Articles by John K. Higgins

Three to five years in the information technology business may seem like a long time, so it may appear that U.S. government agencies have been pursuing cloud technology for ages; incipient projects began as far back as 2008. It was also more than two years ago that the White House initiated a program to pick up the pace of federal cloud adoption by mandating agencies to deploy cloud solutions for at least two components of their IT operations...

Information technology vendors who sell hardware and software to the federal market are keenly aware of significant flaws in the way government agencies purchase IT. An effort to reform IT procurement has been conducted by the Obama administration for the last two years -- with some improvement Some members of Congress, however, still aren't satisf...

The current winter of discontent in the U.S. Congress over federal finances does not bode well for cooperation in other areas. Yet legislators push on, and among top Congressional priorities for 2013 is the enactment of legislation regarding the role of the federal government in dealing with national cybersecurity problems A key issue -- still -- i...

The new Congress is now tackling a flurry of general proposals for comprehensive immigration reform, but only one specific, narrowly focused piece of legislation has already been introduced in the Senate: a plan to vastly increase the number of non-citizens who can pursue jobs and education in the U.S. technology sector The bill, titled the "Immigr...

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is hosting a pilot project with the goal of simplifying the account ID process for all federal agencies. One possible solution: allowing citizens to use their existing e-commerce accounts to access agency websites The USPS has admitted that while electronic mechanisms enable federal agencies to provide some o...

Major programs designed to reduce costs and improve healthcare through the automation of medical records have fallen short of the potential to do either, according to a recent Rand Corp. report The effort to convert paper health documents to electronic form got a huge boost from the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act...

For IT vendors in the federal market, the saga of the 2011 Budget Control Act presents some slight benefits in the very short run, even though reduced federal spending may have a longer-term impact The BCA set the stage for a 10-year program to control the rate of federal spending and reduce the national deficit that included a sequestration mechan...

Small businesses often find it challenging to gain access to the federal information technology market, despite efforts by government agencies to smooth the procurement process for small companies In a move to provide more opportunity for small businesses, the federal General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded a bundle of IT contracts to sma...

How much do federal agencies need to spend on data center consolidation investments now, in order to save money later? It could be quite a lot....

The U.S. government's program to consolidate federal data centers presents an opportunity for improving IT management that goes well beyond the objective of just trying to tidy up data center operations and save a little money. As a result of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), the number of government data centers will shri...

"If you can keep your wits, when all about you are losing theirs, maybe you just don't understand the situation." That often-cited spoof of a Rudyard Kipling poem comes to mind as the doomsday scenarios of the federal budget Fiscal Cliff begin to mount. Maybe cool heads won't prevail. Maybe panic is the right way to go Should information technology...

The meat-cleaver approach to reducing costs in business or government always has the virtue of at least being simple to apply -- although frequently painful in the execution For the U.S. government, an across-the-board cut of roughly 9 percent in discretionary civilian and defense outlays is, in fact, the default scenario of the sequestration requi...

Adoption of cloud technology at the federal level is still far from routine -- but cloud transactions continue to emerge on a regular basis. The deals range in value, demonstrating that cloud migration can be applied for relatively small deployments or for huge networks In the latest major deal, HP Enterprise Services will provide a cloud-based em...

One of the overriding issues in the federal elections was the need to get the government's financial house in order. In the post-election period, Republicans and Democrats have offered conciliatory comments as a deadline for resolving the issue of the fiscal cliff draws near, but positions on the issue remain very much in conflict One area of agree...

One of the conventional views of political pundits after the Nov. 6 Presidential election was that both parties spent billions of dollars on the campaign for a result that did not change the political landscape all that much. Below the broad trends that keep political pundits in business, however, are the myriad federal issues that have a more direct impact on business...

The ever-changing and ever-expanding quest to keep information technology systems secure requires collaboration and coordination among government and business enterprises. To foster such joint efforts, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has put out the word to U.S. businesses to propose ideas and literally work side by side with federal counterparts to develop effective cybersecurity programs...

FCC Draws mHealth Road Map, Part 1 The U.S. government's efforts to advance health technology include work taking place at two obvious agencies: the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs....

Smartphones can perform all kinds of neat tasks, such as instantly directing owners to the nearest sushi bar, or providing inning-by-inning updates of the World Series. Beyond these eye-catching consumer conveniences, the potential for more substantive uses for mobile telecom is enormous One such area is healthcare, including a wide range of servic...

How big is the U.S. government? It's big enough that federal agencies transmit 1.89 billion email messages every day -- an average of 47.3 million daily emails per agency. How confident are the agencies about protecting the sensitive content of those messages? In a recent survey, federal email managers and IT security experts expressed mixed views ...

One of the classic items on the agenda for all presidential candidates, including incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, is to cut federal government waste. In fact, the Obama administration has been campaigning for nearly the past two years to reduce waste and improve the efficiency of federal information technology with a 25-point action plan...