IT modernization | Government Sales Insider

Summing Up the Government IT Sales Summit

November 20, 2018 by Tim Larkins 1 Comment

By Tim Larkins, Director, Market Intelligence

The 2018 immixGroup Government IT Sales Summit has come to an end. Despite an unwelcomed surprise from mother nature, hundreds of suppliers, partners, systems integrators and government employees flocked to the event to attend sessions, share knowledge and network. A diverse array of topics was discussed, and while content varied from room to room, many consistencies were noticeable.

Among them were government agencies’ imperatives for modernization, optimization and meaningful use of data. About half of the agencies are funded with new appropriations in FY19, with the other half on a CR through early December. Of the agencies with new money, most of them are seeing an uptick in their IT budgets – with which they will be purchasing COTS software and hardware to help them meet the aforementioned imperatives.

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Filed under Government IT Sales Summit, Market Intelligence, Marketing, Sales Tagged with COTS products, data analytics, Data center optimization, federal IT, IT modernization

How Can Technology Tackle the Lengthy Immigration Process?

October 23, 2018 by Kevin Shaker Leave a comment

By Kevin Shaker, consultant

The United States Digital Service (USDS), founded in 2014 to provide innovative ideas to agencies around IT modernization, is aggressively attempting to streamline the immigration process by implementing electronic forms and doing away with paper-based applications. The goal is to shorten the lengthy process immigrants endure when applying for citizenship and make it less burdensome on government employees as they process immigration and green card applications.

USDS is now working with United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS), the DHS agency that handles immigration and naturalization, to reform their application analysis process. The USDS team working on the project is more focused on developing technologies for IT and operations process redesign than pushing immigration policy through Congress. Their goal is to also collaborate with agency higher ups and end users to design and create automated systems that alleviate redundancy.

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Filed under Market Intelligence, Sales Tagged with Digitization, federal IT modernization, Green card, IT modernization, paperless processing, Process automation, United States Citizen and Immigration Services, United States Digital Service, USCIS, USDS

Transformation May Be Your Foot in the Door for Federal Sales

October 2, 2018 by Kevin Shaker 1 Comment

By Kevin Shaker, consultant

If you have genuinely transformational technology, public sector IT executives may be willing to listen now more than ever.

In August, public and private sector officials held a series of short discussions on government IT and procurement, emphasizing innovation in everything from protecting critical assets to reforming acquisition methods.

Here are three top takeaways

GSA Schedules

Alan Thomas, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, said plans are being discussed to consolidate schedules for easier acquisition.

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Filed under Contracting, Market Intelligence, Marketing, Sales Tagged with GSA Schedule 70, IT modernization, IT Transformation, Technology Modernization Fund

Omnibus signed into law–now what?

March 27, 2018 by Chris Wiedemann Leave a comment

federal budget, fiscal year, procurement By Chris Wiedemann, consultant

Despite some last-minute dramatics, President Trump signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus appropriations bill into law last Friday, fully funding the government for the rest of fiscal year 2018.

Of course, with any bill this size (over 2,200 pages in total), it takes a while to fully digest the implications for our customers and industry.

That said, it’s never too early to pull out some early highlights – to wit:

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Filed under Public Policy, Sales Tagged with Federal budget, IT modernization, Omnibus, Overseas Contingency Operations

Can data be protected through shared services?

February 22, 2018 by Lloyd McCoy Jr. Leave a comment

Lloyd McCoy Jr.

By Lloyd McCoy, DOD manager

Any guesses on how much data is generated every year by government and government-related apps? More than 1,000 billion bytes. It’s a staggering number.

Naturally you wonder how is all of that data protected? How do we protect the information that makes our electric grid, air traffic, voting processes and other government-controlled functions keep working safely and reliably?

One obvious answer is to improve the way services are shared between government agencies – and between government and private industry.

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Filed under Market Intelligence, Sales Tagged with cybersecurity, data security, IT modernization, Shared Services, Trusted Internet Connections

How to capture more IT business from HHS in FY18

January 30, 2018 by Chris Wiedemann 2 Comments

Chris Wiedemann

By Chris Wiedemann, consultant

I have worked with immixGroup’s suppliers and partners on a wide range of federal agencies and their IT requirements and buying patterns. And one department consistently stands out as the most commonly asked about: Health and Human Services (HHS).

Diving into the numbers makes it clear why. At $13.8 billion, HHS’s top line IT budget is several times bigger than other large non-defense agencies. And although most of that money goes straight out the door in the form of grants to state and local agencies, the remainder still makes HHS the largest non-defense IT agency in government.

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Filed under Market Intelligence, Sales Tagged with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), health and human services, IT modernization, Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Is this the new way of modernizing old systems?

January 3, 2018 by Chris Wiedemann Leave a comment

Chris Wiedemann MGT Act, tech modernization

By Chris Wiedemann, consultant

If you attended the Civilian FY18 Federal Budget Briefing at immixGroup’s most recent Government IT Sales Summit, one theme should have resonated throughout: the new ways government agencies are approaching the old problem of legacy system modernization.

It can be challenging to separate rhetoric from action sometimes, but there’s real energy in government around addressing the challenges of technology overhauls. Agencies are taking a customer-centric approach to design and development, with agile methodologies and human-centric design really becoming deep-rooted in civilian IT groups – and, perhaps more importantly, they’ve gotten an assist from Congress in the form of the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, which was signed into law as part of the FY18 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

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