Maria Roat After leaving the location of CIO for the U.S. Department of Transportation, I co-founded a marketplace called GOVonomy, designed to compare government needs and opportunities with emerging technology products from startups and growth companies. These kind of products are cloud-based and should require the government’s FedRAMP security assessment. Yet most private companies don’t seem to be attentive to the FedRAMP program and process, or the way it may also help improve their cloud security. In order portion of a brand new series of discussions with top government leaders for InformationWeek Government, I interviewed Maria Roat, the FedRAMP director at GSA. The FedRAMP program offers a very good opportunity for all enterprise cloud products and repair providers, although they don’t seem to be immediately planning to market to government, because the rigor can help improve the safety of all their products and decrease liability. On areas of improvement for GSA and the FedRAMP to think about, it’s going to help to have the third... Read More »

Automaker alliance will let cars be recognized as Android devices, seeks to dim Apple, Microsoft influence in automotive tech. CES 2014: 8 Technologies To Watch (click image for larger view and slideshow) Google, automakers Audi, GM, Honda, Hyundai, and graphics chip maker NVIDIA have formed the Open Automotive Alliance to increase the Android platform to vehicles. The coalition of technology and car companies aims to position Android in automobiles this year. The businesses hope to advertise innovation, safety, and a more intuitive user experience. Sundar Pichai, senior VP of Android, Chrome, and Apps at Google, said in an announcement that bringing Android to automobiles will facilitate the combination of mobile technology into vehicles and supply drivers with a well-known interface. The initiative should simplify developing mobile applications that run on or along side automotive electronics — in place of writing code to speak with many various proprietary systems, car-oriented apps can process data using common Android APIs. [How should mobile apps be like cocktails? See... Read More »

Glassdoor characterizes these actual job interview questions as “oddball.” We give these questions the answers they deserve. Employment site Glassdoor on Friday plans to publish a listing of the pinnacle 25 Oddball Interview Questions for 2014, compiled from tens of thousands of interview questions shared by job seekers last year. Of those, 16 come from tech companies. Job interviews are nerve-wracking enough, but if combined with ill-conceived questions, they are often downright harrowing. It doesn’t must be that way. Job interviews may be conducted diligently and respectfully. But both parties do their homework. Sadly, that won’t always the case and job interviews, at the least in the course of the first round, often include one-size-fits-all questions that quantity to being poked with a pole, so a reaction may be recorded and a few poorly reasoned conclusion may be drawn. Now it’s probably never advisable to be a snarky job seeker. But when you end up confronted by such eye-rolling questions as these and also you... Read More »

UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh will discuss a model for tech product development, the role of tech in healthcare reform, and more during an InformationWeek.com radio chat on Tuesday. Innovation in healthcare technology takes a load more than really helpful. Consider telemedicine. Not just must a patient and doctor agree that a video session is fine to switch an in-person visit, but so must the insurance company that pays for the session, the federal government bodies that regulates it, and the hospital that supports it. The complexity involved is a huge reason healthcare provider the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center thinks it could help create breakthrough IT products. And it’s why UPMC has install a greater than 120-person Technology Development Center to refine technology that UPMC can use in-house and market to other healthcare providers and payers. The goal is to make UPMC in-house IT a profit source. “Almost everything I’m doing I’m thinking, ‘Can I make it right into a commercial product?'” says UPMC CIO... Read More »

Microsoft’s cloud services, including Xbox Live, were disrupted Thursday because of a DNS error. Services connected to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud suffered a disruption Thursday — the second one interruption in a under a month. Online reports indicate impacted services included Microsoft.com, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Xbox Live. Microsoft had resolved lots of the problems by Thursday night, avoiding the possibly cataclysmic possibility that Xbox Live will be down when Xbox One units went on sale just after midnight Friday morning. The disruptions began at 2:22 p.m. PT and stretched across multiple regions. Microsoft corporate vice chairman Scott Guthrie confirmed via Twitter that the issue failed to involve Azure itself. Rather, “The issue is a DNS name server issue outside of azure.” Microsoft said Thursday evening that Azure was running normally. As of Friday morning, the Azure service dashboard showed most services were functioning as intended, though partial interruptions were plaguing compute functions in Asia, Europe, and the u. s. . Despite the outage, Windows... Read More »