The White House has been urging agencies to dust off an old tool for saving money. Namely, using more shared services. But for a number of reasons, actually sharing services is not all that easy. The industry and government group, ACT-IAC, will hold a special Shared Services Forum to showcase the hows and whys of shared services. Dan Chenok of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, and executive vice chairman of IAC, the Industry Advisory Council, has more.

Agencies are racing to spend money before the funds expire at the end of the month. That’s good news for all contractors, but especially small businesses. In normal years, agencies make about one-fourth of their small-business deals in September. Quantitative Analyst Evan Croen tracks the data for Bloomberg Government.

The Postal Service offers mobile apps to do everything from looking up a ZIP code to tracking the status of your package. One way USPS is trying to stay ahead of the public’s expectation curve is by upgrading the bandwidth and security of its computer network. Stacy Schwartz is the vice president of AT&T’s federal government business unit. She tells Executive Editor Jason Miller about two contracts AT&T recently won from the Postal Service to improve and better secure the back-end infrastructure.

The White House, in a recent budget memo, called on agencies to strengthen their capacity to use evidence. For that, it says agencies need an evaluation plan that helps leaders focus on the important questions to ask. As an example, the White House points to the Labor Department. Chief Evaluation Officer Demetra Nightingale watches over all the monitoring and measuring of the program.

The Defense Information Systems Agency is at the beginning of a huge project designed to move most of the military’s state-side computing capacity into mega data centers across the country. As Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu reports, DISA is planning to finish this effort in the next five years.