Join Cisco experts, selected partners, and industry leaders at the 2012 Government Solutions Forum. Get program updates by searching #ciscogsf on Twitter.

We invite you to join Cisco experts, selected partners, and industry leaders on March 21 at the fourth annual Government Solutions Forum. At this interactive educational forum you will discover how public sector agencies and educational organizations are successfully implementing new processes and technologies to improve operational efficiency, enable workforce productivity, and deliver measurable results. You will also benefit from:

• Technology showcases
• Interactive demonstrations by Cisco strategic partners
• Peer-to-peer networking opportunities
• Detailed discussions of customer best practices and case studies

Benefits

Title: Four Tracks Provide Maximum Value

The 2012 Government Solutions Forum is structured in four tracks to provide detailed technical learning about the topics facing today’s technology and program management professionals in governmental and educational organizations. Choose the track that best suits your interests. They include:

• Track 1 Mobile Collaboration
• Track 2 Unified Data Center and the Cloud
• Track 3 Cutting the Cost of Government
• Track 4 Managing Risk in a Dynamic Network Environment

Tags: government solutions forum, grand hyatt, gsf, lunch, pollock, washington

The New York Times’ Nicole Perlroth filed an alarming account of government and corporate network vulnerabilities that comes across like a briefing dossier read by James Bond aboard a Heathrow-Beijing flight. But it does the good work of putting a critical technology issue before a broad audience.

“Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery” (NYT, Feb. 10) details extraordinary counter-espionage precautions taken in China by prudent travelers and their organizations. Many now leave their usual notebooks, smartphones and tablets safe at home. Some say a device taken into China is never again permitted to touch their corporate network.

Read More »

Tags: cyber security, cybercrime, cybersecurity, data, data deluge, government, security

Jeff Frazier & Norman Jacknis, Cisco IBSG

Protection is a public service and one that can only effectively be carried out with the support and consent — and participation — of the people.  We’ve read stories about how Twitter played a key role in responding to wildfires or iPhone applications show a community map of registered sex offenders and crime areas.

But in public safety, especially, there is a unique source of participants – one that is especially important in these days of tighter state/local budgets. In California, for example, there are nearly 190,000 sworn active public safety officers (police and fire).  However, there are nearly a million retired and former officers.  This represents, on average, nearly 15 million years of skills and experience walking the streets.  This population of people never lost their purpose or their desire to contribute — they just ran out of time!

How can we harness this trusted population? A local government could create an “opt-in” network of these experienced citizens.  Typically, public safety training records are centralized through a central state body.  A database comparison of the records can be matched against the ‘opt-in’ application.

Once accepted, the officer will receive instantaneous alerts on his cell phone, based on its GPS location, about reported problems.  When a problem is reported, the public safety dispatcher would have the ability to examine a geo-spatial screen and discover how many people are in a particular area and who best to solicit or notify.

Governments across the country should enable this skilled population to support public safety problem-solving, in order to identify, recognize, and address problems much faster.

Tags: gov20, government, localgov, Public Safety, publicsafety, social media, State Local Government

The victim of a gunshot wound to the back of the head, Joseph “Jay” Briseno Jr. came home from his 2003 tour of duty in Iraq to an entirely different life—one that requires extensive ongoing care.

To make necessary healthcare services more accessible to Jay, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, D.C. (DCVAMC) worked with Cisco TelePresence to tailor a telehealth solution specifically to Jay’s needs. Jay can communicate with his doctors through the telehealth device installed in his family home, 30 miles away from the hospital, and avoid the ambulance ride he would otherwise have to take every time he had an appointment.

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Tags: Cisco TelePresence, Joseph Jay Briseno, mobile telehealth, telehealth, telemedicine, TelePresence, Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Ready or not, governments, healthcare providers, and schools are going mobile. If your workforce isn’t mobile yet, it soon will be: by 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a mobile workforce (one that specifically relies on tablet technology), according to Gartner.

As I mentioned before, mobile employees will depend on telepresence and video collaboration tools to optimize their work experiences: these technologies do a wonderful job of filling the gap in personal interaction that can occur when an entire office works outside of the actual office.

But telepresence and video are only as good as the networks that support them.

Read More »

Tags: Gartner, medianet, mobile, mobile employees, Tablets, TelePresence

This week I had the opportunity to meet with a research group from the University of Tokyo visiting California to explore the role of technology for intelligent cities of the future.   I prepared for this meeting with a discussion with colleage Dr. Norm Jacknis concerning his collaboration with government leaders and university researchers who are delving deeply into the impact of the Internet on government, politics, and society. 

Three takeaways were clear from these conversations:

1. Critical importance of collaborative research across expertise domains, geographies, and public and private sectors

2. Capability to harness the explosion of information or big data deluge that is being fueled by mobile devices connected to the intelligent network

3. An optimistic point of view about potential for research applications, and I’m an optimist!

Next month, Cisco is hosting a live webcast with Dr. Martin Chalfie, 2008 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry Fueling Innovation:  How Research is Really Done (February 29, 2012 at 9:00 am Pacific Time / 12:00 pm Eastern Time). 

This webcast will explore how the fruits of basic research are critical to fueling applications. Dr. Chalfie will give examples from his own research developing Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) as a biological marker, as well as from work by others, to demonstrate that the application of basic research into fundamental problems in biology is important for its own sake and, fuels the development of various new applications.

While research is typically focused on one industry, great discoveries generally provide value for multiple industries. 

Dr. Chalfie is a Professor of Biological Sciences and former chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. In 2008 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Tsien for his introduction of GFP as a biological marker.

Tags: Big Data, Collaborative research, Connected Government, data deluge, Smart Cities

To answer that question first we need to look at the significance the current IP layer has in our day to day lives. Beyond that we need to, for lack of better words, “follow the money” that these IP based applications, services and infrastructure support. Stability of IP based communication is something we may take for granted but what would happen if that stable IPv4 layer was replaced with a not so stable upgrade? My home network connection goes out, kind of irritating but in the big picture I will probably forget it… the first time. Service Providers realize that if they cannot provide you with a stable service you may not be a happy customer, which may open the door for you to look elsewhere. Beyond that, the loss of IP based communication in many industries is seen as a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars per second both in revenue generation and loss of opportunity. The point is, much of the world economy relies on a stable network at all times.

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Tags: certification, IPv6, ReadyLogo, USGipV6

In October, we wrote about the federal government’s move toward installing video and telepresence capabilities on mobile devices to improve communication, especially for law enforcement and defense purposes. With mobile telepresence, the government can enhance collaboration and response time during critical events.

A recent New York Times article reminds us, however, that to safely realize all of the benefits of telepresence, the government—or any organization—needs to ensure proper implementation of the video technology. Obviously, security concerns multiply when numerous mobile devices attach to a telepresence network.

Read More »

Tags: mobile devices, new york times, security, TelePresence, video, video traffice

2012 is the bicentennial of the War of 1812.  You may remember just two things about this period from your high school history class.  First, in an act of ignominy for the Americans, the British burned down the capital.  Second, the war ended with the resounding defeat of the British by the heroic General Andrew Jackson in January 1815, in what was the war’s only set-piece battle between the opposing sides.  Jackson eventually rode this victory into the Presidency.

There is only one problem with this battle.  It took place after the war was over.  The previous month, in Europe, the two sides had agreed to peace.  But in those days, communications was so slow that word of the peace didn’t reach New Orleans until February 1815.

Fast forward, approximately forty-eight years later, to the Civil War.  In the period between these two wars, in 1831, Morse thought up the idea for the electronic telegraph.  The Union Army had mastered its quick deployment, so that in 1863 while sitting in Washington, President Lincoln could read almost real time reports from the battlefields many miles away.

This was a dramatic increase in the speed of communications.  Not all that many decades later, telegraph lines and cables would unite the world.  Yet this did not fundamentally change the way people worked or lived or governed themselves.

So consider 2011, when the US Navy Seals got Osama Bin Laden.  There was a tweet about helicopters within several minutes, but the author didn’t know why the helicopters were nearby.  The first tweet with some confirmation came about forty-five minutes before President Obama made his announcement.

Now think back about forty-eight years before to November 22, 1963 and the assassination of President John Kennedy.  The news was out quickly all over television and radio and newspapers.  Walter Cronkite famously told the viewers of CBS News that the President had died thirty-eight minutes before.

Unlike the 19^th century examples, there was no dramatic speed up in the reporting of these two more recent events separated by roughly forty-eight years.  While we may have more sources of information in more places now than in 1963, word doesn’t get out all that much faster.  You could argue that the Telegraph had a greater impact on communications than the Internet.

Yet many of us have the feeling that our world has been changed by this communications.  Why is that?

I think it has to do with the changing nature of the work we do.  In the mid-19th century, more than three quarters of Americans made things or grew food.  In 2011, less than a quarter do so and the rest of us provide services — and increasingly intangible services, including ideas, knowledge, entertainment and the like which is delivered digitally.  Because better digital communications directly speeds up the delivery of these services, we see the impact more.  It’s the increasing availability of high quality communications, in conjunction with these significant socio-economic trends, which will continue to change our lives.

Please share with us how you’ve seen the confluence of these two trends? Reply here and visit the Cisco Public Sector Customer Connection Community.

[picture credit for Battle of New Orleans http://www.frenchcreoles.com/battnozz.jpg]

Tags: broadband, gov20, government, history, internet, network, neweconomy, technology

Do you work from home or on the road often? Do you love “work from home Fridays” where you can drink your coffee in your sweats while responding to emails? So do we. Working remotely saves hours of time on the road that can be better spent getting the kids ready for school or taking that early morning conference call and then immediately hopping on your laptop to work. We also know that teleworking can be great for a more flexible lifestyle but it can also present some challenges if managers do not set expectations of what is expected and if teleworkers don’t create productive work habits.  

Read More »

Tags: mobility, Secure Connectivity, telework, video

A number of forces are changing how we work, live, and innovate: pervasive technologies, distributed ways of working, “space rather than place” as a work ethos, new methods and modes of work, access to shared services, open versus closed innovation, a new generation of workers, environmental concerns, and macro socioeconomic shifts.

Given a choice, people will demand freedom to work, live, and innovate in ways that meet their individual lifestyles, unfettered by place. Meanwhile, pressures to reduce costs and seek new approaches to innovation are causing many private and public organizations to rethink how work gets done. Read More »

Tags: Big Data, Cisco, cloud services, device proliferation, future of work, IBSG, infrastructure, network, S+CC, security, smart applications, Smart+Connected Communities, urban services, urban sustainability, work-life

When it comes to using cutting-edge mobile video technology, Arkansas is blazing the trail for state and local governments.

In the process of developing a network to support data, voice, and video communication services, the state plans to integrate mobile devices into this system beginning this month (February, 2012). According to Government Technology, Arkansas state leaders want to improve public service by embracing what they see as a shift to “a more mobile environment.” Read More »

Tags: broadband, govtech, telework, video conferencing, videoconferencing

Remember when working a full day was 8 hours between 9 and 5? It was such a commonplace that they made a movie with that title, and anyone that worked outside of those hours were considered to be working “banker’s hours” (no offense intended.)

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Following the conclusion of State of Green Business 2012, I boarded a plane to Vancouver with Stephan Dolezalek, Managing Director, VantagePoint Venture Partners and one of my fellow panelists at the San Francisco conference, to ask that other “greenish city on a bay” similar questions that were pondered in San Francisco. (As some of you already know, these two cities enjoy a friendly rivalry to see who can be more sustainable and prosperous while still being hip and cool).

The Cities Summit, hosted and organized on February 1-2 by Vancouver’s city government, assembled an interesting group comprised of hundreds of international business and urban leaders. They focused on the design of creative, practical solutions for a sustainable urban future. The city invited me to moderate a session entitled, “City Finance 2.0: Next Generation Urban Infrastructure.” The invitation arose for one good reason: the focus of this  Vancouver discussion — the business of city building — closely mirrors the focus of the “2012 Meeting of the Minds,” which Toyota and Cisco and others will convene in San Francisco in October. Read More »

Tags: 21st century cities, Cisco, city transformation, green business, IBSG, Smart Cities, sustainable development, urban innovation, urban planning, urban sustainability

As cyber security threats increase, meeting the rigorous standards set forth by the Common Criteria community, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, and the Defense Information Systems Agency is more important than ever.

Cisco is an industry leader when it comes to government product certifications. Cisco’s Government Certifications ensure that its products meet the rigorous testing and certification criteria that are considered prerequisites for many of the world’s defense, civilian government and public sector network deployments.

Cisco leads and drives innovation in policy, requirements, solutions, architectures and standards enabling solutions to ensure mission success.

As a leader in providing certified and evaluated products to the global marketplace, Cisco maintains an active product certification and evaluation program for global government customers.

Check out the video below for the latest updates on Cisco government product certifications.

Stay tuned for more information on how Cisco continues to lead the way in government product certifications.

YouTube: Cisco Certification Firsts

For more information, please visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/govcerts

Tags: Cisco certification firsts, GCT, Gene Keeling, GGSG, global government solutions group, Government Certification Team, product certification, public sector