Here's the year in review viewed through a lens of long-term staying power. What'll matter in 2028? Let's find out.
This year, like previous years, featured a bevy of buzzword-laden technologies, but we at ZDNet are fatigued by the never-ending stream of acronyms. With that fatigue in mind, we put together a simple test for the year in technology. What technologies talked about today will actually matter in a decade?
Here's a look at the technologies compiled by Larry Dignan, Chris Duckett, Jason Hiner and Steve Ranger from 2018 that will matter as well as a few that simply didn't make the cut.
What'll matter in 2028:
Read full story at ZDNet…
first published week of: 12/10/2018
Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia today kicked off a lawsuit to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules. Advocacy groups are also suing the FCC.
The states suing the FCC are New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. That's every US state with a Democratic attorney general. Republican state attorneys general did not join the petition.
"The petition is the first step by states to attempt to block the FCC's decision, and it will allow the attorneys general to move forward with the appeal in the future," said an announcement from Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson.
Read full story at arsTechnica…
first published week of: 01/22/2018
Mark Amtower
I am starting my 34th year as Amtower & Company in a few weeks, will be celebrating starting year 12 on Federal News Radio in February, am starting my ninth year as a contributor to Washington Technology a little later in 2018, and. I am also an adjunct professor at the George Washington University graduate school in the government contracting Master's program. I also speak frequently at public and private conferences and meetings.
An exec at a small company once told me that if I had time to do all this, I wouldn’t have time for him.
I am compelled to write, interview and speak much in the same way John Steinbeck wrote at the beginning of Travels with Charley: “I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”
Putting my thoughts in public gives me the opportunity for feedback that I would otherwise lack. This keeps me close to that cutting edge. We all need something to keep us close to the edge.
Over the past 33 years, I have noticed some things that remain constant, the immutable laws of our market. Here are a few that stand out. If I’ve missed some, I hope you’ll share your thoughts.
Read full story at Washington Technology…
first published week of: 01/22/2018
The role of agency CIOs has evolved to keep up as technology grows increasingly intertwined with critical missions and the delivery of government services, and these authorities -- from IT management to budget input to shaping the tech workforce -- have been enshrined in law for years.
Yet despite the passage of legislation and sustained oversight pressure from Capitol Hill -- not to mention a May 2018 executive order from President Donald Trump -- many agencies are still coming up short when it comes to internal policies for their CIOs.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 08/13/2018
FCC orders cities and towns to slash permit fees for 5G equipment.
The Federal Communications Commission today finalized an order that will prevent city and town governments from charging wireless carriers about $2 billion dollars' worth of fees related to deployment of wireless equipment such as small cells.
The decision has angered both large and small municipalities, as we reported last week.
The FCC's Republican majority says that limiting local fees will cause carriers to build 5G networks in rural and sparsely populated areas where it would otherwise be financially unfeasible. But the order doesn't require carriers to deploy any more broadband than they otherwise would have, and carriers already promised nationwide 5G networks before the FCC made its proposal.
"Comb through the text of this decision—you will not find a single commitment made to providing more service in remote communities," FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC's only Democrat, said before today's vote. "Look for any statements made to Wall Street—not one wireless carrier has said that this action will result in a change in its capital expenditures in rural areas."
Read full story at arsTechnica…
first published week of: 09/24/2018
A new public-facing website will help coordinate the Army IT community's cloud migration.
The Army Application Migration Business Office's AAMBO.army.mil is a one-stop shop offering migration stakeholders information on resources AAMBO provides that can help them get to the cloud.
The website offers links to a current list of Army Cloud Computing Enterprise Transformation vendors, policies from the Army CIO/G-6, a step-by-step process to assess cloud migration readiness and details on AAMBO training sessions. Although capability owners can’t submit data through the website, AAMBO can explain what they can expect from the process. It offers a six-step guide that includes discovery and portfolio analysis, cost-benefit analysis and migration planning and execution.
Until now, there was no single resource for capability owners to go to for information on cloud migration, said Donald Squires, a project officer at AAMBO. Everything that was available online faced internally, requiring account logins and common access cards. “We’ve known that we needed to just get general information out there about AAMBO and what we do," he said.
Read full story at Government Cloud Insider…
first published week of: 01/29/2018
The Army announced that it was looking for its first colonel to join the service as part of its direct commissioning program for civilians who specialize in cybersecurity.
The announcement comes as the Army, and Defense Department as a whole, grapples with the problem of attracting and retaining cyber workers.
The service is hunting for the first colonel to come through its direct commissioning program for cyber operators, Army Cyber Director Brig. Gen. Jennifer Buckner said during a panel discussion about cyber teams at the AUSA conference and trade show on Oct. 8.
"We don't know what one looks like, but we're ready," Buckner said.
Because as government salaries can lag behind the private sector for comparable positions, the 2019 defense spending bill sought to expand the service's ability to recruit cyber workers at a higher pay grade.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 10/15/2018
The Army is retooling its risk management approach to better fit operational needs.
According to Col. Donald Bray, the Army's acting cyber director, the Defense Department’s risk management framework (RMF) guidance was less about removing all traces of risk and more about learning how to carry and cope with residual risk after mitigation.
"We've always been allowed, in the policy, to tailor it for our operations," Bray told FCW on the sidelines of a May 22 conference hosted by AFCEA. "And we're just at that point where we’re really looking at how to optimize, how to select which controls really apply to us, how to…not redo work, and how to tie that into operations so that we can continue monitoring that."
Shifting the Army's RMF strategy is a major cybersecurity priority for Army CIO Bruce Crawford, and tweaking it over the next few months will be an important challenge, Bray said.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 06/11/2018
GPS has become the go-to technology for consumer navigation, whether it’s a pedestrian looking for a coffee shop or a driver seeking an address in an unknown part of town. Unfortunately, since GPS signals can be spoofed, can't penetrate buildings and their satellites can be destroyed, the military can’t count on using GPS to locate military personnel and robots deployed in the field.
Like radar and sonar, broadcast wireless signals can be used to locate objects by measuring the time it takes for a signal to bounce back to a receiver. But that technology has limited success in object-rich environments, such as the inside of an office building or manufacturing plant. In a complex environment it may be impossible to determine where a received wireless signal originated.
“In the presence of obstacles, the wireless signal gets blocked entirely, or scattered in different directions,” Army Research Laboratory Researchers Fikadu Dagefu and Gunjan Verma told GCN. “Think of it like shooting a basketball," they wrote in an email describing the technology. If no one is guarding the shooter, it is easier to get a shot off. "But in the presence of obstacles (big tall defenders), the ball is likely to get blocked or deflected. For wireless signals, buildings and other obstacles alter the direction of the signal.”
Read full story at GCN…
first published week of: 11/19/2018
Baltimore City Hall.
( SHUTTERSTOCK/JON BILOUS)
Baltimore has hired its inaugural chief of IT human capital and director of digital DevOps, and a chief data officer; and begun to execute on its digital transformation plan.
Having received “unbelievably supportive” public comment earlier this year, the city of Baltimore has moved into the execution phase on its first-ever strategic plan — 2018-2023 Inclusive Digital Transformation Strategic Plan — and is in the formative stages of a technology reorganization that will centralize IT, its tech leader said.
Baltimore’s plan, which has been reviewed and signed off by the city council and city hall, has five major areas of focus, Chief Information Officer Frank Johnson told Government Technology — but “first and foremost, it’s all about the people.”
The city has made three key, hires in recent months in an ongoing drive to bulk up its IT staff. Tracy McKee, the former GIS director for the city of Charleston, S.C., joined Baltimore in February, according to LinkedIn, as its chief data officer and is currently creating the agency’s first-ever civic data analytics strategy.
Read full story at Government Technology…
first published week of: 07/23/2018