Agilex Technologies

The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative calls upon agencies to develop and implement plans for consolidating, streamlining and modernizing their datacenter operations.  Based on his experience migrating mission-critical applications to new, state-of-the-art facilities, Agilex’ Kevin Sheehan shares important lessons learned for meeting this mandate by creating a more agile and secure infrastructure.  A key focus is in the use of standard configurations and common platforms to streamline the certification & accreditation process while improving application security and reliability.  He also weighs the pros and cons of emerging technologies, such as virtualization and Oracle Exadata.

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The need to improve information sharing and collaboration is a huge challenge facing all agencies.  One of the most widely used tools for addressing these requirements is SharePoint, which Microsoft has positioned as their Swiss Army knife for collaboration and information sharing.  But, how do these claims stack-up in the government environment?  And what can users expect from the forthcoming release of SharePoint 2010 as well as the Cloud version of the technology?  In this podcast, Agilex’ Sean Dillon draws upon his experience as the eGovernment Architect for Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector organization to answer these questions.

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A new generation of data visualization technologies is making it easier than ever to explore, summarize and analyze complex data relationships.  Which begs the question – how can organizations utilize these capabilities to improve their performance and alignment?  Agilex’ Sue Grist shares best practices and lessons learned from implementing this technology across a number of government environments.  She also shares perspective on improving the Federal IT Dashboard and other public reporting platforms.

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Agilex’ Bob Otto argues that government CIOs need to become more metrics-driven to survive in today’s more dynamic and challenging environment.  He also outlines the role that effective benchmarking can play in improving the performance and the perception of the IT organization.  In addition, he provides commentary on the Obama Administration’s use of performance metrics and IT dashboards to create greater accountability in technology management.  Otto currently leads the CIO leadership practice at Agilex and previously served as CIO/CTO for the United States Postal Service (USPS).

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Agilex CTO Tim Hoechst examines the growing role that smartphones are playing in meeting the mobile computing requirements of government agencies. In addition, Tim shares best practices for developing client-specific applications that capitalize most effectively on these device’s unique features and constraints. He also discusses the relative strengths of various platforms in terms of development and provides his perspective on Apple’s rumored tablet computer.

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Drawing upon his experience developing the CONNECT gateway for the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) initiative, Agilex’ Greg Pfister shares best practices for the use of Agile development.  Particular focus is given to aligning the Scrum methodology for Agile development with the unique requirements of government IT.  Pfister also discusses how an open source community impacts development and the value that service-oriented architecture plays in complex integration scenarios.

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Agilex’ Dominic Delmolino evaluates the pro’s and con’s of upgrading to the recently released Oracle 11g and ExaData databases.  He also shares best practices from his work helping government agencies establish Database Competency Centers.  Dom also provides a near-term prognosis for the prospects of data cloud/information-as-a-services strategies.

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