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GSA Planning to End Its HR Shared Services

An interesting article by Jason Miller from Federal News Radio, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/145/3451148/GSA-plans-to-stop-providing-HR-shared-services. GSA provides HR services to 40 agencies, per the article, covering approximately 30,000 employees, of which 18,000 are GSA employees.

Private companies have, in some cases, outsourced capabilities that were not ‘core’ to their value-add in the marketplace. They do so because it allows their management to focus on their core mission and, hopefully, allows that capability to be provided for lower cost. The term often used for the provider is “shared-service” since multiple organizations are sharing the costs and infrastructure of the provider.

The Federal Government has gone through a number of iterations of shared-services provisioning, ending up with small numbers of government agencies and departments providing shared capabilities in a number of areas, including as this article discusses, HR.

The GSA Administrator, Dan Tangherlini, decided to have GSA focus on its core missions and thus get out of the HR shared services ‘business’.

GSA Planning to End Its HR Shared Services

Sandy and Social Networking

There were two big differences between Sandy for us and many past storms.

First, we did not lose power (yet) which is a real plus. Second, since we continued to have Internet access it was remarkable the active interaction with friends and near-friends who were close and geographically far away.

Our Sandy experience started in Williamsburg, WV, where Ellen and I had gone early to attend the ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference (ELC). My brilliant idea was to stay at a B&B rather than the conference hotels since we really like B&B’s and this allowed Ellen to feel like it was a bit more of a vacation from home since she gets to wander around Williamsburg while I go to the meetings.Sandy and Social Networking

Federal Countdown – October 5th

Every now and again, I get invited to appear on the Federal Countdown, hosted by Francis Rose, Friday afternoons from 3pm to 4pm on WFED radio.

The focus of the show is to have two guests select their three most important stories about the Federal Government. The third most important article is discussed by each guest individually. Then both comment on the two selected second-most and first-most (first-most or just most?) important stories of the week.

Yesterday John Salamone, who is a managing consultant at Federal Management Partners, were the guests. I thought I would provide a brief summary of the three articles I brought in this entry.

The audio for the session is posted on the WFED web-site at:

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/156/3067288/Federal-News-Countdown-Big-data-sequestration-solutions-and-cloud-savings.

Federal Countdown – October 5th

Why FedRAMP Is Worth Caring About

Reposted from AOL Government, http://gov.aol.com/2011/12/12/why-fedramp-is-worth-caring-about/.

If you have been at a recent Washington Capitals hockey game when the opponent scores a goal, you know the crowd routinely shouts out “Who cares!”

Last week, Steven VanRoekel, Federal CIO, released the long awaited OMB plan for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP; which reminds me to be thankful for pronounceable acronyms. The purpose of FedRAMP per the implementing OMB memorandum, is to “provide a cost-effective, risk-based approach for the adoption and use of cloud services”.

This blog entry is my attempt to answer the question “Who cares!”

Why FedRAMP Is Worth Caring About

DISA and Open-Source

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In an earlier post, I talked about the radio show Countdown hosted by Francis Rose on WFED at 2pm Friday’s. The deal was that Francis would have three people select their top Government-related stories of the week and present them in sort of a Casey Kasem 3-2-1 countdown.

I was on January 15th, you can listen to the entire show that week at http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007.

In this post, I wanted to briefly touch on the second of the two articles I discussed, DISA expands access to ProjectForge cloud environment, http://gcn.com/articles/2010/01/13/disa-projectforge-collaboration.aspx.

The article illustrates the greater comfort level that Government has with using open-source software produced by non-Governmental organizations. While not explicitly mentioned, this increased involvement is leading to open-source development going the other direction; being produced by Government and then placed into the greater community.DISA and Open-Source