7 ‘Say What’ Moments from GITEC Summit 2013
From sequestration to unified communications, feds speak their mind.
If you bring a group of techies together to muse about the state of technology, there are bound to be a few intriguing moments. Federal IT gatherings are no different; witness some of the comments made yesterday during GITEC Summit 2013 in Baltimore:
- “Pretty much for the last four years, we’ve been flat-lined while demands on IT have grown exponentially. In some ways, we feel like we’ve been sequestered for four years.” — Horace Blackman, CIO for the Veterans Affairs Department’s Central Office
- “Mobile may be bigger than cloud going forward.” — Joe Klimavicz, CIO at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- “It’s hard to do a lot of innovation; you have to invest to innovate.” — Robert Coen, acting director of the National Institutes of Health IT Acquisition and Assessment Center
- “I have worked in two completely different cultures: At the Environmental Protection Agency, we were the tree huggers; at the National Nuclear Security Administration, we’re the bomb lovers.” — Oliver Voss, acting head of the contracting activity, NNSA Office of Acquisition Management
- “Our data center was designed pre-virtualization thinking — in an ideal world, we would have provisioned more accurately.” — Simone Szykman, CIO at the Commerce Department
- “Mobile devices are productivity tools, and you’re going to have preferences in productivity tools.” — Kimberly Hancher, CIO at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
- “With unified communications, today we’re basically asking industry to unify what it had offered as a package 10 years ago.” — Gary Wall, chief technology officer for the Health and Human Services Department
