Save Award 2010 Ideas

Although many Federal/state agencies/departments have some enterprise software licensing capability, most do not have a robust capacity. In the Department of the Navy, the DON CIO has developed such an approach, which coupled with a mature Strategic Sourcing methodology, will save conservatively $350+ million over FY11 to FY14. This Strategy, called the Dept of the Navy Enterprise Commercial IT Strategy, will be applied... more »

GSA has about 212,000 vehicles in its fleet divided among 75 federal agencies. Most of these vehicles are assigned to individuals ie. one vehicle one man. Last year alone, GSA spent $287 Million to buy 17, 205 new vehicles to its fleet bringing the new number to about 220, 205 vehicles. Each vehicle than requires insurance, gas, toll expenses, parking fees in some instances, violations etc etc. Lest not forget most of... more »

I suggest a new type of proactive solution in the form of an enforcement system to deter the hiring of undocumented workers (illegal aliens, deportable/inadmissible aliens) through self funded economic incentives (monetary rewards) generated by fines. It will encourage the public to report violators and discourage employers from hiring undocumented workers. A percentage of the fines levied on employers of undocumented... more »

I suggest a new type of proactive solution in the form of an enforcement system to deter the hiring of undocumented workers (illegal aliens, deportable/inadmissible aliens) through self funded economic incentives (monetary rewards) generated by fines. It will encourage the public to report violators and discourage employers from hiring undocumented workers. A percentage of the fines levied on employers of undocumented... more »

I realize the “make a suggestion” contest phase is over; but this idea is AMAZING. I am suggesting that in every passport issued by the United States, and our allies, be equipped with a locator (similar to the tracker embedded in pets by the human society) woven into the electronic verification information (like the CAC card chip); that will contain all of the individuals pertinent information to include the picture... more »

Printing money is expensive. We could save money with an automated system. I propose we show our patriotism by getting an American flag tattooed onto our hand – or some patriotic Americans can have it on their forehead. The flag will be specially coded with a small bar code under it that is unique for every citizen. A database will keep track of each person’s accounts. To enforce this system, cash will become void... more »

Expedite Contract definitizations - control government costs – save billions of dollars! According to the GAO 2005 report approx. $7billion of defense spending a year is being executed under Undefinitized Contract Actions (UCAs). Due to the lack of cost control under UCAs, the government is exposed to billions of dollars of wasted/uncontrolled spending with little to no accountability. I propose the government implementing... more »

Change all default typeset to Century Gothic, which saves 30% more ink than Arial. This would result in millions of dollars in savings for the government, with a very simple change.

I have observed a need for a single, federal government best practices website for federal Information Techonology (IT) projects. The IT best practices website would include best practices related to IT related project management, requirements gathering, risks assessment, IT reference materials, systems testing information, systems training, systems security, and other established IT related best practices. By having... more »

I suggest that commercial engineering/scientific software licenses be consolidated. It is common to purchase commercial software licenses using government or customer funding, even though the software is already available in-house or at other government organizations. The idea is to reduce costs and improve workforce productivity associated with the acquisition, maintenance, use, availability, and support of common... more »

We spend months in meetings and via emails, drafting criteria for IT specifications to go in software purchases (could be hardware too). If someone (NIST? or hold a contest and reward the person who wrote the best app) would write a database application, with tables of all the features users needed/wanted, lists of vendors/products with standardized feature syntax, and vendors would verify (a la SCAP) that their products... more »

Why continue to pay for proprietary operating systems like Microsoft when open database standard products like Ubuntu are available for free. The government pays millions every year for Microsoft enterprise licenses, for not only its operating system (Windows) but for its Office suite browser etc. All of these products are available in the open database standers arena and all are configured to work with Ubuntu. On... more »

Negotiate smarter software licensing terms for the most common software tools. Most federal employees spends some time requesting or fulfilling funding requests to upgrade or maintain a core of 5 to 20 software programs due to "full cost"-like accounting systems. Standard communication, calendaring, and document/image processing software are per-employee overhead costs. These should be dealt with by line-management at... more »

Use open source software on government computers rather than proprietary software. This would allow lower licensing and support costs, as well as giving the government the ability to easily tailor software to their specific needs.

Use the free Microsoft Office equivalent software instead of buying multiple licenses. This free open-source software has been in use amongst savvy business leaders for sufficient time to become a true MS Office replacement option. Reference = http://www.openoffice.org/) OpenOffice is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is... more »