Roger Baker becomes the company's chief strategy officer to help it understand the market and ensure it's meeting agency customer expectations.
The former chief knowledge officer declined to say what his next move would be, but he does not plan to retire.
News and buzz in the acquisition and IT communities that you may have missed this week.
Tom Sharpe, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration, is focusing on 10 areas to make the organization more responsive and efficient. Sharpe also plans to meet with vendors and employees to improve their satisfaction with FAS.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) with little debate and no amendments. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the bill's author and chairman of the committee, said the provisions to give CIOs more budget control and the IT project and program management improvements will have a big impact on how agencies spend money on technology.
The annual SmartPay and FedForum conferences have been canceled this year due to cuts to agency travel and training budgets under sequestration.
The agency in an email to contractors said information including social security numbers and bank account information were publicly assessable. GSA is offering credit monitoring services to those affected.
The Pentagon's acquisition chief said he's planning day-to-day, not year-to-year because of sequestration's indiscriminate cuts and political uncertainty over DoD's budget. In 2014, there will be more opportunities to prioritize, but spending reductions also will lead to cancellation of contracts and downsizing of the military and civilian workforce.
Agencies must meet annual goals between 2013 and 2015 to enter data into the Past Performance Information Retrieval System. Joe Jordan, the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said inputting and referring to vendor performance information can reduce risks for agencies.
Barry West is returning for his fourth gig as a CIO, and three other key technology officials are leaving. Two congressmen want to pressure contractors to pay back taxes.
With sequestration now in effect, the Defense Department says it will have to begin to make decisions that cross the threshold between "reversible" cuts to military capability and those that will have long-lasting impacts.
Small firms already have taken a disproportionate hit from DoD's pullback in 2013 spending, Pentagon officials say. Military acquisition leaders worry the sudden cuts will bankrupt small businesses that provide one-of-a-kind capabilities.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is concerned new regulations may make whistleblowers even more reluctant to report tax fraud to the IRS. OMB Controller Danny Werfel says $85 billion in cuts under sequestration would hurt every state. Maj. Gen. Brett Williams says the U.S. Cyber Command is trying to figure how to normalize operations alongside air, land and sea capabilities. Lynn Singleton, director of environmental services at Lockheed Martin, talks about helping agencies move their email to the cloud. Dr. Milton Corn explains why The National Library of Medicine is monitoring social media.
President Obama's recent executive order directing that cyber threat information be shared more broadly with the private sector risks making the data less useful to the intelligence agencies that gather and process it. But the risk is worth the potential reward.
As the Navy scours its IT systems to determine exactly what it owns, it's discovered it operates double the data centers and tens of thousands of servers and applications more than it previously thought. The findings come more than a decade after the Navy implemented its Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, which was supposed to reduce the number of disparate systems run by the agency and eliminate stovepipes. All told, Navy's IT budget could be as much as $4 billion more than it initially thought.