More than a year ago, agencies were ordered to begin shuttering hundreds of data centers and move government applications to the cloud under the administration’s information technology reform plan. As of last fall, agencies had moved 40 services to the cloud and terminated 50 legacy systems. Transportation Department Chief Information Officer Nitin Pradhan announced a program last November called IT Vital Signs, which was created to set consistent performance metrics for cybersecurity , IT investments and departmentwide initiatives like data center consolidation. The department has committed to closing at least 42 of its data centers by 2015. “Stakeholder engagement is really at the…
Monthly Archives: February, 2012
The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t just deliver the mail; it also buys a ton of goods and services, as a new compilation of the mail carrier’s top 150 contractors reminds us. Leading the list for the ninth straight year is Federal Express Corp., which received almost $1.5 billion from the Postal Service in fiscal 2011 to transport Express, Priority and First-Class Mail; runner-up Kalitta Air LLC was paid about $549 million to send military mail to troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Husch Blackwell, the Washington, D.C. law firm that puts the list together each year. For those…
A House caucus focused on increasing the government’s use of contractors will launch next week, the Business Coalition for Fair Competition (BCFC) announced today. Members of the “Yellow Pages” Caucus believe that if the government is performing a service that is being done by private businesses in the Yellow Pages, then the service should be subject to market competition, the BCFC said in an email and Facebook announcement. “This caucus is being created by a group of like-minded members of Congress to create a forum to work together to lower the cost of government, make it more efficient and get a better idea of what government and…
There’s some moderately big news out of the Postal Regulatory Commission, which has denied the U.S. Postal Service’s request for fast-track review of plans to weaken first-class service standards and close up to approximately 250 mail processing plants. Last month, USPS lawyers had asked the commission to issue a legally required advisory opinion by mid-April. But in a Tuesday order, the PRC said “the complexity of the case appears to justify the schedule as issued.” Under that timetable, the commission won’t release the opinion until late July at the earliest. Long story short, this is bad news for postal leaders…