Save Award 2010 Ideas

Limit the number of computer monitors to just one per user. There has been a surge of employees having 2 monitors per work station.

We are mandated to purchase Energy*Star computers and attachments, yet most of the time we do not enable the features.

While most departments policy state that employees are required to power down their computers when not in use with a dispersed work force this policy is hard to manually enforce.

By mandating that the screen saver be set to 30 minutes or less and that the screen saver puts the monitor into stand-by... more »

Have a central federal agency handle ALL recycling/destruction of excess computer equipment. The current process for excessing computer equipment and securely erasing hard drives (including copier/printer hard drives) is very inefficient and somewhat insecure--options are to have individual sites securely erase all data and then pay to have recycling companies pick it up and THEY profit from any recycling possible or... more »

I have been at the I.R.S. for 3 seasons and have been called to veteran associates desks to show them how to create short cuts for web pages they use in their daily jobs, short cut keys for systems that have been in place for some time, and have updated forms that were too easy for me to do. What I suggest is to have someone who is very computer literate join one area at a time and help them to use and create these short... more »

Improve Morale by using technical liaisons on districts; this will save a ton of money.
Create two new technical positions back on districts or at least every other district. Combine IT\GIS\DB duties as one position, HR\Budget&Finance as the other. These are liaison positions to central management but with local customer service emphasis, helping folks complete their processes and meet targets. If we are not going to... more »

Utilize bizhubs or network copiers instead of individual printers on districts or offices. If you compare the cost of ownership over time, network copiers blow away the cost to maintain individual printers. Not only do you get increased capability; utilizing things like PDF creation on-the-fly, you also gain in green benefits; energy savings, less toner use, less to recycle and longer service life. The energy and cost... more »

I suggest that idle computer systems be enabled to be used for distributed and grid computing purposes. This can be configured for individual sites that are located across large areas or even the entire continent. It can be setup as a realtime system or for packages that are processed in a batch system. Most PCs and small computer systems are utilized at less than 5% capacity and this would provide an untapped resource... more »

Enact legislation requiring any business that utilizes photocopy machines to destroy or otherwise completely remove all of the data stored on the harddrives currently installed in virtually every modern-day photocopier prior to selling or disposing of the machines. Although many manufacturers offer software aimed at completely deleting data from the internal storage devices for an additional fee, companies purchasing... more »

We need to stop ordering cheap/lowest bid computer hardware components for desktops and laptops. We may save money in the short term but in the long run we end up spending more on replacement hardware and lose a great deal on employee productivity for every hour, day, week that employees are without their computer system(s).

Block all non-relevant internet sites from government computers. People might be forced to work rather than surfing the web.

I suggest you...Combine VISTA and CPRS to eliminate that dinosaur, VISTA. Appointments have to be placed in VISTA then completed in CPRS, a great waste of time. Time to come into the 21st century!!

VISTA and CPRS are computer programs utilized in the VA system

I would suggest providing two computer monitors per government computer. Although the immediate costs would increase, there are three long term advantages. One, the increased ability of multitasking in group projects. Right now, there is unused, or rarely used software on our computers that isn't utilized because the computer workspace becomes cluttered and difficult to concentrate on. The second advantage is the paper... more »

The federal government should use free and open source software (FOSS) such as the Ubuntu operating system and the OpenOffice office suite whenever these products are competitive with similar commercial software. This would result in substantial monetary savings on licensing fees for commercial software with no loss of productivity.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

http://www.openoffice.org/

Stop the rediculous duplication of effort with multiple security background checks for seasonal employees. Once a federal check is done, it should be good for 3-5 years (whatever the time period) from any agency/unit (park) that initiated it. Not only will you save money (these reports are not cheap!), time (which is money) of current employees processing the same thing over and over, you will be able to employ the new... more »

Stop furnishing computers to employees and contractors -- virtualize instead. Millions of dollars could be saved by changing approach to equipment provisioning in the large unclassified information area. Instead of buying desktops and laptops, access to a virtual desktop could be provided through much lower cost equipment. I know some agencies are already moving in this direction. If approach were adopted faster and... more »