By
Tom Shoop
Your guide to key technology topics facing federal agencies.
Click here to go directly to the Basics.
More than ever, it's an alphabet soup world in the federal government-especially when it comes to agencies' use and management of information technology. From EBK to FISMA to HSPD-12, it can be hard to fake your way through a meeting pretending you understand key concepts that are cutting across all federal operations if you don't have some basic knowledge.
That's why we launched a new feature earlier this year to try to help clarify things. Its name reflected the simplicity of the endeavor: The Basics. It started as an online feature, and will remain so. All the topics featured in this issue will be stored in the Basics section of our new Web site devoted to federal technology management, Nextgov.com.
But we also thought there would be value in setting down some of the Basics in paper form, as a handy reference. So that's what we've done in this issue.
By their very nature, these are subjects of intense interest to information technology professionals. But each of them also is critically important to federal managers in a variety of disciplines. For example, with agencies under pressure from Capitol Hill to increase the number of employees who telework, what manager these days doesn't need to have a firm grasp of the technological and administrative issues involved in encouraging the practice? You can get the details on both here.
How about something like identity management? You might assume that it simply involves who gets to log on to your agency's network. But it's much more than that. It means setting controls on what users-both federal employees and contractors-can do and where they can go on your network. That requires managers to make decisions on exactly what level of access to provide and how it will be controlled, using everything from passwords to fingerprint scans.
Of course, topics like the ones in this issue are changing all the time. That's why the features will be updated with the latest news and information in The Basics section of Nextgov.com. And we'll be adding more and more of them.
Oh, and those acronyms in the first paragraph? They refer to Essential Body of Knowledge, the Federal Information Security Management Act and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. For a full explanation of what they're all about, read on.
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