Behind the Curtain at TCG

TCG Named as a SmartCEO Future 50 Fast Growth Company

TCG has been named by SmartCEO as one its Emerging Growth Future 50 Fast Growth Companies in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.  Washington SmartCEO magazine, in partnership with Clifton Gunderson LLP, announced the publication’s fifth annual Future 50 winners in the January 2010 issue.

The Future 50 program recognizes the 50 fastest-growing companies in the Greater Washington area based on employee and revenue growth. In addition to the Future 50 companies, SmartCEO also recognized Emerging Growth winning companies under $10 million in revenue and Blue Chip winning companies, with excess of $150 million, or more, in revenue.  TCG was named as an Emerging Growth company. For more details, see the press release on the TCG website.

OMB wants your ideas on how to improve federal programs!

Via the ever-vigilant Cornelia Chebinou of the NGP and NASACT:

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget has established Partner4Solutions.gov to gather solutions and best practices to improve service delivery, payment accuracy, administrative efficiency, and reduce access barriers in federally funded assistance programs. OMB has asked that we distribute t the link to this website.

States and local governments are already addressing these issues head-on and have identified many innovative approaches. Partner4Solutions.gov is an opportunity for taxpayers, program participants, and Federal, State, and Local program administrators to provide their input and begin a dialogue to better understand some of the on-the-ground best practices in this area.

This website is also a central element in meeting the transparency and collaboration principles of Executive Order 13520 – “Reducing Improper Payments and Eliminating Waste in Federal Programs.”

Please join this effort as a partner by contributing your ideas and solutions at Partner4Solutions.gov.

Inside FederalReporting.gov and the Recover Board

GovExec has a very interesting article covering the background, players, and trials in establishing FederalReporting.gov. It includes details on the reuse of EPA's Central Data Exchange (CDX) system to meet the requirements of the Recovery Act, and how the contractors (CGI Federal and Smartronix) collaborate to ensure all the systems work nicely together. Very much worth a read!

Performance management reform around the corner

The Bush administration implemented the PART program, to the consternation of many, and then no-one really paid much attention to the data when it came to developing the government's budget. Often used as a stick rather than a carrot, PART made headway in starting the process of even measuring how programs were doing but did little to curb programs that were demonstrably failing. (To be fair, the measures used were often criticized as being themselves flawed, leaving some programs in a state of performance success limbo.)

Now there's a renewed focus on using performance data to drive budget formulation and execution, as this GovExec story about a meeting of the Senate Budget Committee Task Force describes. Exactly how this will pan out is clearly to be determined, but Jeff Zients, OMB's chief performance officer, outlined five principles that will be followed:

• senior leadership ownership;
  
• cascading goals and measurements;
• outcome-oriented, cross-agency goals and measurements;
  
• relentless review and accountability; and
  
• a transparent process.

In addition, the story notes that:

The cascading goals and measurements principle is designed to remedy a historic failure to communicate to component agencies, units or offices how their performance on a program resulted in the success or failure of departmentwide objectives.

Eliminating the "What does this mean to me and my agency?" question will really help put performance at the forefront of day-to-day activities inside each agency and program. And for those of us struggling to raise performance in our own organizations, this is extremely good news indeed.

Transparency creates new IT challenges

As the government pushes for more transparency in operations and data delivery, IT departments must be prepared to take on significant challenges, says Dave McClure, GSA's associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications. Those challenges are summarized as:

1. Disclosure management
2. Data sharing
   
3. Data quality
   
4. Multichannel service delivery
   
5. Data analysis
   
6. Disruption
   
7. Measuring impact

The bottom line for agencies is that more care needs to be taken to ensure data is appropriate, gathered from a broad array of sources and disseminated equally broadly, as free as possible of errors and problems, with a layer of analysis and integrity heretofore unimagined, and created with the notion of improved performance in mind.

Agencies are undoubtedly experiencing new pressures for flexibility and agility in delivery of data to the nation -- an expectant country now expects full and open disclosure of accurate information, as quickly as they demand it -- and IT plays a key role in supporting the government's performance in this regard.

Recovery.gov data in augmented reality on your iPhone/Android phone

Layar is an augmented reality application for iPhone and Android phones, and the Sunlight Labs have now created a layer for the app through which you can browse data from Recovery.gov! "Augmented reality" is a new class of applications that essentially layer data on top of a real-world image, in real-time. So if you're walking down the street, you can hold up your iPhone camera in front of you and the Layar application will show you all sorts of data on top of that "reality", as the images below show.

I use this to find interesting restaurants (using the Yelp.com app), Wikipedia entries for the places I'm in, and other nifty stuff like that. It's a fantastic way of adding to your knowledge about wherever you happen to be.

To get started, you should install the Layar app on your iPhone or Android phone, and then search in the app for the "Recovery.gov" data layer. Once you fire it up, you can see what organizations near your locale have received Recovery Act funding, how much, and get access to the complete record from Recovery.gov, right on your phone.

Data mashups like this are why it's so important for government to open itself up in the ways that Recovery.gov, Data.gov, and other initiatives are attempting to enable. The ways in which we citizens can use this data are many and unpredictable.

[Found via the often-awesome BoingBoing, from where I copied the above image, lest you see an augmented reality of my office instead!]

Collaboration yields high return on investment

This new study from Frost & Sullivan concludes that organizations that use collaboration technologies yield significant benefits. The study was commissioned by Verizon and Cisco, so clearly there's a focus on their products -- VoIP, web meetings, and so on -- with an undercurrent of "Our technologies aren't that expensive, if you consider the benefits, mate!" But the conclusions do echo our own experience: organizations that use collaboration technologies experience increased productivity and improved work/life balance among staff. And I say this as someone who'll be working from home tomorrow so I can look after a sick kid!

TCG Receives 2009 Inc. 5000 Award

We're pleased to announce that TCG President Dan Turner officially accepted TCG's 2009 Inc. 5000 award from Inc. magazine at the Inc. 500|5000 Black-tie Gala Dinner and Awards Ceremony on Friday, September 25, 2009 at the Gaylord National Convention and Resort Center at National Harbor outside of Washington, DC.  As previously posted, the award recognizes TCG as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States. The annual event, which honors all Inc 500|5000 CEOs and their companies, served as the finale to the Inc. 500|5000 Conference.

We're looking to forward to repeating this award next year!

TCG’s Rising Star, Rich Renomeron, is featured in Federal Computer Week

As previously posted, one of TCG's senior technical staff, Rich Renomeron, has been honored as a 2009 Rising Star by 1105 Government Information Group, publisher of Federal Computer Week, Washington Technology, and other government IT industry publications. A Rising Star profile on Rich and his accomplishments has now been published in Federal Computer Week.  Click on http://fcw.com/articles/2009/08/10/rising-star-renomeron.aspx to read more.  Congratulations once again to Rich!

TCG Ranked #692 on 2009 Inc. 5000!

We're delighted to announce today that TCG is once again on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing privately-held companies in the United States of America! The list is based on revenue growth, and TCG's revenue grew by 405.7% from 2005 to 2008. This also means that we're the 63rd fastest-growing government services company in the country, and ranked number 60 of all companies in the DC/VA/MD/WV area.

We're phenomenally proud of our staff and thankful to our clients for fueling this incredible growth. This is the third time TCG has been on the Inc. list. Let's see how we do in 2010!