open government, through the use of technology and innovation, one of its high-profile goals. And, recent poll numbers suggest there is a clear-cut strategic and political impetus for conducting government out in the open, so to speak. Fast Company reports on a recent Pew research poll, which found that citizens [...]

Forget about “doing more with less.” The Defense Department prefers to think of it as “doing more without more.” But, there’s more to the policy than just changing the way defense planners — including procurement chief Ashton Carter — think. In a world where managing the department’s bottom line is a DoD priority, the department [...]

The Government Accountability Office, the government’s watchdog agency, released Tuesday a report containing information on myriad government programs plagued by “unnecessary duplication, overlap or fragmentation.” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), one of the main proponents of the review, which was mandated by an amendment Coburn proposed to a bill that reset the debt limit last year, [...]

Don’t call the Department of Homeland Security’s workforce initiatives in-sourcing. While Nextgov reports the agency has been chipping away at its contractor workforce over the past couple of years, DHS prefers to think of its efforts as creating the perfect mix of government employees and contractors. “The goal is to make sure that we have [...]

As Congress mulls passing another extension of a stopgap spending measure to avoid a government shutdown, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III said the Defense Department would likely face a number of unknown challenges by operating under a continuing resolution. “Since we’ve never had a year-long continuing resolution for defense, and certainly never operated [...]