Author Archive

S. Michael Gallagher

Digital Government

When X doesn't mark the spot

With more agencies building geographic information systems, standards are key to making them work right.

Digital Government

New wave

Thanks to open standards, the market for application servers is a lot friendlier than it used to be.

Infrastructure

The march of IDES

Integrated development environments have become increasingly complex and encompassing over the past few years. The basics remain the same, but the ways in which applications are built and developers work together has changed significantly.

Digital Government

RFP CHECKLIST: Enterprise search

Unlocking the information at your agency may require a robust enterprise search platform.

Digital Government

A sharp eye for details

Giving users near-instant access to precise information is a tall order. But expand that requirement across all an agency's data, or even sources of related data, and the task seems insurmountable. Yet that's the promise of enterprise search technology.

Digital Government

Mixing the menu

If there were ever a technology that seemed tailored to the needs of government, it's service-oriented architecture. With thousands of disparate systems needing to share information across organizational boundaries'particularly homeland security information'SOA offers agencies an attractive shortcut to their data-sharing goals.

Digital Government

Managing a network of networks

Once upon a time, network management was one of the most straightforward of tasks: Monitor the health of key network devices like routers, hubs, switches and servers, and alert someone when something went down.

Digital Government

Everything's on the record

As the business of government, like that of the rest of the world, is increasingly done digitally, the task of managing official records becomes increasingly important.

Infrastructure

Davis, Calif., gets fast with ColdFusion

Seth Duffey, a systems specialist for the City of Davis, Calif., started off developing with Microsoft's Visual Basic, but he's left the tool and isn't turning back.

Digital Government

Rapid, really

Rapid application development in the 1990s was, generally speaking, a contradiction in terms.