Once he had that birth certificate thing out of the way, President Obama signed an executive order telling federal agencies to improve their customer service by leveraging  technology. Agencies have six months to develop plans using private sector best practices as their guide. Jeff Zients, the federal chief performance officer, said that, ironically, the government's tardiness may end up being an advantage: Agencies will be able to leverage the lessons gleaned from private sector leadership.

That said, some emergent technologies, such as cloud computing, will inevitably play a large part in the government's plans as agencies consolidate data centers and move more services into public and private clouds. For example, GSA in May plans to release a $2.5 billion procurement to consolidate 950,000 email inboxes across 100 email systems and 15 agencies into one cloud system, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said at the forum.

Source: InformationWeek