Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness

It seems like everybody in federal information technology was at the AWS Washington, DC event a couple of weeks ago.   We didn't manage to interview Tyler Johnson from the floor, so we got him on a Zoom call to explain how his company can help federal leaders achieve the goals for their agency. Tyler Johnson says that CloudBees can take all the point providers at the AWS event and wrangle them int...

The good news is that today's digital technology allows for seemingly infinite variations on a code; the bad news is malicious actors know this and change their code constantly. One of today's responses to this constant attack is called "continuous" improvement.   Quite a simple phrase to type, but difficult to accomplish.   How do you continuously improve a complex software application that is us...

There are certainly many ways to approach security in today's complex hybrid federal cloud. raditionally, a manager would look at a system and have an agent assigned to each machine. This could be a virtual machine or a real instance. This structure goes back to the days of servers in the back room and megabytes of storage.   Once you put a few "zeros" behind some data stores, then you have a prob...

When 10,000 people show up to talk about cloud computing, what topics do they cover? Today, we sit down with Jeffery Kratz, Vice President, of Worldwide Public Sector Channels & Alliances to find out. With a conference this large, there are hundreds of stories to tell.   To focus on the needs of the federal government, we will look at how improvement with Amazon partners can help federal agencies...

Forty years ago, the boxer Roberto Duran famously said, "No mas."   Translated from Spanish, it means, "no more." Sugar Ray Leonard was bombarding him with too many punches to handle. The flood of data and the incredible size of data stores in the federal government is causing the federal government to examine how to store and categorize data more efficiently. We could be reaching the point where...

If you go to Google Trends and compare "Artificial Intelligence" to "Chief Data Officer" you will find a hockey stick for AI and a pancake for Chief Data Officer.   It seems that many are ignoring the importance of the Chief Data Officer in assuring that the data used for AI is accurate. The importance of managing data in the federal government has been reflected in the formation of the Federal Go...

Our interview is with Steve Forster, a data scientist from the DLA. Steve started in the warehouse and through years of struggle and hard work managed to rise to the position of Senior Data Strategist. This parallels the transformation that the DLA is undergoing. The DLA was formed in 1961 and has over 25,000 people supporting the Department of Defense worldwide. To reduce costs and improve servic...

Consider this:   a few years ago, a Navy officer would have a financial question about how a program was executed, and its t took 45 days to get an answer.   Certainly, a contrast for a Naval Aviator's need for speed.   Today, we interview two leaders in the Navy's Financial Management Data and Digital Transformation program.   They provide insight on a wide range of topics with a focus on giving...

When Covid hit, thousands of federal employees bumped up the number of visits to federal agency websites. But let's not forget the number of citizens visiting federal agency websites has skyrocketed as well.   It is possible that these websites were designed before the epidemic with expectations of a certain volume of visits and transactions that were much lower. The obvious logjam is data access,...

With all this hype about artificial intelligence, one key component that is getting left behind is the quality of the data that is used.   To use a biblical reference, if you build your house on sand, chances are it will not survive the next storm. Talend is a company that has a focus on data integration and management.   In today's   interview with Tom Scurlock gives listeners an overview of how...

Covid prioritized identity verification. It went from the bottom of the tech stack to the top. Many federal agencies have zero trust initiatives divided into segments; each group starts with identification as the first pillar. Our guest Jordan Burris has years of experience in managing identities for large organizations. He has worked in commercial enterprise technology as well as the Office of Ma...

If you can distill today's cybersecurity recommendations down to one word, that word me be "trust." We have Executive Orders that talk about "trust" in digital architecture.   Look at the motto for today's enterprise architecture, "Zero Trust Architecture." The way most of us apply this trust is to garden a variety of humans. This may involve using some kind of a." system to assure that a person i...

When industries mature, users learn how to optimize them.   For example, early televisions were huge, expensive, and black and white.   Technology has made them small, cheap, and stunning.   When the cloud was introduced 15 years ago, there was a rough transition with rough starts, failures, and much money wasted.   Recent figures from Gartner indicate that, in 2023, the global public services clo...

For some reason, the topic of Artificial Intelligence has embedded itself into the common mind. It is so pervasive that one might walk into a local Seven-Eleven and hear a conversation about ChatGPT. It may be fine for an undergraduate student to use generative AI to help write a term paper, but those who manage federal agencies must get serious about how Generative AI can help, or hurt, their age...

When you look at the Executive Orders that have been issued you can see many references to user experience. The initial order, #14058, included thirty-six customer experience improvements across seventeen different federal agencies. This was followed up in March of 2023 with further fact sheets that detail improving the typical citizen experience with federal websites. It is one thing to issue an...

In every spy movie, you see there is a scene where someone is in line at an airport and there is emotional music where the government agent looks at the passport, looks at the actor, and makes a decision. Well, the world of digital identities is much more complicated that any scene in a Bourne movie. In our digital world, identification is such a hot topic we have conferences that have an extensiv...

Our post-Covid world is full of clouds merging, remote data being collected, and a rash of new federal security initiatives. This is causing federal technology professionals to look for better ways to see what is on their network and then make decisions on how to use that data. In the last six months, there has been a surge of interest in a company called Elastic. During today's interview with Geo...

When the history of software development is written, they will look back at the decade that preceded 2023 as the era where developers started to pull pre-written code off repositories and assemble code in this "modular" manner. Many federal systems are constructed in this "cut and paste" method. This is all well and good if the code can be trusted.   But can it? Today, Emile Monette from Synopsys...

When it comes to the federal government, the old news is "move to the cloud." Today, the question is, how can your agency optimize its presence in the hybrid cloud? Today, we sit down with a tech veteran, Michelle Rudnicki, the Vice President of the U.S. Public Sector for NetApp to answer that question. Her company has been involved in data management for decades and it is difficult to shoehorn he...

Out of all the phrases that technology has generated in the past ten years, I think I like the phrase, "cloud washing" the most.   The concept is that a traditional company would promote itself as always being cloud native.   Kind of like being a Monday morning quarterback. In 2023, the variation on that theme is "Artificial Intelligence washing."   Now that AI is a trending phrase you can see tec...

Out of all the phrases that technology has generated in the past ten years, I think I like the phrase, "cloud washing" the most.   The concept is that a traditional company would promote itself as always being cloud native.   Kind of like being a Monday morning quarterback. In 2023, the variation on that theme is "Artificial Intelligence washing."   Now that AI is a trending phrase you can see tec...

In March of 2023, the National Cybersecurity Strategy was released. Lots of pundits opined a day or two after the release; rather than an immediate reaction, it seems best to wait for a news cycle or two to look at the strategy from a better perspective. Well, what better perspective than a person who has worked inside the government, is an attorney, and has some serious credentials in the tech wo...

When the history of technology of the twentieth century is written, one of the giants will probably be Ray Kurzweil. As most listeners know, he designed the first Optical Character Recognition (OCR) machine.   The drudgery and error-inducing process of keying in forms was reduced.   Today's interview is with Chirs Harr from Hyperscience.   During the interview, he gives listeners an understanding...

If you toss a baseball anywhere inside the Washington, D.C. beltway, you will probably hit a company that develops software. Well, what differentiates them? Size?   Degrees the staff hold.   The number of contracts?   Today, we sit down with a couple of software development experts from Excella to talk about completing more that the bare minimum for a project. They argue, quite cogently, that qual...

Artificial Intelligence certainly has piqued the interest of the defense community here in Washington, DC.    The Brookings Institution has a recent study that shows 307 vendors working with the federal government on many aspects of artificial intelligence. Today, we look at a company that has been involved with helping humans leverage information from data for over 25 years. His emphasis is to be...