Federal IT miscellany

Netspectives on my favorite subject: How Adoption of Open Standards Can Benefit Federal Agencies

Grant Gross reports that the FCC should deny AT&T spectrum buy, groups say

James Staten: AWS and OpenStack: An Interesting Contrast Worth Considering During Cloud Selection

Enterprise 2.0: E2 Santa Clara 2011 Call for Papers Now Open!

Via Fedspere

Health care IT miscellany

From HITsphere:

Social Media And Public Health: New Tools In The Battle Against Influenza

Disputing Medical Data

why login/password should be banned in health-related applications
why login/password should be banned in health-related applications – II

Amazon offers free cloud computing services to educators and students

Why open standards are good for your health

Are we going to single payer anyway?

From an IT perspective this may actually be a benefit. If more people are moving toward plans funded by the federal government, then the government’s IT procurement decisions should be definitive in terms of standards and protocols.

If the VA, the military, Medicare and Medicaid build and re-build their IT infrastructure based on the same open standards, in other words, those become the standards the private insurance market will follow.

Assuming, of course, that the U.S. government builds to a single standard.

New to me Gov't and Defense IT blog

The Packet Rat, Picking through the wreckage of the headlong collision of Government and technology.

Call for Papers: 2009 multi-conference

PromoteResearch.org

The 2009 multi-conference (MULTICONF-09) in computer science, information technology, computer engineering, computational science, control and automation technology will be held during July 13-16, 2009 in Orlando, FL, USA. The venue details will be announced later on.

Click on the following links for more information about MULTICONF-09:

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR-09)

International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Control Systems (ARCS-09)

International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics and Chemoinformatics (BCBGC-09)

International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and Web Technologies (EISWT-09)

International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking and Communication Systems (HPCNCS-09)

International Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ISP-09)

International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology and Applications (RAITA-09)

International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP-09)

International Conference on Theory and Applications of Computational Science (TACS-09)

International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (TMFCS-09)

Little considered aspect of Software as a Service

Making technology investments in tough times

Some commentators have opined that more customers will turn to SaaS-based solutions inasmuch as the cash crunch will hit buyers' capital ("CapEx") budgets first. If that's the case with you, you'll want to weigh reduced initial cash outlays against potentially higher operating costs on a long-term basis under a SaaS model. Depending on the type of service provider, you're shifting at least part of the capital burden to your SaaS vendor, so you'll want to weigh their liquidity very carefully.

More generally, it's prudent to examine the financial health of all your major technology suppliers, current and prospective. We've always counseled looking more closely at balance sheets rather than profit-and-loss statements. Many vendors still remain cash-rich, even as they become customer-poor. I'm no financial expert, but I'd value short-term assets over things like "goodwill."

Keep in mind that bigger does not always mean more solvent.

DISA creates Technology Review Boards

Defense Systems

The Defense Information Systems Agency will no longer rely on third parties to alert it to promising technologies from sources that it might not otherwise identify, agency officials said last week.

DISA will abandon the third-party capability-broker concept it advanced last year and has instead established Technology Review Boards that will meet regularly to receive input on potentially valuable new technologies directly from small businesses and other likely sources, said Hank Beebe, technical director of DISA’s Program Executive Office for Command and Control Capabilities (C2C), at DISA’s Forecast to Industry 2008 last week in Arlington, Va.

I think that this is a good idea and will reduce the amount of "wired" bids.

New to me local business blog

The Female Entrepreneur, As you can probably guess, I'm a female entrepreneur. I'm blogging to share my thoughts, experiences and cool stuff I've learned.

Linking federal IT professionals

Federal Information Management alerts us to the establishment of the LinkedIN Federal IT Group and eGov Community.

Have an idea for how to use technology to improve healthcare?

Via The Healthcare IT Guy, we learn that $5 Million being made available to “Support Ideas That Transform Markets and Empower Consumers.