Criterion Systems, a leading provider of information technology services to government and commercial clients, today announced the appointment of Greg Rothwell to the company's Board of Advisors. During his 34 year career in the federal acquisition community, Mr. Rothwell served in 10 different agencies and was responsible for standing up and growing some of the government’s largest procurement programs and contract vehicles.

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Criterion Systems, a leading provider of information technology services to government and commercial clients, ranked No. 7 on the Washington Business Journal's 2009 list of the "Fastest Growing Companies" in Greater Washington. The annual list recognizes 50 local companies based on revenue growth during a three-year period.

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Criterion HPS Inc. today announced the release of the Phantom, a
computationally dense smart computing platform with a 64-bit, highly-parallel architecture that allows enterprises to overcome the power, space and cooling challenges. With the delivery of the Phantom, the company is responding to industry demands for a green technology that supports computationally intensive workloads without growing the data center footprint.

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Criterion Systems, a leading provider of information technology services to government and commercial clients, welcomes Terry S. Kees, former Information Technology Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to its Board of Advisors. During her career with the CIA and her subsequent tenure with Lockheed Martin, Ms. Kees has a distinguished record of supporting the intelligence and national security community.

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Citizant (www.citizant.com), a leading provider of professional technical and business solutions to the federal government, today announced that it has hired Jason Hannah to manage the company’s growing portfolio of Justice and law enforcement programs. Hannah brings more than 25 years of management experience to Citizant, including a decade of leadership at Northrop Grumman on programs for the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DOJ and DHS), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

In Communities of Practice experiences, the biggest, and most positive, impacts have come in "NOT" selling KM, but painting a clear picture that KM is an activity needing attention based on business practices. The message entails that "bad knowledge" can be managed as well as "good knowledge". The difference is only the effectiveness of the methods and business practices creating the knowledge.

The potential benefits of cloud computing are overwhelming. However, attaining these benefits requires that each aspect of the cloud platform support the key design principles of the cloud model. One of the core design principles is dynamic scalability, or the ability to provision and decommission servers on demand. Unfortunately, the majority of today's database servers are incapable of satisfying this requirement.

Chris Kemp, CIO, Ames Research Center, NASA, delivered one of the most highly anticipated keynotes on how Cloud Computing is being used at NASA to help cut costs, increase efficiency, and allow the agency to increase focus on mission critical activities.

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The IJIS Institute , a nonprofit organization that focuses on mission-critical information sharing for justice, public safety, and homeland security, announces the release of a new document, NIEM Conformance for RFPs. The document is now available at http://www.ijis.org/docs/NIEM_Conformance_for_RFP_20091028.pdf.

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Only a few years ago, the term “Cloud Computing” was known only to the hyper-savvy techies of the world. Today, hardly a week goes by where technology publications and e-newsletters don’t mention the term and how it is revolutionizing the federal IT landscape. In 2009, GTRA has seen government executives go from bewilderment to general acceptance of Cloud as a viable model.

Although there is growing recognition of cloud computing’s benefits—and an ever stronger business case for achieving high performance by moving deeper into the cloud—progress is snagged on concerns about IT security. Enterprise IT leaders now must find the right balance between the risks and rewards of computing in the cloud. They can benefit by revisiting well-established IT security and enterprise risk management practices.

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Cloud Computing is without a doubt one of the most transformational technologies and concepts of this new administration, and is completely revolutionizing how IT leaders think about, build, and protect their technology infrastructures. As a relatively new, yet highly publicized technology, many questions remain regarding its security, viability and application in real-life settings.

FEMA mission requires a comprehensive and pervasive collaboration and information sharing environment within FEMA, across the Federal Government, with FEMA’s public and private sector partners, and with the public. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) will provide FEMA the ability to:
• Facilitate Quick Response to Changing Requirements
• Leverage Shared Infrastructure, Services, Information, and Solutions

• Ability to Share Interfaces with External Organizations

Learn how the Budget Line of Business used shared technology services to improve agency performance and build communities of practice engaging over 20,000 Federal users.

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• PHILIP WENGER, Deputy Policy Lead for Budget Formulation and Execution LoB, OMB

The notion that Enterprise Architecture is strictly an IT function has been one of the biggest barriers enterprise architects face in getting buy-in from business stakeholders. Actively engaging the business side of an agency/department is crucial to an enterprise architect’s ultimate goal of providing valuable services to its clients. This session will present a case study of what the Chief Architect’s office at Customs and Border Protection has done to overcome this challenge, and how CBP business leaders have made EA an integral part of the overall business strategy.

This session is designed to provide executives, program and project managers, and business owners an overview of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and its governing infrastructure. This course will discuss NIEM’s value proposition and organizational benefits as well as highlight NIEM implementation success stories. NIEM adoption strategies will be discussed, providing participants best practice techniques to incorporate NIEM into their organizations.

On June 19, 2009, the Secretary and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) implemented the Program Management Accountability System (PMAS), a new mechanism by which all VA IT projects would be managed. In conjunction with this announcement, the CIO halted over 40 programs to focus on re-planning, each of which would require the approval of the CIO in order to restart.

In astrophysics Dark Matter is responsible for the universe not flying apart, thus encouraging the growth and stability of the universe’s cohesiveness & structure. In the Business Driven Enterprise Architecture, the Dark Matter of the BDEA is what is ultimately responsible to ensure complete integrity and cohesiveness of a true overall Integrated Enterprise Architecture that is completely known. The Dark Matter of the BDEA comprises proper identification & clarification of Value Chains and Value Streams.