Author: Pete Sinnott

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 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…
September 1, 2005

CMMI FAQ

TCG’s Senior CMMI Level 2 Mentor, Maureen Sullivan, just published a great article on www.tcg.com: What is CMMI Level 2 … and How Do We Get There?: A Brief Guide to CMMI Level 2 for Small Software Development Organizations. The article is intended to…
August 30, 2005

NGP article in GCN

Before I went on vacation last week I was interviewed by Government Computer News’ Jason Miller about the National Grants Partnership’s first white paper. The resulting article was published yesterday and I think it captures the core of the white paper very well,…
August 18, 2005

Oregon govt uses Asterisk and other open source

Slashdot has a posting today. about the Oregon government’s use of open source technologies, including Asterisk (an open source PBX system).…
August 10, 2005

HHS multi-agency systems

Charles Havekost, HHS CIO, was a speaker at an IAC-sponsored lunch yesterday, which I attended, and he spoke a little about a HHS system that services multiple agencies for their ata-collection approval process. This isn’t the only example of such a multi-agency system at HHS:…
August 9, 2005

Vienna using social software for grant applications peer review

(Via Boing Boing) A Viennese art group called netznetz has decided to use a “reputation system” to decide how it will distribute the grant money it receives from the local government. The aim is to encourage collaboration among the grantee community…
August 8, 2005

Federal IT Managers Leaning Toward Open Source

(Via Potomac Tech Wire) “An increasing number of government agencies are choosing open source architecture when upgrading their information technology systems, according to a new report from Potomac-based Larstan Business Reports. According to a survey of IT managers in the civilian and…