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Wired Workplace
The WordPress Example
- By Brittany Ballenstedt
- July 30, 2012
- comments
Speaking at the Next Generation of Government Conference on Friday, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg said his company currently employs about 120 people spread out across 90 cities, meaning most employees work from their homes and do not have a colleague in the same geographic location. “The advantage is you can hire the best people in the world regardless of geography,” Mullenweg said. “The disadvantage is that there is something particularly powerful around brainstorming or how bandwidth collaboration works best when you are in person.”
In order to overcome that disadvantage, Mullenweg noted that the money the company has saved in office costs thanks to telework ends up getting spent thanks to travel costs. The company has created cross-functional teams of five to nine employees -- whether designers, engineers or business experts – to work on projects. “Everything within that team is self-contained,” he said. “By keeping the teams small, it enables them to meet up physically a couple times a year ...
Microtasking Mania?
- By Brittany Ballenstedt
- July 23, 2012
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Microtasking may soon become a new way of working for federal employees as part of the Obama administration’s digital government strategy.
Bridget Roddy, program manager for the Virtual Student Foreign Service Program at the State Department, told Wired Workplace that she is assisting the General Services Administration as a consultant in an effort to create a microvolunteering platform as part of the digital strategy.
The VSFS program last fall launched a pilot microvolunteering platform that allows State employees to post unclassified, short tasks that can be performed by eager student volunteers. The platform allows State Department workers to post tasks that require anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of hours to complete. The program is currently open to American college students who applied for the VSFS e-Internship program, but the goal is to eventually open the program to all American college students, Roddy said.
Late last week, GSA announced that it had launched the Digital Services Innovation Center, a key piece of the digital strategy. As part of the launch, GSA is now calling on government entrepreneurs and techies to join in and help in creating a digital presence where government information can be accessed anywhere, anytime and ...
The Next Big Telework Thing: Better Tallies
- By Brittany Ballenstedt
- July 16, 2012
- comments
According to Tom Simmons, vice president for federal systems and Citrix, the next steps for telework focus particularly on effective tracking and reporting. Indeed, OPM announced just this week it will automate the way it collects and provides statistics on telework.
“They’re relying on manual reporting from the teleworker,” Simmons said of the recent report. “Any time you’re relying on individual behavior in an environment that’s likely new to someone, the ability to capture good and reliable data is challenged.”
Simmons noted that government has done a great job at automating the time and attendance system but said any measure of telework success should rely less on how many hours a teleworker is putting in at home and more on the output and quality of the work they do. “When government tries ...
IT Jobless Rates Are Half the National Average
- By Brittany Ballenstedt
- July 9, 2012
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The unemployment rate among IT professionals remains at about half of the national average – at 4.4 percent in the first quarter of 2012 – and that’s no surprise given the strong demand. Hiring managers are even facing stiff competition in securing some key types of IT skills.
According to this month’s issue of the Dice Report, the most difficult employees to find, hire and retain among the current pool of IT pros are Java developers, mobile developers, .NET developers and software developers. In fact, hiring managers cited those positions about double or triple the frequency of other skill sets in the employment marketplace, Dice found.
Rounding out the top 10 list of most difficult skill sets to find were security, SAP, SharePoint, Web developer, active federal security clearance and network engineers.
Technology hiring managers also are not looking for new, young IT graduates straight from college, either. According to the survey, hiring managers are most looking for IT pros with two to five years in the workforce, followed by those with six to 10 years of experience.
Most organizations are no longer training their IT professionals, with most saying they leave the responsibility for training to the individual ...
Cyber Summer Camp
- By Brittany Ballenstedt
- July 2, 2012
- comments
“The camp is geared towards aspiring high school and college students,” said George Schu, a senior vice president with Booz Allen Hamilton, speaking to Wired Workplace about the first of four U.S. Cyber Challenge summer camps, which are run in partnership with Virginia Tech and Booz Allen Hamilton. “Interestingly, it also attracted people out in the workforce who already had considerable skills and were interested in sharpening their skills.”
The camp last week, held in Arlington, Va., also included a roundtable of industry experts and camp participants to examine the critical shortage of cyber professionals, in part to inform a follow-up to a report released last fall by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the cyber workforce shortage.
“The roundtable gave some perspective on the ever-growing need for people with cybersecurity skills and related certifications,” Schu said. “I tried to paint a picture for campers that this is definitely a growing field and that skills in these ...
