VHA shaves data storage costs with CD-ROM
The Veterans Health Administration's decision to store monthly accounting information on CD-ROMs instead of paper will save taxpayers $420,000 a year, a VHA official said. VHA began sending CD-ROMs to 146 VHA sites nationwide in October. The CD-ROMs let the agency's financial management employees access end-of-the-month accounting reports on their desktop PCs instead of sorting through boxes of paper.
FAA names AT&T exec Daniel Mehan to become its first chief information officer
The Federal Aviation Administration last week tapped Daniel J. Mehan to be its first chief information officer. FAA chose the career AT&T Corp. executive from a pool of more than 50 candidates. Mehan, 54, is AT&T's international vice president of quality and business management in New Jersey. He will start his new job at FAA on Feb. 1.
Emergency funds will make the difference for Rural Development
Emergency year 2000 funds will help the Rural Development Agency buy the new desktop and notebook PCs it needs to process single-family housing loans. The Agriculture Department agency uses software created and maintained by USDA's National Finance Center to process loans through its Single-Family Housing Program in St. Louis. But NFC had to upgrade the software and make it year 2000-ready, said Joe Perez, Rural Development's chief information officer.
Transportation looks to repeat success with ITOP II
26 vendors will sell services on ITOP II The Transportation Department this month awarded 34 contracts that add up to a jumbo governmentwide acquisition vehicle. Transportation awarded the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts, worth up to $10 billion over seven years, under its Information Technology Omnibus Procurement II program, a follow-on to its successful ITOP program.
Wang Federal wins contract to consolidate NASA's networks
Wang Federal Systems this month won a 10-year, $453 million contract to run NASA's networks. The McLean, Va., company will consolidate NASA's WANs and support data distribution for the agency's four strategic R&D enterprises: Aerospace Technology, Earth Science, Human Exploration and Development of Space, and Space Science. Aerospace Technology develops aeronautical and space transportation technologies. Earth Science studies the Earth's environment. Human Exploration and De velopment of Space focuses on space exploration. Space Science studies the mysteries
GAO report prompts HCFA to take battle stations
HCFA in November set up the war room and assigned employees to do nothing but track year 2000 progress and solve renovation problems. The agency has also stationed employees at sites run by contractors to track their progress preparing Medicare systems, said Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, HCFA administrator. "Ensuring that Medicare beneficiaries will continue to receive services after Jan. 1, 2000, is my No. 1 priority," DeParle said. "To achieve this goal, we are doing whatever it
SBA hires Unisys for variety of loan systems support services
The Small Business Administration recently awarded a contract worth $51.9 million to Unisys Corp. to consolidate and operate systems that support the agency's loan programs. SBA awarded the seven-year contract under the General Service Administration Virtual Data Center contracts. The agency estimates the contract at $44 million, but if the agency exercises all its options over the life of the contract, it will edge toward $52 million, said Dan Vellucci, SBA's director of planning
Advanced OCR system will capture Census 2000
The Census Bureau's Data Capture System 2000 will let the agency process more forms electronically than it did for the last decennial census, reducing data entry errors and personnel costs. Because the system uses an optical character recognition program running under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 to capture data from scanned documents, the Census Bureau will need fewer part-time employees to key in data, bureau officials said.
Year 2000 program director has confidence in FAA's success
GCN last spoke with Ray Long, director of the Federal Aviation Administration's Year 2000 Program Office, in July when Congress and the General Accounting Office were hammering the agency for getting off to a slow start in its year 2000 work. Since then, FAA met the Office of Management and Budget's Sept. 30 renovation milestone, reporting that 99 percent of its mission-critical systems are year 2000-ready.
Education names Woods its COO for aid
As the government's new education financial aid chieftain, Greg Woods will get the chance to implement the ideas and policies he championed as deputy director of Vice President Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The Education Department earlier this month named Woods as its chief operating officer for the Office of Student Financial Assistance, a performance-based organization.
FEMA calls on president's council for more help on 2000 preparations
The Federal Emergency Management Agency needs more readiness assessments from the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion before it can prepare an emergency response plan to handle possible year 2000 disruptions, a FEMA official said. "We have to plan for the unknown at all times," said Lacy Suitor, FEMA's executive associate director for response and recovery. "We need the assessments."
Battle of the Blues: Whose supercomputer is fastest?
Two supercomputers at Energy Department labs are duking it out for the title of world's fastest machine. IBM Corp. in September delivered two-thirds of an RS/6000 SP supercomputer, called Blue Pacific, to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The supercomputer, when fully assembled at IBM's laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., achieved a peak performance of 3.88 trillion floating-point operations per second, said Dave Turek, IBM's marketing director for RS/6000 SP. IBM will deliver the final third of
New Energy CIO brings IT skills to job
The Energy Department's new chief information officer said he believes his diverse background in information technology acquisition, architecture and policy at the Air Force has prepared him well for the federal CIO ranks. "I view my job as providing a focus and coordination in IT across the department," John H. Gilligan said.
FAA pulls tracking app from two radar centers
The Federal Aviation Administration has hit some turbulence in getting aircraft-tracking software ready for 2000. At radar centers serving major airports in Chicago and Dallas, FAA in recent weeks reverted to an old version of the Automated Radar Terminal System—one that is not 2000-ready. Complaints from air traffic controllers at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport led FAA early this month to pull the plug on the latest ARTS version there. Last week, air traffic controllers at the Dallas-Fort
Education awards CSC four task orders for consolidation of financial aid systems
The Education Department last month awarded four task orders worth $150 million to Computer Sciences Corp. to consolidate and operate systems that support five of the department's financial assistance programs. Education awarded the task orders under the General Services Administration Virtual Data Center contracts. The department previously awarded a $71 million VDC task order to CSC to run the National Student Loan Systems, which tracks loans after students receive them.
NOAA computer modeler stays step ahead of El Nio
Ming Ji, a native of China, says science has always come easy to him. He now uses complex weather models to predict El Ni'o's patterns. Ming Ji has a reputation for burning the most computer time of any scientist at the National Center for Environmental Prediction. The meteorologist, a U.S. citizen born in China, works 50 or more hours a week running climate models on a Silicon Graphics Inc. Origin2000 server. His job: predicting
FEMA automates property inspection scheduling
A telephone registration process and a custom PC application let the Federal Emergency Management Agency help disaster victims begin rebuilding their homes, businesses and lives quickly. The process automates the sign-up for applying for aid. During phone interviews, FEMA agents gather the data in the PC application, which runs under Microsoft Windows NT 3.51. By using the teleregistration app, FEMA agents cut paperwork, said Glenn Garcelon, chief of FEMA's National Processing Services Center in Denton, Texas.
NASA steps out on seat
With two orders totalling almost $175 million, NASA last month became the first agency to use one of the government's two new multiple-award seat management buys. NASA late last month awarded a $154.9 million task order under its Outsourcing the Desktop Initiative for NASA program to OAO Corp. of Greenbelt, Md. Earlier in the month, it awarded a $19.6 million ODIN order to RMS Information Systems Inc. of Vienna, Va.
DNS snafu delays user access to space Web site
Sen. John Glenn's participation in the recent shuttle flight prompted NASA to upgrade its Web service. A NASA error in listing the Domain Name System for a Web site hosting information about the John Glenn space shuttle mission temporarily barred access to the site. "As we were trying to upload content, we noticed something was not working right," said Kelly Humphries, assistant for operations in the public affairs office at the Johnson Space Center
USDA's Anne Thomson Reed focuses on human resources in accepting award
For Anne Thomson Reed, managing people in an increasingly technological age is a tougher challenge than the technology itself. "We need to start thinking about developing the next generation of information technology employees," said the Agriculture Department chief information officer. And the techno-savvy people increasingly in demand need to be seen not as nerds, but as the change agents they are, she told some 1,000 government IT and vendor officials who gathered last
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