May 6, 2008

NIH procuring grants systems engineering help

One of the larger, if not the largest, grants management system in government is run by the NIH. It’s called the Electronic Research Administration (eRA…yes, with a small ‘e’) and you can read all about it here. NIH is currently recompeting…

AWARD — off-the-shelf grant evaluation software

Thanks to Matt Jillings at Compusearch, I recently met John Thompson and Kristen Chhim of Commerce Decisions, an English company that produces procurement source selection and performance monitoring systems for the British government, called AWARD. (By the way, I find myself intensely…

GMLOB alliances: The story updated

Back in March I posted about the various MOUs signed between agencies and GMLOB providers. Alice Stewart of Management Concepts has been researching this, and I’ve been very remiss in not updating the list. So I’m fixing that now! Additions are…
May 5, 2008

Office 2007 converter for OSX

After receiving a lot of files with the dreaded “.docx” filename extension, I discovered that Microsoft has a converter available for OSX that transforms these Windows Office 2007 files into Mac Office 2004 format. It’s not perfect (it’s in beta right now) and…
April 28, 2008

GForge 4.5.11+ works well on PHP5

For our NITRC project, which is based on GForge 4.5.x, we wanted to integrate it with MediaWiki.  However, while the latest version of MediaWiki (which has group workspaces) runs on PHP 5, and all of the GForge documentation refers to…

Grantium conference and news

Grantium’s got a lot on its plate these days! They have just announced their first North American G3 User Conference, to be held at the Hyatt in Bethesda, Maryland, from June 11th to 13th. You can go here to review the…
April 23, 2008

FBO.gov’s response to my bug report

FedBizOpps switched to a new system on April 1st and that system had some serious problems, which I reported to the FBO team and posted here on the blog. Last week I got a call from someone at FBO about this bug report and…
April 16, 2008

Shared services = standard services

Rant alert. Larry Neff is the Deputy CFO at DOT, which runs an FMLOB shared services center. In this FCW article he makes it clear what the mission of these government shared service centers is:  …Neff said, agencies that require…

NextGov — Collaborative technologies drive accountability, say international CIOs

Nice quote from Karen Evans about wikis in government, in this article while commenting on the use of OMB’s MAX Federal Community:  “There was nervousness because the comments are there for everyone to see, and may become a political commentary,” Evans…
April 11, 2008

Demo of MAX Federal Community and BFELoB discussion

Just got this from the GSA collaboration folks. If you’re a government person with an interest in online collaboration, this could be a great event!  The Budget Formulation and Execution Line of Business (BFELoB) Task Force is hosting a free forum on its…