IT procurement

See the following -

Obama Calls For IT Procurement Reform

Tom Shoop | Nextgov | November 5, 2013

President Obama on Monday called for an overhaul of the way the federal government purchases information technology in the wake of the troubled launch of the Healthcare.gov website. Read More »

Open Source & IT Procurement

Paul Matthews, Chief Executive of the Institute of IT Professionals (IITP) congratulated Commerce Minister Foss for listening to the IT industry and supporting the nearly unanimous passage of New Zealand's recent law banning software patents. Read More »

Open Source Software Selection

Stacy Collett | Computerworld | May 6, 2013

Open source is the new X factor in software selection. More than 50% of all software purchased will be open source by 2017, according to a 2012 survey of 740 enterprises released by a collaboration of 26 open-source companies. Read More »

Outdated IT Contracting Rules Added To HealthCare.gov Woes?

Grant Gross | Computerworld | December 13, 2013

Critics of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' botched deployment of HealthCare.gov can point to a series of management mistakes, but many observers point to a more systematic problem with government IT contracts. Read More »

The Top 5 Government Tech Stories of 2013

Joseph Marks | NextGov | December 30, 2013

...numerous agencies are moving to open source software systems, which means the software’s basic building blocks are in the public domain and not dependent on proprietary systems owned by specific vendors. Read More »

Trade Group Calls For Level Playing Field, Publishes Guideline On Procurement

Gijs Hillenius | European Commission (EC) | March 19, 2014

Public administrations should give a fair chance to open source when procuring IT solutions, says the OSB Alliance, a trade group for some ninety German, Swiss and Austrian open source ICT service providers. "All other things being equal, open source software should be preferred because of its benefits." [...]

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U.K. Official Urges U.S. Government To Adopt A Digital Core

Elise Hu | NPR | October 23, 2013

When he read about the technical failures plaguing HealthCare.gov, Mike Bracken said it felt like a real-life version of the movie Groundhog Day. During the past decade, the government in the United Kingdom faced a string of public, embarrassing and costly IT failures. Finally, a monster technical fiasco — a failed upgrade for the National Health Service — led to an overhaul of the way the British government approached technology. Read More »

Want Healthcare.gov To Work? Destroy And Rebuild Federal IT Procurement

Veronica Combs | MedCity News | October 27, 2013

The conversation started the first week after healthcare.gov launched. Maybe the problem was federal procurement, not Obamacare. Read More »

Want To Make Digital Government Work? Hire Your Own Coders

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | January 3, 2014

The standard way to put proposed new federal rules online is in large blocks of text [...]. By using hypertext and modern Web design, they thought, regulators could make proposed rules more available and comprehensible to the general public and reduce busy work for industry attorneys and activists who spend hours parsing through regulations each day. Read More »

What The Healthcare.gov Debacle Teaches Us About How To Fix Government Software

Barun Singh | Fast Company | October 31, 2013

A single change--making development open source--could have saved the new site and might change the outcome of future projects. Read More »

Why Healthcare.gov Went Wrong—A Lack Of “Agile”

Tim Fernholz | Quartz | October 25, 2013

In 2010 [...] Barack Obama told a group of CEOs that the government’s “best efforts are thwarted because the technological revolution that has transformed our society over the past two decades has yet to reach many parts of our government.” He outlined priorities to make the government a better user and buyer of information technology. Now, his administration’s signature initiative is embroiled in a massive IT project gone wrong... Read More »

Why US Government IT Fails So Hard, So Often

Sean Gallagher | Ars Technica | October 10, 2013

The rocky launch of the Department of Health and Human Services' HealthCare.gov is the most visible evidence at the moment of how hard it is for the federal government to execute major technology projects. But the troubled "Obamacare" IT system—which uses systems that aren't connected in any way to the federal IT infrastructure—is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the government's IT problems. Read More »