The month of September marks the busiest buying season for the federal government. In the final month of fiscal year 2018, an astonishing $97 billion was spent on 509, 828 contracts. On average, this equates to $3.2 billion per day.

September is also getting busier and busier. Between 2015 and 2018 spending increased by 39%.

The Federal Data Strategy principles (https://strategy.data.gov/principles), as currently articulated, are a set of best practices and guidelines, which could be utilized to govern the development and maturity of an organization’s management of data as an asset.  However, without guidance or a framework within which to actualize these principles, these principles may well be rendered a wish-list.

If you’re situated within the Washington, D.C. metro area or surrounding states, mark your calendar for the 2015 Informatica Government Summit to be held on April 23, 2015 at the Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel.

According to Federal Computer Week, federal agencies spend almost half of their annual IT budgets on supporting legacy applications. Even more worrying, about 47% of the government’s existing IT applications are based on legacy technology that needs modernizing.

While digital government innovation is on the rise, as evidenced by websites like Healthcare.gov and numerous state and local intra-agency and citizen-centric services, the underlying IT systems required to support these innovations – the middleware – is struggling to keep up.