Friday, May 21, 2021
Highlighting articles and insights that we have found interesting for the week ending May 21, 2021

Federal data is key to optimal governance and business — open it with public input. To be truly transformational, government data must be open and it must meet public needs. That is why our organization, the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE), has joined with more than two dozen other groups and individuals in an open letter calling on the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to ensure stakeholder engagement and meaningful public input into the content, priorities, and management of federal data programs. Our cosigners include the Center for Data Innovation, Demand Progress, the Government Accountability Project and two academic centers.

Federal CIO Says New IT Modernization Plan In the Works. The work that began with the government CIO working group—the Federal CIO Council—will result in either an update to the Trump-era IT Modernization Plan or a new document signaling a shift in priorities. Either way, it will encompass a holistic vision for IT delivery across government, Martorana said. “We’re all trying to solve the same problems; we all understand what the risks are and the opportunities for us to both travel together as an enterprise but, also, uniquely look at each agency’s maturity level,” she said. “But we are working together.”

Leveraging the TMF for the secure modernization of high value asset. In this post, we will explore the opportunity to leverage the TMF to modernize HVAs while improving cybersecurity in a manner consistent with the EO’s direction. In our first post, we outlined elements of the Office of Management and Budget’s TMF/American Rescue Plan (APR) guidance that were just recently updated. The updated guidance incorporates new flexibilities in the fund’s payback requirements and also continues to focus modernization efforts on addressing High Value Assets (HVAs), improving cybersecurity, improving citizen-facing services, and leveraging scalable cross-government services.              

How CISA limited the impact of the SolarWinds attack. “As part of the SolarWinds campaign, EINSTEIN was extremely useful in terms of identifying suspicious network traffic from a handful of federal civilian agencies that upon further investigation by those agencies helped identify additional victims of this campaign. It’s worth noting that EINSTEIN didn’t prevent the intrusion nor was it able to detect the intrusion until, in this case, we received threat information from private sector partners to inform our detection and prevention mechanisms,” said Matt Hartman, the deputy executive assistant director for cyber at CISA, in an interview with Federal News Network.

Biden Expected to Unveil Full Budget Proposal Next Week, Without a Permanent OMB Director. President Biden is poised to submit his full fiscal 2022 budget request next week, despite not having a permanent budget director or even a nominee for the position yet. 

10 signs that your ego is in charge of your leadership. Any leader can become self-serving if they find themselves constantly arguing for their point of view, envying others, regularly interrupting or boasting about their success, writes Lolly Daskal. "Few things can do more to undermine your influence, respect and trust," she writes. Lolly Daskal

Ditch your 5-year plan for an adaptive approach. Strategic plans will always prove incorrect, but by focusing on the impact of outcomes, seeing projects as "bets" and making quarterly updates, companies have a better chance for success, argues this article from NOBL, which promotes this approach. NOBL Academy

Why resilience is not just for people. Resilience is a trait companies need just as much as people do, as COVID-19 has shown, according to this McKinsey analysis. "Firms should strive as much as possible to embed resilience in the way they work, in a way that makes them better in normal times, not just in the face of unpredictable threat or change," the authors write. McKinsey

Anxiety When There’s a Lot to Be Anxious About. Several recently released books offer some guidance. Only some of them discuss the pandemic; nevertheless, they present an opportunity to rethink the problem of anxiety and test new strategies for damping it down or, even better, putting it to more-productive use.

Next Week on The Business of Government Hour: A Conversation with Joel Gurin on Aligning Open Data, Open Source, and Hybrid Cloud Adoption in Government. How do analytics and technology intersect and mutually reinforce one another? What can be done to integrate these efforts more effectively? How can government leaders leverage the intersection of open data, open source, and hybrid cloud models to drive improved performance an productivity. Join host Michael J. Keegan as he explores these questions with Joel Gurin coauthor of the IBM Center report, Aligning Open Data, Open Source, and Hybrid Cloud Adoption in Government, and President of the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE).          

Broadcast Schedule: The show airs Monday at 11 a.m., and Friday at 1 p.m. on Federal News Network 1500AM WFED