SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

Each year hundreds of public hearings are held to support public input on draft environmental impact statements (EIS) and environmental assessments (EA) Often the public cannot attend due to schedules and travel distance. An option that should be pursued for each public hearing is seeting up regional or national webinars so that the public can sign up and listen to the discussion and also provide their comments/input... more »

The removal of printers from offices would force employees to find new more efficient ways to communicate. The savings from paper and toners could be used to provide ways for those without internet access to get information.

Currently, the U.S. government spends in excess of $1 billion annually to license software -- software that produces documents that are difficult to access after a few years because the new version of the software often doesn't work with the older documents. Since the document formats are proprietary, we have no way to access these documents other than by maintaining the unsupported older software. This has made transparency... more »

All IT projects should investigate opensource software first, before purchasing software. All projects should be encourage to use opensource before purchasing software.

CIO staff should be linked in looser affiliations throughout their agencies/departments. A few central positions could be maintained for basic network services, but the rest of the staff should sit and work within lower level groups in the organization. The non-IT staff need closer links to those that know what is technologically available, and how to organize information in an efficient way.

Terminate the contract with GovTrip. It is an impossible website to navigate and probably costs millions of dollars in frustrated staff time. Switch to a simple, easy-to-use system.

All documentation within our systems should be electronic, as it allows us to better manage, organize, store, transport and replicate information. We will save a lot, by implementing this initiative completely. With the production of large amounts of documentation there is a lot of overhead.

Agencies must supply not only the printers but all the parts to maintain them – along with service contracts and of course, paper.... more »

The pager system especially for physciains is an outdated system that no longer serves a purpose especially when almost all of us have cellular phones or smartphones. Eliminate the pager system and work phones and allow employees to use their own mobile phones.

We are faced daily with the objective of managing paperwork and projects, tracking documents and projects as they move through staff elements for work, review and signature. A developing program known as the Office Workload Manager or (OWL) solves this problem. The OWL provides reports, is a central repository for all documents, and a resource that can be used to support personnel evaluations.
Listed are proposed and... more »

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services currently issues very expensive Certificates of Citizenship and Certificates of United States Naturalization. They are printed by the Treasury Department's Engraving & Printing and then issued after vetting and a fee of approx. $600 dollars plus is paid to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Converting these certificates into plastic card identifiers would cost... more »

The purchase of certain technology (Remedy)requires uniformed implementation & operational procedures in order for any ROI to be realized. In order for Remedy to be an affective tool for FEMA, memebers of IT must have smartphones that can be used to receive and to update tickets from the very start of the mission. A single point of entry should be established at the start of the mission to coordinate ticket entry and... more »

Have one source of data that Fed employees can use to find out information about anyone. This could be available from our computer desktop. This source, could have various levels of security clearance, and have a system like "Clear" or "Lexis Nexis" where various information would be provided depending on the needs of the agency. This would save the agency a great deal of time, energy, efforts for verication and working... more »

Our organization has been directed by higher authority to report on each contract action that contain "information technology" (IT) at a level that is not required by higher authority. The process is driven by an instruction which is built on previous government-wide guidance, definitions, and reference models, the process is outdated and invalid (as noted for many agencies in the Enterprise Architecture Segment Report... more »

If FEMA can't get rid of NEMIS for a better system, then let's make the system work better for processing disaster claims and producing reports. The system was set up back in the 70's and times and processes have changed and the system is not working for us! When a sequence of events happen, NEMIS should be able to send out automatic notifications, complete processes, etc. NEMIS should be able to do more work for us.... more »

DHS/USCIS uses an on-line tool Internal Self-Inspection, Tracking and Evaluation (INSITE) to strengthen controls, identify deficiencies & write corrective plans. INSITE’s focus is compliance (laws, regulations, policies and procedures). INSITE is for accountability to all agency levels and fosters integrity.
INSITE administration is done by USCIS Management Directorate, Security & Integrity (OSI) Internal Review Division... more »