SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

This is nothing new. Instead of the typical one year budget cycle, I suggest a two year cycle. This would cut down on budget hearings and better stabilize longer-term planning and contracts.

For the implementation period, we would simply take the first year's budget and multiply that by the projected inflation rate for the second year and combine the total for our 2 year budget. For emergencies, there is the supplemental... more »

Per the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), federal information systems must be hardened according to security configuration standards such as the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), the U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB), and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks.

Government (and contractor) IT shops spend countless hours configuring new and existing systems to ensure... more »

Throw out the current system for hiring which isn’t working and adopt a radical new approach modeled around the COMPETES Act. Do away with bureaucratic vacancy announcements filled with confusing and meaningless questions and replace it with a very simple contest that requires only two things – a resume and the answer to the following questions, “What makes you the best fit for this position?”

No Federal Government employee should make more than the President. This would include the quasi government organizations of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the World Bank, etc. Too many employees in these organizations are making far more than they should be. According to CNN in 2009, chief executive officers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got annual pay packages worth approx $6 million apiece, while other top execs pulled... 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an instruction which is built on previous government-wide guidance, definitions, and reference models, the process is outdated and invalid (as noted for many agencies in the Enterprise Architecture Segment Report...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 »

Create an Information Assurance Branch under OMB for all accreditation efforts and standards. One method will help save trillions of dollars across all agencies. Certification and Accreditation is mandatory for all DoD systems, but yet we waist billions of $$$$s accrediting the same system in different agencies because one agency wants a bigger, fancier or different color system than another. I say make a branch under... more »

Create an Information Assurance Branch under OMB for all accreditation efforts and standards. One method will help save trillions of dollars across all agencies. Certification and Accreditation is mandatory for all DoD systems, but yet we waist billions of $$$$s accrediting the same system in different agencies because one agency wants a bigger, fancier or different color system than another. I say make a branch under... more »

Allowing employees to use unshceduled telework more often increases the continutiy of operations and office efficiency. In addition to saving the commute time, the use of unscheduled telework allows greater flexibility in the employees work schedule to complete assigned tasks.

Currently, economic and financial data is collected at a variety of departments and agencies with many surveys overlapping (e.g. Census, BEA, BLS, Agriculture, etc.). We should move data collection, not data dissemination or analysis, to data.gov where collection methods could be standardized, overlapping surveys eliminated, staffing reduced and a greater utility of revenue employed. Approaching data collection in this... more »