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SIGNS OF CONTINUITY IN FEDERAL IT MANAGEMENT ARE EMERGING
Remember the consolidation of agency IT activities under the Office of Management and Budget's Lines of Business initiative? Signs are that the Obama OMB will continue with this program as it tries to get a handle on governmentwide costs of IT infrastructure (ITI). Peter Tseronis, senior technical advisor in the office of IT support services within the CIO office at the Energy Department and chair of the CIO Council's IPv6 working group, talks about why ITI is a hot topic at OMB.
-> Read More
IT WILL TAKE WEEKS TO DISCERN THE OUTER EDGES OF STIMULUS BILL
Imagine saving and scrimping for, say, a new pickup truck with a big diesel engine and trailer hitch that could do anything you dreamed of doing. Then, one day, the new truck has landed in your driveway as if falling from outer space. Some agencies are experiencing manna from heaven with passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, nee the stimulus bill. -> Read More
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Gene L. Dodaro
Gene L. Dodaro, Acting Comptroller of the U.S.
Government Accountability Office, Craig Newmark,
and Knight Kiplinger to Speak at IRMCO 2009
The U.S. General Services Administration is pleased to
announce that Gene L. Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General of
the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Craig Newmark,
founder of Craig's list, and Knight Kiplinger of Kiplinger
Letter will be speaking at IRMCO 2009 on April 19-22.
When you attend IRMCO, the annual government-only gathering
of agency career and political leaders, you not only get to
hear from industry and government leaders like Dodardo,
Newmark, and Kiplinger, you have the opportunity to:
- Explore the most current thinking about policies and strategies of the current Administration, and learn how to help achieve your agency's missions and objectives.
- Hear from and network with keynotes and speakers selected to directly address the needs of a government executive.
- Create a network of peers within the executive realm of government in order to foster interagency knowledge sharing, coordination and collaboration.
- Earn program management continuous learning credits for updating critical skills.
Plan now to attend IRMCO on April 19-22, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland, a quick trip up Route 50.
TRANSPARENT GOVERNMENT? ARRA EVEN SOUNDS LIKE A LAUGH
The conference version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Obama was to sign this week, is posted online by Congress in two, 6M pieces - A and B. The whole effort - the process and the bill itself - is a sterling example of opacity in government. -> Read More
SLOWLY THE PICTURE OF WHO'S WHO IS TAKING SHAPE
While the community waits to see who will be Nancy Killefer's replacement nominee for Deputy Director of Management at OMB, and whether the Obama administration appoints a chief technology officer, other positions with influence are getting filled. Of note is Vivek Kundra, the Washington, D.C. CTO, to be the OMB's administrator of E-Government and IT, and Melissa Hathaway to the National Security Council. Who's who is taking shape. Who will be next? -> Read More
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE REALLY DOING WEB 2.0?
Once a great shortcut word makes it into the vernacular, watch out. Web 2.0 is one such word. The explosive advent of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter gave the Web 2.0 a second life (pun intended) - which is about the phase of a thing at which the federal government tends to get involved. Now many agencies are freely using the term, and actively practicing Web 2.0. -> Read More
Complete Articles for February 15, 2009
Signs of Continuity in Federal IT Management Are Emerging
Peter Tseronis
Remember the consolidation of agency IT activities under the Office of Management and Budget's Lines of Business initiative? Signs are that the Obama OMB will continue with this program as it tries to get a handle on governmentwide costs of IT infrastructure (ITI). That's from Pete Tseronis, senior technical advisor in the office of IT support services within the CIO office at the Energy Department. He is also chair of the CIO Council's IPv6 working group.
One piece of evidence is rather basic. The OMB web site, which was scrubbed bare immediately after inauguration, is populated once again with documents, including those from when Clay Johnson was the Deputy OMB Director for Management. E-gov is back, as is Enterprise Architecture.
(Although OMB Director Peter Orszag has promised an overhaul of the Program Assessment Rating Tool effort, so that it is more detailed and evidence-based, the 2008 guidance is still posted at the OMB site. That overhaul may take a while because the administration must first find a deputy director for Management after nominee Nancy Killefer withdrew in early February.)
Of note, Tseronis pointed out, is guidance on segment architecture dating from December 2008. OMB is asking for agencies to define the architectures of the business functions, or segments, and "IT infrastructure is the hot one right now." Simultaneously, he said, the Gartner Group is finishing up cost analysis of subsets of ITI, including mainframe and data centers, telecommunications, and end user support. That third group is a catch-all that includes PCs and local area networks.
In each agency, the enterprise architecture can be broken down into three tiers, with the upper tier being the missions that the agency performs. For example, at Energy the top-level domains include research, nuclear facilities oversight, and energy source development. Below that is functions that occur at all agencies such as payroll, human resources management and finance - the Lines of Business. And below that are the pieces of ITI.
When all of the cost and activity information at the ITI level is added together, he said, CIOs and OMB will know by department and in total what the spending on ITI is. They'll know who is spending it most efficiently and therefore is eligible to become a shared service provider.
"You can't deploy Web 2.0 without a stable infrastructure. You can't do cloud computing without the next generation Internet - which means IPv6," Tseronis said.
The date to watch for this reckoning is May of this year. In the meantime, he said, Orszag is asking for more detail on what agencies are doing, particularly whether their ITI investments support the top level missions.
It Will Take Weeks to Discern the Outer Edges of Stimulus Bill
Imagine saving and scrimping for, say, a new pickup truck with a big diesel engine and trailer hitch that could do anything you dreamed of doing. You're working out the detailed justification to your skeptical spouse. Then, one day, the new truck has landed in your driveway as if falling from outer space.
Some agencies are experiencing manna from heaven with passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, nee the stimulus bill. For example, the Social Security Administration is getting in the neighborhood of $500 million for a new data center, to replace its current National Computing Center. The other evening I spoke with one SSA technology official who said the agency hasn't even worked with the General Services Administration to find a site for the new facility, which he figured would have an acre under roof. The current facility is obsolete and beyond remodeling. It has 18-inch raised floors where the new standard is 36 inches.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gets $170 million for climate modeling, which is essentially supercomputing exercises. NASA receives $400 million for climate research and supercomputing. The space agency also gets $150 million for research into the NextGen aid traffic control system. State Department will receive $290 million for IT upgrades.
Smaller projects are also in the bill. In one item, the Farm Service Agency at the Agriculture Department receives $50 million for maintaining the modernizing of its IT infrastructure.
Then there are well-reported allocations, such as more than $7 billion for rural broadband build-out loans and loan guarantees.
Throughout the bill, though, agencies receive chunks of money in the hundreds of millions of dollars each for programs. There is potentially IT money in these allocations, but at this point it is doubtful agency managers themselves know precisely how they will spend all the money. This means there is a chance for industry to influence the details. What is clear is that many of the programs will require an IT component for evaluation and distribution of grants, program management, and "transparency" reporting.
For example, there is $350 million for the Commerce Department IG to develop and maintain a broadband inventory map. Is this an IT project? In my estimation, yes, because it is certainly not a big piece of paper and stick pins.
Also in the bill are large sums for non-federal governments. For example, in the section of the bill dealing with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, there is $200 million under the broadband provision for grants under which localities can expand "public computer center capacity, including at community colleges and public libraries."
Moreover, the bill specifies billions for the construction or refurbishment of federal buildings and Defense Department facilities. There will be an IT component in all of the individual projects.
Thus there is no one number that represents all of the potential IT spending in the ARRA. More certain is that the annual rule-of-thumb estimate of $70 billion in governmentwide IT is about to get a step-function boost.
Transparent Government? ARRA Even Sounds Like a Laugh
The conference version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Obama was to sign this week, is posted online by Congress in two, 6M pieces - A and B. The whole effort - the process and the bill itself - is a sterling example of opacity in government. Posted late last Thursday evening, it was rushed to a House vote mid-day Friday. I doubt most members read all of its approximately 1,000 pages.
What you'll download is two big, non-searchable blobs. My advice is to paste all of the type into a Word document, which can be searched (even if only for dollar signs) or print to PDF on a Mac such that you have an easier version to look at. I made my own PDF and, searching for occurrences of dollar signs, found 428 hits in the 496-page Part A segment. A lot of dollar signs, but the search results make it easier to comb through the bill than a page-by-page look-see.
With these levels of dollars at stake, what's a measly 12M of disk space?
While the community waits to see who will be Nancy Killefer's replacement nominee for Deputy Director of Management at OMB, and whether the Obama administration appoints a chief technology officer, other positions with influence are getting filled.
Of note is Vivek Kundra, the Washington, D.C. CTO, to be the OMB's administrator of E-Government and IT. That is, the job recently vacated by formidable Karen Evans. So Kundra will have to carve out an identifiable niche for himself. He has experience working for Virginia, where he was Assistant Secretary for Commerce and Technology. He had the advantage of coming into District government following Suzanne Peck, who, under Mayor Anthony Williams, had taken the city from rotary telephones to the Internet age. Coming into the Obama OMB, he'll have the benefit of numerous IT initiatives that have established a base for more progress. These include the Trusted Internet Connection initiative, policy on IPv6 and consolidation via the Lines of Business Initiative.
Many of the CIOs with whom Kundra will deal will have had experience in the Clinton, and even possibly the Bush, administrations. A possible disadvantage is that he accepts the job without knowing who his boss will be, since the e-gov administrator reports to the Deputy Director for Management.
Another appointment of importance in the IT community was that of Melissa Hathaway to the National Security Council, from which she will direct the administration's cyber security efforts. What the cyber security approach will be, however, is still to be learned, since the administration punted that question with a 60-day review, to be lead by Hathaway. Although she is experienced in cyber security having served as a Bush aid in the same domain, and having worked for former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell at Booz Allen Hamilton, she will still be a few rungs below where many expected Obama's cyber security point person to sit.
None of the department CIOs, where they are political, have been named, although Allan Holmes at NextGov blogged that Roger Baker, former CIO of Commerce, is to be named CIO of Veterans Affairs. Baker has been helping the Industry Advisory Council create a series of transition papers, the most recent dealing with restructuring federal regulation of the financial system.
Once a great shortcut word makes it into the vernacular, watch out. Web 2.0 is one such word. The etiology of such terms is always hard to trace, but an admittedly cursory Google search brings up an article from 2005 by Tim O'Reilly, claiming to have coined it in 2001. Blogs and wikis were common by 2005; YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter less so.
The explosive advent of these latter three web phenomena really gave the Web 2.0 a second life (pun intended) - which is about the phase of a thing at which the federal government tends to get involved. So now a Twittering FEMA and a GovLooping federal community dot the landscape.
As GCN reported, sometimes use of these tools can bring accolades to an agency. NASA sent Twitters updating followers to progress on a Mars Phoenix Lander mission, and a group called the Shorty Awards found the agency's efforts worthy of an award. NASA was in good company. Other nominees included cycling legend Lance Armstrong and "Betty Draper," - actress January Jones who plays the advertising wife depicted on the TV series, "Mad Men."
Twittering itself can also be troublesome, as Rep. Pete Hoektra (R-Mich.) found out recently. The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Twittered his way through a tour of Iraq and Afghanistan, signaling the arrival times and transportation modes for each stop.
This raised security concerns, presumably from others on the trip who didn't want to be sabotaged by terrorists.
Meanwhile, the government is going in more heavily for presentations on YouTube. The General Services Administration has concluded negotiations with Google, the owner of YouTube, to resolve issues over the video server's terms of service. As written, they don't apply to the federal government so the company has modified them to let agencies post videos.
Of course, the question is what videos agencies would want to post. Given the depth of video assets held by the government - everything from Pentagon briefings to Library of Congress holdings - the possibilities are seemingly endless. Leading the way is President Obama, with weekly postings at www.whitehouse.gov of the weekly radio address. More exciting is the possibility of what government activities could be recorded now that YouTube, that great video server in the cloud, is available. In many ways, YouTube could be an improvement, given that the system requirements presented by the various agencies vary so widely (and few seem to work well on a Mac). Even more important, video assets could be more easily searched and therefore be more accessible without citizens having to go from web site to web site.
Social media at the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration have gotten a boost from the recent peanut butter salmonella scare. The agencies have jointly attacked this problem, and used a variety of media to tell the public about it. My favorite is this widget for keeping up with peanut butter-related recalls and the astonishing variety of products (and brands) that used the tainted crud. This and many other widgets, or small web applications, are available to anyone who wants to add them to a blog or web site.
MARTHA JOHNSON Administrator, General Services Administration THE HONORABLE JOHN BERRY Director, Office of Personnel Management VIVEK KUNDRA Federal Chief Information Officer and Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget (invited) DANNY WERFEL Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management (invited) DR. SHELLEY METZENBAUM Associate Director for Personnel & Performance Management, Office of Management and Budget (invited) MICHAEL ROBERTSON White House Liaison, Associate Administrator for Governmentwide Policy and Chief Acquisition Officer, U.S. General Services Administration 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; Executive Editor of Better, Faster, Cheaper; Research Fellow, Ash Institute of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
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