got geoint?

Now that we have recovered from Thanksgiving, hit the treadmill a few times and cleared our heads a bit, we are ready to focus on a more serious Friday’s Food for Thought. Although keep reading this post, surely we will slip something fun and entertaining in here — it is Friday after all.

First up, it seems that the theme of “change” is everywhere now. Obama picked a game-changing cabinet, and everyone has a recommendation for how to bring change to our great country. In particular, the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) made some aggressive recommendations this week on how to improve the U.S. National Security System.

The PNSR recommendations would essentially replace our national security system created 60 years ago, that in their words “often discourages agencies from working together on joint assignments and policy implementation to respond to crises and effectively manage national security affairs.”

The recommendations comprise a broad set of mandates, which includes:

- Establishing a President’s Security Council to replace the National Security Council and
Homeland Security.

- Creating an empowered Director for National Security in the Executive Office of the President.

- Initiating the process of shifting highly collaborative, mission-focused interagency teams for priority issues.

- Mandating annual National Security Planning Guidance and an integrated national security budget.

- Building an interagency personnel system, including a National Security Professional Corps.

- Establishing a Chief Knowledge Officer in the PSC Executive Secretariat to ensure that the national security system as a whole can develop, store, retrieve and share knowledge.

- Forming Select Committees on National Security in the Senate and House of Representatives.

In unrelated news, our government is moving steadily into the Web 2.0 world and we applaud this tremendously. A couple of weeks ago, BearingPoint launched GovTwit, an online directory of basically anyone, who is anyone in the government sector on Twitter. And you would be surprised, there are lots of government entities, thought leaders and elected officials on Twitter. And, yours truly, got geoint?, made the list as well. Click here to check out GovTwit. It is an amazing resource.

Now to end on a fun note, we realized that there are many popular songs that feature either the concept of maps, mapping, or the globe as a metaphor, or in the actual song title. We tried our best to compile all of these songs here. We certainly left out many other songs, and ask for reader suggestions…we will be updating this post based on reader feedback throughout the day.

- He’s Got The Whole World in His Hands, Tanya Tucker (cover). Click here.

- Top of the World, The Carpenters. Click here.

- The theme song for the TV Show “The Big Blue Marble.” Click here.

- The World, Brad Paisley. Click here.

- Maps, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s. Click here.

- Maps and Legends, R.E.M. Click here.

- Eyes of the World, Grateful Dead. Click here.

- On The Beach, Neil Young. Click here.

Happy Friday!

Tags: GovTwit, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Project on National Security Reform, R.E.M., The Carpenters