Summaries for June 1, 2009

CHOPRA, KUNDRA SETTLE IN. SO WHAT WILL EACH DO?
One is an administrator at the Office of Management and Budget and one is an associate director within the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Both have auxiliary titles that speak more loudly about what they are supposed to be doing than their primary ones. With both new technology leaders sharing overlapping responsibilities, it matters how well they work together. -> Read More

WHAT IS THE REALITY OF CLOUD COMPUTING?
At this writing, the GoGrid.com video hasn't gone viral. GoGrid.com is an online beta site offering cloud hosting. A little research will show there is a whole world out there of hosting and cloud services. The question is how an on-demand IT environment can encompass agency-specific applications and the databases that underlie them. The General Services Administration is tackling that question with a new request for information. -> Read More

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ADMINISTRATION ZEROES IN ON CYBER SECURITY STRATEGY
It's a sign of how imbued American society is with technology that the president can give a speech and no one is nonplussed that it is peppered with tech words like Web 2.0, worms and thumb drives. This is not new with President Obama, but it's some distance from when George Bush pushed a theatrically large, fake button to "turn on" the first www.usa.gov site. In announcing the report out of the 60-day cyberspace policy review, which concluded April 17, Obama said, "From now on, this digital infrastructure, the networks and computers we depend on every day, will be treated as they should be: as a strategic national asset." -> Read More

HEY, ANYONE REMEMBER BIG AGENCY APPLICATIONS?
The government is in a swoon over the newness of the Obama initiatives. In the midst of all of the discussions of sites giving data about the government, you'll hear evidence that the administration needs to pay attention to the fact that there are ongoing, inherited, legacy - call them what you want - challenges of regular, old fashioned IT deployments that enable the government to work. As if on cue, this week at the Management of Change conference down in Norfolk, Va., CIO Vivek Kundra announced plans to install a management "dashboard" for viewing performance of federal developments. -> Read More

• Chopra, Kundra Settle In. What Will Each Do?

  Vivek Kundra

  One is an administrator at the Office of Management and Budget, and one is an associate director within the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP.) Both have auxiliary titles that speak more loudly about what they are supposed to be doing than their primary ones.

  The CIO, Vivek Kundra, has already been active on the rubber chicken circuit, promoting, among other things cloud computing (see below) and the need for updated approaches to security and privacy within federal systems. As successor to Karen Evans as administrator for e-government and IT at OMB, Kundra inherits a seat associated with strong policy implementation.

  The CTO, Aneesh Chopra, is technically the associate director of the Technology Division at OSTP. His job, as he told me just after President Obama’s cyber security policy announcement last week, is “to really drive innovation into the nation’s economy. And in which areas the presidential priorities of health care, education, energy, and job creation will be infused with the principles and power of innovation.” Actually, the technology division of OSTP has a breathtaking array of responsibilities. They overlap with those of Kundra, and, for that matter with those of the yet-to-be-named cyber security coordinator (see below), who is in the National Security Council.

  For instance, OSTP’s tech division is concerned with protection of America’s cyber networks, making government more open and transparent, and bringing government – as the administration likes to term it – into the 21st century, technologically speaking. When he appointed Chopra, Obama said, “Aneesh will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities – from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure.”

  One school of thought is to get as many great minds on an initiative as possible and great things will happen. In government, though, what often happens is that too many people with overlapping responsibilities devolves in to turf battling, or internal conflict which the president must settle, usually by accepting someone’s resignation.

  Chopra is diplomatic about the layered authorities: “We’re very clear that the CIO, the CTO, and, we think, other leaders in the administration like in new media, are well positioned to establish innovative platforms for agencies to consume.” And that this will enable them to better carry out the president’s priorities. Nothing revolutionary in that, except that from the point of view of career managers, it is anything but clear. They really want to know who is in charge, when it comes to cyber security, systems deployment priorities and other policies.

  One agency energized by all of this is the General Services Administration. As detailed below, the rubber is hitting the road, so to speak, for cloud computing, Kundra’s pet initiative, in GSA. And Chopra had this to say about the policy fact-finding and public input that is going on now: “Sometime later this summer we’ll have a coherent set of policy recommendations that will be jointly announced by OMB with support by my office and, obviously, with implementation at the GSA level.”

  Chopra also noted his and Kundra’s mutual familiarity. Chopra was the Virginia Secretary of Technology and Kundra was the state’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology. So my bet is the two will be able to work together, as Chopra promises they will, without bickering over turn. It will be a good test for the no-drama Obama White House.

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• What Is The Reality of Cloud Computing?

  At this writing, the GoGrid.com video hasn’t gone viral. I was only the 51,000th and something viewer. GoGrid is an online beta site offering cloud hosting at a price of 19 cents per hour per gigabyte of RAM for a 1-processor Xeon server. GoGrid is offered by an online processing company called ServePath.

  A little research will show there is a whole world out there of hosting and cloud services. The difference? Hosting dedicated servers causes using organizations to bump into the scaling questions. When do you add a server? How do you manage growing numbers of physical servers? Virtualization has been an intermediate strategy, but an organization with its own hardware still has the ongoing challenges of, well, hardware.

  In some ways, cloud computing resembles time sharing of the 1960s and 1970s. Only instead of accessing the computing facility via dedicated phone lines or a virtual private network, it is via the Internet. As commonly described, it would seem to make sense as a way to provision the average office worker. The more difficult question is, how an on-demand IT environment can encompass agency-specific applications and the databases that underlie them?

  Instead of opining or speculating about it, the General Services Administration, via a new request for information, is getting industry to define what the agency is calling Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS. Within the synopsis is a Word document that really gets down to asking the hard, detailed questions about cloud computing.

  For example, getting at the application question: “Describe your capability to offer hosting services, including any capabilities for server provisioning, preconfigured system images and applications stacks, management, operating system patching, security software, and other managed services.”

  The RFI also puts structure into the question of cloud computing by asking about nitty-gritty details. For example: “Please identify which ports are allowed or accessible through your infrastructure (i.e. 25, 80, 139, and 443) and which we might assume would be blocked. Are any unique ports or API calls required?”

  Or: “Describe your approach to addressing IT security challenges in cloud computing, in particular - dealing with hacker attacks, the potential for unauthorized access, and inappropriate use of proprietary data and IT applications. What are your processes and solutions for preventing these challenges from occurring?”

  An important element not specifically addressed in the GSA RFI is what the user experience and any training requirements might be. Would users be now employing on-line documents such as Google Docs? That would have profound implications not only for users but also for existing contracts for standard products such as Microsoft Office. In fact, some PC makers are planning to field low-end notebook machines that run Google’s Android operating system.

  But the RFI might help the government answer the biggest looming question, and that is whether commercially-operated clouds are suitable for government information processing and storage in the first place in terms of privacy and security trustworthiness. Ultimately, both models will exist. Should the U.S. eventually achieve the goal of having most Americans’ health records electronic, the likely most feasible model would be architected like the Internet itself, a series of regionally located, federated data centers that form a single virtual server.

  And not all cloud activities are speculation at this point. Last month FCW reported that public safety systems are starting to use what might be termed application-specific clouds for creating interoperability among dissimilar communications systems.

  In the meantime, no agency should feel compelled to scramble for a cloud solution. Wise program and IT managers will remember the attempts at seat management, application software providers, software as a service, thin client computing and grid computing all being touted as the next big, universal model. None of them caught on in the ways envisioned, perhaps, but all found persistent niches.

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• Administration Zeroes In On Cyber Security Strategy

  It’s a sign of how imbued American society is with technology that the president can give a speech and no one is nonplussed that it is peppered with tech words like Web 2.0, worms and thumb drives. This is not new with President Obama, but it’s some distance from when George Bush pushed a theatrically large, fake button to “turn on” the first www.usa.gov site.

  In announcing the report out of the 60-day cyberspace policy review, which concluded April 17, Obama said, “From now on, this digital infrastructure, the networks and computers we depend on every day, will be treated as they should be: as a strategic national asset.”

  That’s a good start.

  The president last Friday went on to say that he would be creating a new office, that of Cyber Security Coordinator, and that:

  • He would personally select the person to fill it
  • The person would be a member of both the National Security Staff and the National Economic Council
  • Responsibilities would be “orchestrating and integrating all cyber security policies for the government; working closely with the Office of Management and Budget to ensure agency budgets reflect those priorities; and, in the event of major cyber incident or attack, coordinating our response.”
  • CIO Vivek Kundra (in the Office of Management and Budget) and Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra (in the White House staff) would also have cyber security roles.
  • The office would contain a person with specific responsibility for privacy.

  “Orchestrating,” “coordinating,” “working closely with” – those are not necessarily power-position words. So the effectiveness of the president’s pick will depend on the person’s prestige and cyber security chops, and the degree to which he or she will have regular and meaningful access to the president.

  I predict some turf skirmishing among the OMB director, Chopra and Kundra, and the cyber security coordinator. The Wall Street Journal, to whom most of the president’s strategy had been leaked, reported last week there had been fierce bickering between the National Security and Economic Council staffs. It took almost as long for the report to come out after the conclusion of the 60-day review, as the review itself. At the East Room announcement Friday, National Security Advisor James L. Jones and Economic Advisor Lawrence Summers walked in together, though.

  On the other hand, the new strategy for the most part follows the recommendations of the Center for Strategic and International Studies report, “Security Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency.” And fundamentally the president elevated the importance of cyber security as a national priority.

  One significant difference between the CSIS recommendations and what came out of the White House concerns whether the federal government should regulate the private sector about cyber security. The report called for more government regulation of private cyber security, at least of systems controlling critical infrastructure such as the electric grid or defense contractors. But Obama, while calling for greater cooperation between industry and government, ruled out having the federal government dictate standards.

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• Hey, Anyone Remember Big Agency Applications?

  The government is in a swoon over the newness of the Obama initiatives, principally stimulus spending and the drive towards more visibility of spending and wider citizen involvement.

  But in the midst of all of the discussions of sites giving data about the government, you’ll hear evidence that the administration needs to pay attention to the fact that there are ongoing, inherited, legacy – call them what you want – challenges of regular, old fashioned IT deployments that enable the government to work. For instance, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Robert Casey said the Army would regroup on its Future Combat Systems (FCS,) much of which was canceled for the 2010 budget by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. FCS has not been a totally futile exercise; analysts expect each of its brigades will receive unmanned ground and aerial vehicles developed as part of FCS.

  As more political leadership positions get filled at the sub-department levels, those folks will find that working in an agency, even if the president is new and popular, ain’t all moonlight and roses.

  Systems that are candidates for attention include:

  • Census bureau. Robert Groves, whom the president has chosen for director, is currently the Director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. Taking no guff from any Senator, he spent some time telling the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that he would give personal attention to reining in scope and ensuring integrity of development of the bureau’s enterprise applications.
  • Federal Aviation Administration’s NextGen, the replacement of ground radar navigation with a system that depends on the geographic position system. The administration wants to accelerate NexGen. The Air Transport Association has been pushing Congress to fund faster NextGen deployment. This group felt that HR 915, the House version of FAA authorization, didn’t go far enough, although the law does express the sense of Congress that NextGen is a national priority.
  • FBI’s national terror suspect watch list. The FBI named Timothy Healy as Director of the Terrorist Screening Center, and cleaning up that list will be the first order of business.

  The Patent and Trademark Office, where a growing backlog of applications is frustrating the agency, and applicants alike, is another example of an agency where major league systems work is needed.

  In a timely development just this week at the Management of Change conference down in Norfolk, Va., CIO Vivek Kundra announced plans to install a management “dashboard” for viewing performance of federal developments. He said programs will be reviewed monthly. That will be a tall order given OMB’s own list of ongoing IT projects numbers something like 700.

  Bottom line: Government work is not all wikis, social media, RSS feds and blogs. Running the government sometimes requires big systems with big requirements. The Government Accountability Office has issued scores of reports on information management risks in the last few years alone. Many of those projects still exist. If the Obama administration can make progress on half of them, it will probably walk on water.

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