Here is a link to my interview on WFED radio by Francis Rose, broadcast Friday during the In Depth radio show. I provided some thoughts about the role of the Inspectors General relating to cybersecurity,… My Interview on WFED Radio
One of the things I learned during my time as the Chief Information Officer at the US Department of Transportation is that one of the core competencies of the Federal Government is looking over someone else’s shoulder, that is the provision of oversight.
The CIO has three major organizational best friends providing helpful advice. First there is the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) which has the added lever of having a big impact on how much money you will potentially get in your budget in coming years. Second if you are associated with a big program, and at DOT there was always something going on at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which was a big program, then the Government Accountability Office (GAO) got involved. Often, by the way how OMB rated programs and how GAO rated programs were slightly different so fixing for one did not always fix for the other, but that is another story for another post.
And finally there was the internal to the Department based Office of Inspector General (IG). IG’s investigate many things but one of their required areas of focus relates to how Information Technology is provisioned within an agency or department.
Oversight in the Federal Government – The Underutilized Part
This semester I am not only teaching classes, two IT related classes at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), but also taking graduate classes, two Government and Politics graduate classes at the University of Maryland College Park.
So every Tuesday afternoon and evening I attend two almost three hour classes, the first focusing on Political Institutions (which I will talk about in a later post), and the second focusing on Political Theory, specifically about human rights. These are both seminars associated with getting a PhD, so in large part I am surrounded by young people, almost all of whom are younger than my two daughters, who are extremely bright and already know the difference between positive and negative rights, natural law, the implications of the Enlightenment, and so on, all of which I had to look up to understand when I came across all of these terms in the weekly readings.
It is a very natural thing for a parent to feel pride in your children’s accomplishments. As both of my daughters remind me, I am biased (they are, of course, wrong, I am totally objective about each of them; I just happen by coincidence to have the best two daughters ever) and my job is to be proud of them (I do agree with this one).
But sometimes your children do something a bit more special.
Miriam and Tamar have talked about running a marathon together for a while. Over the last year they decided to be more serious about it, both doing a regular training routine, one in Northern Virginia and one in Brooklyn. They both submitted entries to the Philadelphia Marathon, held the week before Thanksgiving.
So this last weekend, I drove Ellen and Tamar up to Philadelphia Saturday morning, while Miriam met us there, taking the train from New York. We stayed in a bed & breakfast located a mile south of Independence Hall (a place Ellen and I found the last time we visited Philadelphia).
Saturday the girls picked up their packets and wandered around the Philadelphia Convention Center for the marathon exposition. Aisle after aisle of special shoes, special socks, belts, GPS time pieces, books, energy bars, and thousands of participants and friends-of-participants and family-members-of-participants.
Nice follow-up article in Fierce Mobile Healthcare regarding the panel I moderated here.
A remarkable statistic that was presented during the panel discussion I moderated yesterday at the first Federal Health IT summit hosted by ATARC, the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center, was that medical errors in hospitals are the third leading cause of death in the United States. The focus of the panel directly and indirectly dealt with how to decrease that statistic.
A lot of the emphasis over the last year or so in the federal Health IT market has focused on electronic health records and comparable issues, topics which have been and continue to be challenging and important topics.
But as Dr. Julian Goldman who was one of the participants on the panel who noted even more important is all of the information we do not have and do not use that directly affect the results of medical treatment.
I have had the fortune to spend much of the last 30-some years being improved by Ellen. Remarkably I find that no matter how much she corrects, I still have much work that is needed… Today’s Argument – Biopic
It occurs to me that if we were able to connect our mailbox to the recycling bin in some automated fashion, it would would increase efficiency.
Over the last year or so, I decided to focus a bit more on academic opportunities.
I have attempted to become a better professor at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), helped start a non-profit focused on increasing academic involvement with government (ATARC), and this semester signed up for two graduate courses at the University of Maryland College Park in, of any things, Government and Political Science.
One of the two graduate classes I am taking focuses on Political Institutions in the US, the other focuses on Political Theory relating to human rights. It is the latter I wanted to talk about in this post.