In Depth Show Blog – Aug. 9, 2013

Six furlough days is the latest total from the Department of Defense. Cutting five of them required taking money from all over the DoD budget. Robert Hale, undersecretary of Defense, comptroller and chief financial officer at the Department of Defense, explained the journey the Pentagon took to get to six furlough days total.

Planning your future and your retirement gets emotional sometimes, but it’s really a numbers game. Understanding – and crunching – the numbers can take a lot of the emotion out of the planning.

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The job of your agency’s chief information officer will change. The question is, how? That depends on the strategy your agency wants the CIO’s office to pursue. Mark Forman is director of Government Transaction Services, and former E-Gov Administrator at the Office of Management and Budget.

Sequestration affects almost everything in government. The acquisition cycle looks different this year than any year in the past. Joanne Woytek, program manager at NASA SEWP, says the different look this year came as a bit of a surprise.

Training dollars disappear all over government when budgets get tight. Demonstrating that training is worth the money will help you hold onto that money. Melissa Starinsky, chancellor of the Acquisition Academy at the Department of Veterans Affairs, says that ROI demonstration isn’t as hard as it looks.

Computer processing power is embedded into places you might not even think of. One of the latest hacking advisories pertains to toilets. You can control one kind of toilet with an Android app and that means it’s on the network, and accessible by hackers. Preparing for the Internet of Things adds another layer onto cybersecurity preparations.

The Defense Information Systems Agency says it’s in the midst of a major push to overhaul the technology it uses to move voice, video and data communications all over the world every day. As Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu reports, the agency’s planning several upcoming contracts to move to a concept called Unified Capabilities.