One of this year's big paradoxes in federal IT spending is that budgets have gone up, but overall spending seems to have slowed.
Open-source initiatives continue to have a significant impact on long-term government IT planning.
With all the talk lately about government enterprise architectures, it's interesting to see what the Defense Logistics Agency is doing to get all of its procurement, supply chain and logistics managers on the same page.
Some interesting trends have developed in recent months that reflect the changing IT priorities of federal agencies.
As more big cities announce plans to build large-scale wireless mesh networks, city IT managers need to take a step back to establish exactly what they hope to accomplish with such construction.
The stars seem to be lining up in a way that could push even more business toward the big IT service vendors that already handle so much of the federal government's need for IT.
Finally, e-government initiatives are producing measurable results.
As 2004 winds to a close, I thought it appropriate to look toward 2005.