Digital Government

OMB releases guidelines for performance-based contracts

Eighteen months after they began experimenting with performancebased service contracts, federal agencies are finding that this procurement strategy saves time and money and has improved contractor performance, according to a new "best practices" guide distributed by the Office of Management and

Digital Government

Panel charts post-FIRMR course

An interagency committee of information technology and procurement officials recommended that the government replace most directives of the Federal Information Resources Management Regulation (FIRMR) with general management and acquisition guidelines as it begins to put into place provisions of the

Digital Government

Proposed rules shave days off bid-protest process

The General Accounting Office last week issued proposed rules for expediting the bidprotest process. The Information Technology Management Reform Act, which gives GAO jurisdiction over all bid protests in IT procurements, requires the agency to shave 25 days from its consideration of cases. Beginn

Digital Government

New group to lobby on federal purchasing

A new information technology vendor group has formed to develop industrywide positions on how the government should implement the new Information Technology Management Reform Act (ITMRA). The Industry Coalition on Information Technology (ICIT), a collection of vendors and trade associations, hopes

Digital Government

Congress increasingly does business via Web

Last month, at the height of the debate over a proposed constitutional amendment to limit House and Senate members' terms in office, supporter Sen. John Ashcroft (RMo.) devoted his home page to the subject. More than 30,000 visitors to his Web site were encouraged to register their opinions on the

Digital Government

GPO drafts plan to boost electronic publishing

Under a draft strategic plan to expand its electronic publishing activities, two years from now the Government Printing Office would be distributing in digital form 10 times as many documents as it does today. The digital copies obtained as diskettes, CDROM discs or from online services wou

Digital Government

Ameritech to donate $2M for document digitization

Telecommunications company Ameritech Corp. said it will donate $2 million to the Library of Congress to help local libraries, state archives, universities and other nonfederal institutions digitize their American history collections for inclusion in the National Digital Library program. The contrib

Digital Government

Standards to ease product deployment

Leading vendors of workflow management software are developing products that will conform to new and proposed interoperability standards, which aim to make it easier for federal users to deploy the technology. Workflow companies said they hope standards will expand the market for their wares. Vendo

Digital Government

Funding impasse resolved

With just five months left to the 1996 fiscal year, Congress and President Clinton late Thursday ended their stalemate over federal spending and agreed to a $163 billion appropriations bill that would fund more than two dozen departments and agencies until Sept. 30. The deal could free some agencie

Digital Government

Document management vendors pursue standards

CHICAGO Seeking to expand the market for their products, document management software companies plan to offer packages that meet newly proposed interoperability standards starting later this year, vendors reported at the Association for Information and Image Management trade show. Vendors and in

Digital Government

Lotus merges imaging product with Notes

CHICAGO Lotus Development Corp. announced at the Association for Information and Image Management trade show earlier this month its plan to fully integrate Lotus Notes:Document Imaging (LN:DI) into the latest version of Lotus Notes. In addition, Lotus said it has begun to ship an application tha

Digital Government

Firms tout Web as workflow solution

CHICAGO Vendors of workflow and document management software exhibiting here at the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) trade show have embraced the Internet as the future infrastructure for business process automation. New products from nearly every major imaging vendor empl

Digital Government

PMC sets up performance measurements

Top Cabinet officials have agreed on a set of performance measurements for procurement that agencies will use to determine how well agencies serve users. The President's Management Council (PMC), whose members include department deputy secretaries, said last month that agency procurement offices sh

Digital Government

OMB issues CIO guides; critics consider them weak

The Office of Management and Budget this month provided agencies with preliminary guidance on appointing chief information officers, as required by the Information Technology Management Reform Act (ITMRA), which will go into effect Aug. 8. But congressional sources involved in drafting the law said

Digital Government

Vendors blend workflow with forms automation

CHICAGO If an electronic form crosses your desktop, chances are that it's on its way somewhere else. Two new deals between workflow and forms processing software vendors announced at the Association for Information and Image Management trade show would integrate these two applications, making it

Digital Government

Fiscal '97 request hits the street

In an electionyear budget that is certain to be rewritten by Congress, the Clinton administration proposed fiscal 1997 funding increases for some key agency information systems and asked to spend more on technology research programs that have had a prominent place among its economic development in

Digital Government

OFPP plan would offer one source for agency data

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy wants agencies to link their acquisition home pages to ARNet, a World Wide Web clearinghouse for information on federal purchasing reform, and tie these sites together through a text retrieval system that would allow vendor searches. The service would offer

Digital Government

Rule changes signal new freedom for FAA

Today the Federal Aviation Administration sweeps away layers of procurement and personnel management regulations that have developed over half a century and replaces them with fewer, and what it hopes are more flexible and easiertofollow, rules that will help it keep pace with rapid advancements

Digital Government

GAO comes down hard on Cyberfile; doubts system will work

The Internal Revenue Service has spent millions of dollars on Cyberfile, a system that allows taxpayers to file tax returns over the Internet, but has planned and managed its development so sloppily that there is "little assurance" the system will work as intended, the General Accounting Office r

Digital Government

Spending cuts spur feds to mull capital budgeting

Whether the White House or Congress prevails in the fight over the federal budget, funds for information technology programs will likely shrink over the next six years as cuts in discretionary programs continue. So how will agencies find the money for information systems? According to administratio