Locatis, Osborn stepping down from posts

There were two notable federal technology personnel moves on Thursday.

First, Michael Locatis, assistant secretary of the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, will leave effective on Friday, in a story reported by Federal News Radio.

Bobbie Stempfley, who served in that role before Locatis joined the agency, will replace Locatis, the former chief information officer at the Department of Energy, on an interim basis. Locatis served for nine months.

Also, Bob Osborn, CIO of the National Nuclear Security Administration, is retiring as of Friday, according to Information Week.

Osborn joined NNSA as its CIO in January of 2011 following 26 years in the Marine Corps.

VanRoekel called to testify on wasteful IT spending

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has called a hearing to discuss “the wasteful and dysfunctional fashion in which the federal government acquires information technology systems and services.”

Among those testifying in the January 22 hearing include U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel and Dave Powner, the director for information technology management issues at the Government Accountability Office.

“American taxpayers have spent more than $600 billion on IT over the past decade,” the committee, chaired by Congressman Darrell Issa, said in release. “Currently, the federal government spends about $80 billion annually on IT, with industry experts estimating that as much as 70% of new federal IT acquisitions fail or fall behind schedule. The estimated cost to the taxpayer of these failed IT programs is as high as $20 billion each year.”

Also scheduled to testify:

• The Honorable Tom Davis, Former Member of Congress, and Chairman of the Government Reform Committee
• Douglas Bourgeois, Vice President, Chief Cloud Executive, VMware, Inc.
• Michael Klayko, Advisor and Former CEO, Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
• Chris Niehaus, Director, Office of Civic Innovation, Microsoft Corporation

Internet co-founder Cerf appointed to NSF

Vint Cerf, one of the recognized founders of the Internet, is joining the federal government … again.

President Obama on Thursday announced his intention to nominate Cerf, now a vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, as member of the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation.

While working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Cerf, along with Bob Kahn, are credited with developing the technology that allowed computer to transmit information between themselves which became the foundation of the Internet.

Cerf also worked as MCI where he was part of the development of the first commercial email system, MCI Mail, that was connected to the Internet.

The National Science Board establishes NSF policies within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the president and Congress and serves as an independent policy advisory body to each on science and engineering research and education issues.

HP selected for $543 million VA IDIQ

HP Enterprises Services is one of the vendors selected for the Department of Veterans Affairs Real-Time Location System contract valued at $543 million.

Under the five-year indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract, HP will help VA procure and deploy a management system that will assist in the automation and improvement of operations and veteran healthcare services.

The contract will equip 152 medical centers in the 21 Veteran Integrated Service Networks and seven Consolidated Medical Outpatient Pharmacy facilities with real-time location technologies

“The quality of veteran care and improving the delivery of our healthcare services are the driving forces behind implementing the RTLS solution,” said Kimberly Brayley, director, RTLS Project Management Office, Veteran Health Administration. “Leveraging state-of-the-art technology allows VA to decrease operational costs and increase efficiencies, satisfaction and quality healthcare delivery.”

In support of the RTLS program, HP will partner with CenTrak, Intelligent InSites and WaveMark, to perform development, integration, implementation, testing, training and support functions.

“The VA meets today’s federal healthcare requirements by providing an agile, flexible and innovative platform for improved operational performance and patient care,” said Marilyn Crouther, senior vice president and general manager, U.S. Public Sector, HP Enterprise Services. “With HP’s RTLS application and services, the VA is able to deliver patient-centric, high-quality healthcare to valued U.S. veterans.”

FedPod: Snow, We the People and Interior sec stepping down

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A snow storm is hitting D.C., “We the People” gets a new signature threshold and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is the latest to step down.

Army CIO honors Martin Luther King

In a new blog post, Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence praised the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. in a celebration of the holiday bearing his name.

“Dr. King, through faith, perseverance, and reason, changed the course of our Nation forever. He lived by the measure ‘What are you doing for others?’ — an ideal that resonates with our Army values and Warrior Ethos,” Lawrence wrote.

She continued, “Dr. King was a driving force behind the American civil rights movement, and a half-century later we continue to celebrate his life and dream of advancing equality, opportunity and social justice for all Americans.”

Read Lawrence’s full tribute to Dr. King.

Labor makes online tools mobile-friendly

The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration has made some of its most popular online tools available as mobile-optimized websites.

The change is part of the department’s ongoing efforts to make workforce resources more open and accessible to the communities that need them most.

Jane Oates, assistant secretary of labor for employment and training, wrote on the department’s blog that the following tools are now available:

• Locate and contact the American Job Center closest to them.
• Conduct a Job Search by searching local job listings throughout the entire United States. Job listings are updated daily and can be searched by job type or keyword as well as by city, state or ZIP code.
• Perform a Veterans Job Search to match military job experience to civilian careers, and then view local job listings for those careers. Users can search by their military job title or their occupational classification (MOC/MOS) code and can view job listings by city, state or ZIP code.
• Browse the Salary Finder, which provides average hourly wages or annual salaries by occupation and location. The data come from the Occupational Employment Statistics program of the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Search the Training Finder for education and training programs in a specific area. Users can search by occupation, program or school, and then find contact information for the relevant program.

ICE’s Eisensmith the new DHS CISO

Jeff Eisensmith is the new chief information security officer at the Department of Homeland Security, his former office confirmed to FedScoop.

Eisensmith was previously the CISO at DHS’s Immigration and Customers Enforcement. He will be replaced at ICE by Tom DiBiase.

‘We the People’ raises signature threshold

The White House is raising the signature threshold on the administration’s online petition site, “We the People,” in order to give “the most popular ideas the time they deserve,” said White House Director of New Media said Macon Phillips.

In a post on the White House blog, Phillips said the threshold will increase from 25,000 signatures in 30 days to 100,000 signatures in the same time frame to get an official response from the White House.

“It’s wonderful to see so many people using We the People to add their voices to important policy debates here in Washington and bring attention to issues that might not get the attention they deserve,” Phillips said.

This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist.

This is the second time the White House has raised the signature threshold. Users originally needed 5,000 signatures for a response, but that was raised to 25,000 quickly after the site’s launch in September 2011.

According to Phillips, in the last two months of 2012, use of We the People more than doubled as roughly 2.4 million new users joined the system, 73,000 petitions were created and 4.9 million signatures were registered.

In the first 10 months of 2012, it took an average of 18 days for a new petition to cross the 25,000-signature threshold. In the last two months of the year, that average time was cut in half to 9 days.

Interior secretary latest to step down

Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will step down at the end of March.

“Colorado is and will always be my home,” Salazar said. “I look forward to returning to my family and Colorado after eight years in Washington, D.C. I am forever grateful to President Obama for his friendship in the U.S. Senate and the opportunity he gave me to serve as a member of his cabinet during this historic presidency.”

Salazar joined the Obama administration as the 50th secretary of the Interior in January of 2009. He previously was a senator from Colorado from 2005 to 2009 and was previously the state’s attorney general.

Salazar gain notoriety for overseeing the department during the BP oil spill in 2010 by administering a moratorium on offshore drilling.

In recent weeks, a number of Obama’s Cabinet members and advisors have announced plans to leave the administration, including Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

Said President Obama of Salazar:

“I want to thank Ken for his hard work and leadership on behalf of the American people. As the Secretary of the Interior, Ken has helped usher in a new era of conservation for our nation’s land, water, and wildlife. Ken has played an integral role in my Administration’s successful efforts to expand responsible development of our nation’s domestic energy resources. In his work to promote renewable energy projects on our public lands and increase the development of oil and gas production, Ken has ensured that the Department’s decisions are driven by the best science and promote the highest safety standards.”