HOWARD SCHMIDT, ON THE JOB AT THE WHITE HOUSE, PROJECTS CYBER OPTIMISM
Howard Schmidt, one week on the job, gave his first speech as the White House Cyber Security Coordinator to a packed Internet Caucus luncheon in Washington. Yet for many in the audience, it was less discovering an unknown, and more hearing an old friend talk about a new job. Which is what it was, because Schmidt has such a long resume in cyber security both in an out of government, the feeling in the room was that his very familiarity will be an asset in the job.  -> Read More

WHITE HOUSE SUMMIT SHOWS ADMINISTRATION'S IT PRIORITIES
A year into the Obama administration with its broken-in management team, some of the long-standing IT challenges have not made extraordinary progress. Yet much progress has been made in the areas of transparency and interchange between agencies and their constituencies. Against this backdrop, the White House held its IT and mission performance summit earlier in the month.  -> Read More

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Register Today for GSA's IRMCO 2010
Leading Reform for Mission Performance
Early registration rates for government are now available for IRMCO 2010. Plan now to attend IRMCO 2010 on April 11-14, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. Federal Travel Regulation on Conference Planning-Prepayment of Registration Fee, FTR Amendment 2006-02 allows for the reimbursement of the prepayment of early bird registration fees to attend a conference, so take advantage of the IRMCO 2010 discounted rate. The 49th annual government-only gathering of agency career and political leaders is the premier place to network and discuss the government's challenges.

IRMCO 2010 Keynote speakers include:

• Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer and Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget
• The Honorable John Berry, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
• Danny Werfel, Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management
• William D. Eggers, Co-Author, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government, Global Director, Deloitte Research-Public Sector
• John O’Leary, Co-Author, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government, Research Fellow, Ash Institute of the Harvard Kennedy School
• Judie Leach Bennett, Executive Director, Legal and Risk Management, Canadian Blood Services

Go to www.irmco.gov to register and receive early discounted rates for government's management conference or call 202-237-0300. For further information, email Peg Hosky at peg@hosky.com.

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Smart Budgeting: Decision Making in a Challenging Budget Climate
No agency in the US government operates alone and neither do you. Attend Smart Budgeting: Decision Making in a Challenging Budget Climate on Wednesday, March 3 at 7:30 AM at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. where a panel of government officials and industry experts will share ideas for tackling the management of the government budget formulation and execution process.

The expert panel includes Chris Christopherson, Senior Vice President of Industry Solutions, SAP, and former Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer, Department of Agriculture (USDA), Dennis Taitano, Director, Office of Financial Operations, Assistant Secretary of the Navy , Daniel Fletcher, Deputy Chief Financial Officer, Department of Interior, Thad Juszczak, Director in the Grant Thornton LLP Global Public, and moderator Chris Dorobek, Federal News Radio Co-Anchor, The Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris

To register visit http://www.FedInsider.com/smart-budgeting-2. Smart Budgeting is open to government employees only.

SUDDENLY, IT'S SHOW TIME FOR HEALTH IT
Can the Haitian earthquake aftermath give any lessons for electronic medical records? Numerous reports have described the Israeli field hospital that was up and running in Haiti a couple of days after the earthquake. One important detail is that an electronic health record (EHR) is created the moment a patient enters the facility. It turns out that even though other countries might be further along than the United States in terms of EHR adoption, they still have the problem of interoperability of systems.  -> Read More

GOINGS ON AT THE FCC EXPLAINED—A FEDINSIDER ANALYSIS
You've got to do some careful tea leaf reading to figure out where the Federal Communications Commission might be headed in its National Broadband Plan. The plan was to be delivered to Congress on Feb. 17, but the FCC has asked for an extension to the middle of March. When the saga is over, though, the wireless services market will likely look different than it does now.  -> Read More

• Howard Schmidt, On The Job at the White House, Projects Cyber Optimism

  Howard Scmidt

  Howard Schmidt, one week on the job, gave his first speech as the White House Cyber Security Coordinator to a packed Internet Caucus luncheon in Washington. Yet for many in the audience, it was less discovering an unknown, and more hearing an old friend talk about a new job. Which is what it was, because Schmidt has such a long resume in cyber security both in an out of government, the feeling in the room was that his very familiarity will be an asset in the job.

  Schmidt has plenty to do, including the implementation of the White House cyber security review. He faces a Congress in which many ideas about how to do cyber security are brewing -- including the placement of Schmidt's own job within the White House hierarchy. But he wasted no time in dispelling some of the myths that have surrounded his position. Yes, he said, he definitely has the authority required to get the various elements of the federal government together on cyber policy, and to carry the message to industry.

  "The question I get asked most frequently is, do you have the authority, do you have the ear of the president, and is this taken seriously in the administration" and whether he'll be the chief liaison with Congress. "The answer is very simply stated, and it's 'Yes,'" adding, "The president has been very clear in designating me as his lead policy official in the area of cyber space security for the federal government." He also said that he doesn't believe lack of budget authority over agencies' cyber budgets will get in the way of setting policy.

  And, he said, it is correct that his position has dual reporting up through both the White House economic advisory and national security teams. "I think that is crucial," Schmidt said. Aside from the obvious cyber dangers to systems and data, "when you start looking at the economic impact on the global community and not just the United States, there's a key place for that." He also stressed the importance of interagency cooperation, including via the existing CIO Council and the inspectors general group.

  Schmidt didn't have a lot of specifics to impart to the gathering, having only been on the job for a week. He is making the rounds on Capitol Hill and meeting with the far-flung White House components. And he is stressing the need for a strong partnership with industry in standards development and in response to cyber attacks.

  Most of all, Schmidt seemed optimistic, if slightly guarded. He reiterated the need for agency systems managers to focus on the vulnerabilities, many of which, he pointed out, derive from the very software tools that yield so much benefit. "We have very little control over the threats," Schmidt said. So his overarching strategy, he said, will be one encompassing risk management and reduction. He noted that, just as traffic broadcasts never point out the millions of people who make it to work on time, the daily cyber threat reports don't mention "the $375 billion that made it safely through the supply chain today."

  During a question-and-answer session, Schmidt carefully avoided answering a question about whether the United States should develop a cyber war strategy and capability, noting that definitions for what constitutes cyber war have not been developed yet. He did say, in answer to others:

  • His office is still in the assessment phase of how deep packet inspection will affect Internet privacy.
  • He will receive a briefing next week on how the government might proceed with strategy for identity management, noting that the time of getting rid of a password approach has passed.
  • Schmidt supports the open government initiatives of the Obama administration, adding that each data set released to the public is being examined for personally identifiable or other privacy-related information.
  • He is a proponent of cloud computing "but of doing it right." Schmidt said there's an opportunity for private and governmental cloud users to collaborate in the development of security standards for cloud computing.

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• White House Summit Shows Administration's IT Priorities

  A year into the Obama administration with its broken-in management team, some of the long-standing IT challenges have moved forward slowly. Yet much progress has been made in the areas of transparency and interchange between agencies and their constituencies. The local IT press dutifully reports updates from the various CxOs, but questions about the pace of Federal IT projects are being raised in media such as InformationWeek. What is sometimes misunderstood outside the Beltway is that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra's position actually has limited say over individual agency IT budgets, and that appropriations are the result of a complex process involving agency leadership, OMB and Congress. Kundra's chief role to date has been turning the administration's goal -- stated the first day in office -- of increasing the transparency of government, in part by making information easier to obtain, and in establishing cloud computing as an alternative methodology for reducing infrastructure costs and allowing for faster provisioning of IT.

  Some systems projects at the agency level have the classic problems of over-reaching technology that misses cost and budget targets. The Secure Border Initiative at Homeland Security, for example, has undergone review after review, delay after delay since its inception in 2005. See this latest installment in the multi-billion-dollar saga from Jason Miller of Federal News Radio. Older existing systems, like the financial system at Veterans Affairs work okay, but with 30 year old code how do you update it and make it support web service functionality?

  Against this backdrop, the White House held its IT and mission performance summit earlier in the month. Many in the community commented on who was not there. Neither the Industry Advisory Council crowd -- many of whose members wrote transition papers after the election -- nor the obvious federal contractors were invited. The federal CIOs met with CEOs from tech giant Microsoft, but also Pepsi, Southwest Airlines, Liz Claiborne and Time Warner. Ideas generated in three breakout sessions will be sent to the central command in the White House, including senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, and also posted online by the office of Jeffrey Zients, the deputy OMB director for management, using the blog at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

  By a year into the Bush administration, 25 e-government projects had been launched. There wasn't a lot of money behind them, but they required interagency cooperation in many cases, and they were concrete tools for improving citizen service. Moreover, the Lines of Business initiative, only a partial success and now in limbo -- was aimed at getting agencies out of the business of developing duplicative enterprise systems. The Obama administration has taken a different tack. It has launched several initiatives to push information out to the public -- Friday was the deadline for the 3-dataset mandate, and now Data.gov has hundreds of thousands of data feeds available. And the administration, via executive order, is trying to simplify and make more coherent the whole process of categorizing sensitive but unclassified information. And it has called for information technology projects to be accompanied by more controls on cost and schedule. But it hasn't yet framed its management goals in a single framework that everyone can refer to.

  Much has been made of social media, and agencies have made progress here. The White House is even offering an iPhone application for video streaming the president's activities, in addition to the push-e-mail, blog, and online video programs it has already launched. Agencies are using social media tools to get input from the public on whatever issues are confronting them. For example, the Federal Communications Commission's reboot.fcc web site invites public discussion on systems, rules and so forth, even its "future of media" discussion. But, let's face it, agencies face an extreme challenge in reading and analyzing all of the input. That's one reason the FCC cited in asking for a delay of its Broadband Plan--the need to read through a lot of public input. Not that public input is new--it was embraced in a big way starting in the Clinton Administration. But with the online tools now available, the amount of information coming in has grown exponentially. So a technology challenge is finding out what it all means in a way that is reliable but doesn't require every posting to be read individually.

  This gets us back to the federal contractors and the ongoing IT challenges of federal agencies. For the hard issues that arguably have the most impact on and greatest cost to citizens -- veterans waiting in line for a year for benefits, a Mexican border installation that is years late, a modernized air traffic control system -- agencies are not yet getting specific guidance from the White House and its peripheral staff. These efforts are fully in the hands of the CIOs, CTOs and other managers, career and appointed. OMB language about favoring insourcing or fixed price contracts hasn't really changed the contracting landscape all that much, at least not yet. The most recent annual contractor study by Grant Thornton showed contracts other than fixed price still dominate in terms of numbers of contract actions. In the next two weeks, one way or the other Congress will be past the health care debate that's crowded out most other activities. Some potentially high-impact procurement legislation is pending, and hearings about a variety of matters are returning to the House and Senate agendas. So perhaps the community will see a return to conversation about the issues that comprise a $76 billion yearly tab.

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• Suddenly, It's Show Time For Health IT

  Can the Haitian earthquake aftermath give any lessons for electronic medical records? Numerous reports, such as this account in Time magazine, have described the Israeli field hospital that was up and running in Haiti a couple of days after the earthquake. (Two Israeli 747s loaded with equipment and people were airborne within hours of the quake.) One important detail is that an electronic health record (EHR) is created the moment a patient enters the facility.

  As federal EHR funding starts to crank up in the United States, every day patients walk into the offices of health care practitioners and fill out paper forms. But the age of colored lucite clipboards is about to end.

  It turns out that even though other countries might be further along than the United States in terms of EHR adoption, they still have the problem of interoperability of systems. A 2007 report from HIMSS, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, noted that 21 out of 26 general hospitals in Israel use EHR systems, but 27 different systems are in use. "All countries suffer from the same issues of lack of healthcare IT standards and barriers to inter-system communication," the report stated. At least in other countries, use of EHR, albeit lacking universal interoperability, is the norm.

  Aware that federally backed EHR systems implementations might be plagued with problems, Sen. Chuck Grassley last week sent out surveys to more than 30 major hospitals throughout the country, asking them for information. This follows letters he sent last fall to vendors of EHR systems, asking them about interoperability problems, forms that miscalculate treatment dosages or other patient data, and other usage issues. Grassley, aware that billions of federal dollars are about to flow into the health IT market, wants to make sure that the dollars end up funding systems that support the purported goals of the spending -- mainly to drive cost out of the health care system.

  Four developments in the last 30 days show that the EHR push from the Obama administration is having some effect:

  • Earlier this month, a group of several hundred veterans in southern California agreed to participate in a test EHR exchange between the VA and the San Diego division of Kaiser Permanente, similar to a test last year among medical institutions in Massachusetts. This test really covers not just the medium of exchange but also the interoperability of records themselves. The exchange network and the EHR standards are moving on parallel tracks, but ultimately each will require the maturity of the other before a robust electronic health IT system can start to show benefits.
  • A workgroup within the Nationwide Health Information Network said it would make recommendations to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) on a strategy for identity authentication providers in the exchange ecosystem. HHS could use commercial authentication systems, set up its own or use that of the VA. The goal is secure exchange.
  • The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued final rules for what constitutes "meaningful use" of EHRs, and final comments are due March 15. Once the rules take effect, the money from the American Reinvestment and Recovery will start to flow to hospitals and medical practices who can prove that they are using EHRs meaningfully. The incentive is large -- up to $63,750 to get into EHRs for Medicaid payment recipients, but so are the bars to proof. In 2011, hospitals will have to prove they meet 23 objective measures, and medical professionals 25.
  •  Perhaps most important, an interim final rule popped out of HHS for what constitutes a qualifying EHR.

  The health IT market is a complex one, but these developments add up to this: The ingredients required to launch an accelerating market for products, value added services and systems integration in health IT now swirl together in the mixing bowl -- standards, rules, a funding mechanism, and the technology. As the medical industry adopts EHR, or updates the EHR systems now in place so they meet federal standards, those vendors already in the market will face increasing competition.

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• Goings On At the FCC Explained—A FedInsider Analysis

  You've got to do some careful tea leaf reading to figure out where the Federal Communications Commission might be headed in its National Broadband Plan. The plan was to be delivered to Congress on Feb. 17, but the FCC has asked for an extension to the middle of March. When the saga is over, though, the wireless services market will likely look different than it does now. Federal agencies and their wireless needs aren't the main focus of what is going on, but telecom managers should pay attention because the changing marketplace and broadband patterns could affect the utility of existing contracting vehicles down the road.

  Fundamentally, the Obama administration believes that universal access to the Internet via a broadband connection is a right, like access to standard telephone service has always been. Moreover, it sees broadband as enabling economic growth and better opportunities on the part of minorities to take part in a new type of economy.

  That's why the stimulus bill, passed almost a year ago, included money for the Commerce Department to map where broadband is and isn't available throughout the U.S., for grants to build out broadband infrastructure, and for the FCC to develop a plan. But there are politics overlying these efforts. The new FCC chair, Julius Genachowski, is a proponent of net neutrality, which essentially prohibits the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world from regulating use of the networks they own and operate based on volume of consumption. In a federal appeals court, Comcast and FCC are battling over whether the FCC has the right to restrict the company's ability to restrict customers from accessing certain bandwidth-hungry sites, in this case BitTorrent. So it’s unclear at this point whether the FCC will ultimately prevail in Genachowski's bid to regulate Internet access, as the FCC now regulates telephone and broadcast services.

  And make no mistake, the administration and many supporters see national broadband access not just as an economic issue but an economic justice issue. Here is FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn, speaking to a recent meeting of the Minority Media & Telecom Council, which took place at Howard University:

  "Together we must ensure that people of color – and all Americans – can participate as owners, employees, and suppliers' on-line. That cannot happen, however, if we passively permit a new set of gatekeepers to erect yet another set of barriers to entry...By sitting this one out, or worse, by throwing up roadblocks that will enable what is now “our” Internet to become “their” Internet, we simply would be reinstating the very kinds of imbalanced structures that we have been attempting for decades to dismantle in other contexts." Clyburn was referring to the low level of minority ownership of radio and television broadcast entities in the U.S.

  Added to this mix is the FCC's concomitant desire to get more competition into the wireless market by obtaining spectrum. The FCC is being urged by the administration, via the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Commerce Department, to look at broadcasters' and other spectrum for delivery to would-be new entrants into the broadband services market. States NTIA administrator Lawrence Strickling, "The Administration supports exploring both commercial and government spectrum available for reallocation, and favors a spectrum inventory to determine how radio frequencies are currently being used and by whom."

  So that's how it all ties together -- inventorying spectrum again, using auctions where possible to sell it, but not if incumbents bid and win, thereby continuing patterns of what the administration sees as concentrated ownership. Plus stimulus money for the new potential offerers of wireless service. Plus net neutrality.

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