Articles Related to federal agencies

According to national ICT business association ITAC, Canadian tech businesses and professionals should be proactive in providing feedback for the Government of Canada's overarching strategic IT plan

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained documents showing how U.S. law enforcement agencies and the Internal Revenue Service are gathering information from social networking sites for their investigations.

The U.S. Treasury Department is not managing its technology dollars as well as it could be, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. In particular, the GAO cited a need for Treasury officials to improve the coordination between the agency's IT and business managers on proposed technology investments.

The U.S. government plans to establish a national identity theft law enforcement centre and create a public education campaign about the dangers of ID theft. A task force named by President George Bush yesterday also called for national data protection standards for companies that collect and sell personal information, as well as stronger public disclosure laws.

Efforts to increase telework in the federal government have a long way to go. Just 35 percent of federal managers today think their agencies support telework, according to results of a survey conducted by Telework Exchange and Federal Managers Association and released Monday.

Forty-three percent of U.S. government employees sometimes telecommute instead of driving into the office, up from 19 percent a year ago, according to a survey released Monday.

U.S. federal officials are looking to outsource the IT infrastructure that's needed to support a planned smart-card system for authenticating employees governmentwide. And the outsourcing plan makes sense, given the scale and complexity of the smart-card initiative, IT analysts said last week.

At his inauguration next Thursday, President Bush is expected to outline his goals for the next term. But his IT staff is already at work on one of them: improving IT job skills within the government. Karen Evans, U.S. administrator for e-government and information technology, said in a report last month that she wants to eliminate what she described as a "skills gap" at half of all federal agencies by the end of the fiscal year in September. That covers a range of IT functions, including information security, application support, systems analysis and project management.