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"I think, in an ideal world, [VA] would have preferred that we simply, you know, go along with them, but we don't--we may end up there. When we do the source selection, we may end up with a VistA derivative and be more common in software," said DoD's Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall.

Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel will serve as the Office of Management and Budget's deputy director for management.

The Defense Department is moving forward with plans to acquire a commercial EHR solution. "There are good reasons for VA to have selected its legacy system," wrote Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in a May 21 memo. "However, many of these reasons do not apply to DoD."

Thursday, May 23 marks the one-year anniversary of the Obama administration's unveiling of the Digital Government Strategy, and with that milestone comes an array of deliverables that are due under the strategy. FierceGovernmentIT has compiled an at-a-glance scorecard to assess what's complete, what's missing and to what degree things changed since the plan rolled out last May.

"Technology doesn't always carry the day when you need to present a program to a set of executives in a federated organization," said Commerce Department Chief Information Security Officer Rod Turk during a May 20 panel discussion at ACT-IAC's Management of Change Conference in Cambridge, Md. Department CISOs and the teams that support them have to coordinate with an array of stakeholders.

Many people think data security is only an issue for the Defense Department, the intelligence community or the Homeland Security Department, said Commerce CIO Simon Szykman while speaking May 14 at the FOSE conference in Washington, D.C. "Even if the confidentiality of the data is not key, the long-term integrity of the data is," he said.

During a May 15 press briefing, Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel acknowledged there could be downstream infrastructure costs associated with successful data liberation. These costs will be dealt with on an individual basis, said VanRoekel.

Beyond asking agencies to guard against the release of data with personally-identifiable information, the Open Data Policy published by the White House May 9 directs agencies to account for the "mosaic effect" of data aggregation. The mosaic effect occurs when information alone is not identifiable but when coupled with other available information poses a privacy or security risk.

Along with its Open Data Policy, the White House unveiled May 9 Project Open Data, a GitHub-hosted tool kit it hopes will be the living, breathing implementation arm of its policy. The online repository provides tools for coders to adopt the policy within agencies' 6-month timeline.

Under the new policy, agencies must build and modernize information systems in a way that "maximizes interoperability and information accessibility, maintains internal and external data asset inventories, enhances information safeguards, and clarifies information management responsibilities," says the memo.