Two recent decisions don't seem connected, but both will affect the way agencies ultimately choose to move to cloud computing while supporting new mobile devices.
As agencies cut their IT budgets, security is one thing that they still have to get right, and that might mean boosting investments to get it right the first time.
Government agencies face tough choices about their desktop strategy as they contemplate the end of Microsoft support for Windows XP by 2014.
Here are some rules of thumb IT managers can follow when facing the end of life of legacy systems.
By focusing on core systems, your downsized organization could become an expert at providing resources to other agencies, which could lead to new, highly focused growth.
IT officials should start on federal CIO Vivek Kundra's 25-point IT plan with e-mail and shared services.
The government's data center consolidation initiative, which should ramp up in January, could have an interesting ripple effect: A spike in the use of open-source systems.
Newly arriving services must be able to interchange data with existing systems during a transition to cloud computing. And none of it can happen unless agencies have a SOA that can support much more than just Web-facing applications.