Save Award 2010 Ideas

Review all Federal computer programs. Many do not work are inefficient and difficult to navigate even for a computer person. This wastes huge tax dollars and is completely frustrating. Examples: NPS IDEAS, antiquated, poorly designed and locks up often.

Review purchasing protocol. Now to purchase something it must be submitted in PMIS, then re-entered in IDEAS. Even worse, If it is facility related you must enter it... more »

Set computer monitors to turn off after 5 minutes of no use, and computer to enter sleep mode after 15-30 minutes to lower energy consumption.

Office productivity suites, such as MS Office, can easily cost more than $300 per machine (depending on license purchased). And these software are licensed with restrictions that they may not be modified because you don't own software you buy, you are only granted USE it. Already in existance is a fully functional and well-featured office suite called openoffice.org that is not just free but open sourced. Open sourced... more »

Require all employees to turn off their computers every night. The energy used by one computer may be small, but the combined effect of all of these computers is significant.

Purchase Computers with Cameras 7/14/10

I suggest that every computer purchased for government use have a camera and supporting tele-software such as Skype. Provisions should be made for turning the camera off for personal or security reasons. If government computers had cameras, travel for training, meetings, to view a situation, or to conduct on-site inspections could be held to a minimum. Also, group meetings and... more »

NASA should manage its own desktop information technology infrastructure - which is presently outsourced to several different contractors. The current system is inefficient, slow, and expensive. By replacing the layers of outsourcing contractors with a single, unified IT authority at each NASA center, the process could be made more effective.

IT requires all employees in our Agency to keep their computers on at night so they can run updates. I appreciate that they do this at night however why not write a simple scrip that would shut down the PC once the updates have been completed. Think of all the electricity it would save plus reduce potential hacking if the machine was shut off.

Streamline the procurement for computer hardware, or at least provide a way to update the specs so we can get the latest hardware. Because of the time it takes for the paperwork to get done, the hardware is usually obsolete by the time we get it - while the gov't still pays top dollars for it. There are lots of waste happening in government paying for obsolete computer hardware.

We purchase thousands of duplicate software licenses. Every new computer we buy comes with a licensed version of an operating system (usually Windows), but old licenses are still valid from computers that are no longer in service, and many organizations actually have site licenses, so that every new computer is purchased with an unnecessary cost. We can track operating system licenses (or purchase open source ones)... more »

Replace all federal desktops with thin-edge terminals OR desk-ports for a work laptop.

 

Untether the workforce from cubeland (and then reduce the cubes).

When we replace our computers every 3 years, we copy everything from the old hard drive to the new one. Then the old computer disappears, including its drive, which gets wiped. Instead of taking the old drive away, install it in the new computer, and leave it there. This will save the day it usually takes to copy the files, and old hard disks have little value anyhow. It will also mitigate the risk of valuable data being... more »

Switch to MAC computers. It will cost more in the beginning but save money in the long run. They are much faster and reliable. Vista made the computers much slower!

Take the old computers and donate them to local schools for reuse. You can wipe the computers clean to keep this country safe.

Provide in house on site IT support. Those of us who are not IT experts spend WAY too much time trying to install/upgrade/migrate/reimage/retrofit our computers. A few years ago, all IT support functions were centralized and taken out of offices, leaving employees to forge for themselves. Let's put IT support back at employee level. Thanks!

I suggest you put another computer screen next to the existing one to improve an employee's efficiency.