Your Guide to the Management of Change Conference

For more than three decades, executives from government and industry have been meeting annually to formally explore how advances in technology are affecting federal agencies’ missions. The aptly named Management of Change conference aims to help senior federal managers understand commercial developments in communications, data management and other areas, and how new technologies could be applied to improve citizen services, national security and a host of other federal missions.

On June 3, the American Council for Technology, a nonprofit forum open to all government IT executives, and the Industry Advisory Council, a membership organization of private sector technology executives, will convene the 32nd annual MOC conference in Cambridge, Md.. The conference tracks will be centered around three key topics: use of social media, mobile technologies and cloud computing.

We've put together three special reports on each of these topics, for use as background reading in preparation for the conference:

Your Guide To MOC: Social

Your Guide To MOC: Mobile

Your Guide To MOC: Cloud

The focus won’t come as a surprise to anyone following federal IT. Agencies are under pressure to move more IT functions out of government-owned data centers to Web-based operations in the cloud. The transition holds enormous potential to change not just where these functions occur but how agencies are structured and how employees perform their jobs.

The push to cloud computing also coincides with the widespread embrace of mobile computing and social media, both inside and outside government. Among the issues the MOC conference will explore are how these trends are affecting expectations of employees and citizens, the security implications for managing critical information in the cloud, and the return on investment in mobile technology.

Maria Horton, the MOC industry chairwoman, said conference organizers hope to spark new thinking around these promising and vexing trends.

In addition, Horton said, the conference will showcase innovations that could change the way agencies do business. “We took a select panel of government technology officers and asked them what technologies or categories of technology they would need beyond 2012 -- collaborative tools, sensors, anti-fraud technologies. We looked at a whole group of categories,” she said. Working with federal IT professionals, organizers selected those that offered the most promise for federal missions.