Summaries for July 15, 2009

HP'S BANERJEE GUIDES TECH GIANT'S BIG BETS
If you are wondering where to place a bet, you can do worse than watching to see where an experienced handicapper is putting his money down. For government agencies, the handicapping challenge is knowing when to play it safe with what is the current standard in IT versus when to invest in what looks promising in the future. Large IT suppliers like Hewlett Packard also have to place bets on where technology is heading.  -> Read More

ARE FEDERAL WEB SITES DUE FOR AN INJECTION OF ENERGY?
The government's web strategy, which seemed so contemporary a few years ago, is falling behind. As the federal government ponders what's next in IT -- social networking, new-generation push technology like Twitter, cloud computing -- the question popped up this week: Is it getting the basics of e-government right? Not quite, according to a new McKinsey & Co. report, which states it is in part the non-adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities such as wikis, blogs, and mashups, that has left federal sites behind commercial sites.  -> Read More

                                                                            Advertisements

IRMCO 2010
If you missed this year's IRMCO conference, save the date for April 11-14, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay, Cambridge, Maryland. For details about IRMCO 2010, or to view presentations from IRMCO 2009, go to www.irmco.gov.

---

AFFIRM Annual Awards Luncheon
Join AFFIRM on Thursday, July 23rd for the AFFIRM Executive Leadership Awards. Presented annually since 1979, the awards recognize outstanding executive leadership in federal information resources management, and is the highest and most prestigious AFFIRM award.

Join us on July 23rd at the Willard InterContinental Hotel. The event will begin at 11:30 AM with networking and check-in, followed by the luncheon and awards program from 12:00 to 1:30 PM.

To register for the AFFIRM Annual Awards Luncheon visit www.affirm.org/events/monthlyluncheons/jun09.

DASHBOARD DEBUTS AS STRAIGHTFORWARD EXAMPLE OF TRANSPARENCY
If I were an agency CIO, I would be spending an afternoon on the new dashboard for federal IT investment that was recently launched by the Office of Management and Budget to see how I look. For example, on the dashboard is one of the industry's favorite CIOs, Dave Wennergren of the DOD, smiling next to a bright red uh-oh! rating of the $236.6 million (in fiscal 2009) Expeditionary Combat Support System. Let's see, it is an average of 120 days late per milestone. It's all there, for this and hundreds of other federal IT investments. The dashboard is beta, and it has some flaws, but to mix metaphors, it has legs.  -> Read More

ATTACKS EXPOSE NEED FOR ATTENTION TO CYBER SECURITY BASICS
While Washington quivered in anticipation of monumental decisions -- the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, health care reform, carbon taxes -- a garden variety internet worm wriggled up from obscurity to cause widespread denial of service attacks for federal sites. Even if President Obama had appointed his cyber security coordinator, it's doubtful the White House could have prevented the attack. It does make you wonder when the president will get around to appointing someone, though.  -> Read More

• HP's Banerjee Guides Tech Giant's Big Bets

  Prith Banerjee

  If you are wondering where to place a bet, you can do worse than watching to see where an experienced handicapper is putting his money down. For government agencies, the handicapping challenge is knowing when to play it safe with what is the current standard in IT versus when to invest in what looks promising in the future. The Secure Border Initiative is a case in point. In trying to secure a border with a virtual and physical fence, the Homeland Security Department is attempting to push the state of the art, but not so far that the project collapses.

  Big IT vendors have the same problem in reverse. They need the profits and volume from products and technologies that are in current vogue, but they've got to be ready for when the shifts occur. The timing is rarely easy. Just ask the old Digital Equipment Company.

  Take giants like Hewlett Packard, which ranks #12 on the Washington Technology annual list of the 100 largest federal IT contractors. They not only time market shifts but, if they are successful, also nudge them along. HP spends more than $3 billion a year on research and development. According to the company's senior vice president for R&D, Prith Banerjee, HP researchers strive for a balanced approach to how the money is invested, with 30 percent going for basic scientific research that may or may not eventually pay off in commercial products. Another 30 percent is aimed at immediate product requirements.  The rest is spent on eight technology categories that he, and other company executives, think will soon become important to large organizations.

  Banerjee was in Washington recently, mainly to give two keynote talks to gatherings of the National Science Foundation. His subject there was how the U.S. can maintain its technological and innovation leadership. He also had a luncheon briefing for a few reporters and detailed the eight categories where HP is placing its bets.

  1. Commercial digital printing. The thinking here is that eventually, most printed documents will be customized to individual readers and that there will be less printing of large quantities of identical copies. Traditional printing techniques are being outstripped in cost and capability by digital means. In fact, you can see this at work at the Government Printing Office, where many "press" runs are actually coming off machinery with an intelligent laser printer at the core.

  2. Content transformation, where information in physical (via scanning) and digital formats can be seen in a seamless way. Work here includes development of next-generation displays.

  3. "Immersive interaction" in the way people work with computers. HP sees limitations to the mouse plus keyboard input mode which has been surprisingly durable. HP is after what Banerjee called multimodal interfaces, or interacting with computers via speech, pen, touch, and movement of hands or head. Some systems are developed that can respond to where the user's eyes are pointed.

  4. Bringing together the domains of structured and unstructured data for the purposes of gaining business insight using both sources. This is a vexing problem in many industries, including law enforcement, where hand-written notes and forms are impossible to mine for patterns and insight.

  5. Analytics, that is, business decisions based on mathematics and scientific tools applied to large data sets.

  6. Development of the intelligent infrastructure. Banerjee also called this the next generation data center that is more flexible and easily scalable than current setups, and more secure. Beyond that he imagines trillions of sensors spread on a planetary scale, each having an IP address and each contributing some piece of environmental data that can be processed and interpreted with powerful computers for improving everything from oil exploration to agriculture planning.

  7. Cloud computing. In the future, Banerjee believes, most IT will be delivered as a service. The problem is that few clouds exist now with security sufficient to convince enterprises such as government agencies to entrust their crucial data to it.

  8. Sustainability. HP is working on making computers and computing devices more energy-efficient. But, he notes, computers only use about 2 percent of the electricity consumed in the U.S. "But what about the other 98 percent? IT can have a role in that, too," he said.

  Banerjee said he expects future enterprises to compute with a combination of cloud services and their own infrastructures, with the balance being determined by the criticality of each application. Some organizations, such as the FAA or IRS, will probably always have an internally owned and operated infrastructure. But e-mail and desktop services can probably be outsourced by nearly every organization. [Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP Technology Services -- a $45 billion piece of HP -- accompanied Banerjee and noted that services is now the biggest revenue item for the company thanks to last year's acquisition of EDS.]

  Banerjee was in Washington to push the notion of stronger partnerships among industry, government and academia. "In an innovation economy, not all smart people work for our labs," he said. HP's policy priorities are R&D investment, the partnerships, and energy sustainability. While noting the uptick in R&D money available for NSF grants thanks to the stimulus bill, Banerjee said he hoped NSF funding levels would not drop back in the 2010 fiscal year and beyond.

  H1B visas and the people they bring are topics about which Banerjee seems passionate. A native of India who first worked in the U.S. on an H1B visa, he said HP -- and he personally -- support continuance and expansion of the program that brings skilled foreigners into the U.S. "This is really a good thing the U.S. does. 30 percent of [technology] startups are founded by immigrants," he said.

  Return to top

---

• Are Federal Web Sites Due For an Injection of Energy?

  The government's web strategy, which seemed so contemporary a few years ago, is falling behind. As the federal government ponders what's next in IT -- social networking, new-generation push technology like Twitter, cloud computing -- the question popped up this week: Is it getting the basics of e-government right?

  Not quite, according to a new McKinsey & Co. report, which states it is in part the low rates of adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities such as wikis, blogs, and mashups, that has left federal sites behind commercial sites. The report cites one unnamed agency that "invested millions developing a service that enabled citizens to manage their accounts with the government online, only to achieve a disappointing adoption rate of 5 percent." It says user satisfaction with federal web sites is falling behind that of other sites, and that one reason may be that web site development and ownership in government is not firmly in the grip of program managers, or what McKinsey calls "line of business executives."

  Timing of this report is interesting. The Obama administration and Congress have unleashed a new Web fever, with cites running or proposed to follow everything from stimulus spending to how members of Congress use their franking privileges. The head of McKinsey's federal practice is Nancy Killefer, who has to withdraw her name from nomination to be Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget. So this looks a little like a gambit to stay relevant just as the government's approach to web development is evolving.

  I also question the underlying assumption, evident here and with many similar reports, that the American public is waiting around hoping for deep and continuous involvement with the federal government online. If the take-up on the unnamed site was 5 percent (of what) perhaps that means people feel they have better things to do. Like other reports, the McKinsey piece fails to make a distinction between the general public and what I call the professional public.

  The professional public consists of contractors, lobbyists and corporate public affairs types, trade association members, journalists, academics, grant seekers and others who make it their business to know how to navigate the federal government. They know the difference between a Congress Member's office and committee staffs. They know that both the Agriculture and Commerce Departments have grants and loans for broadband and why you go to one place or the other. Such people can find what they need online from the government, even while being aware of the limitations of government web sites.

  People in the general public may have a reason, but no inclination, to be involved with government policy-making, grants applications or contracting. Thus they tend to seek online tax payments to the IRS; information about regulations relating to their particular livelihood; and applying for VA, Social Security and other benefits. And here the government does have an opportunity for improvement. Even the online questionnaire at www.benefits.gov requires some knowledge of benefits program to begin with. How would an applicant know whether he or she is eligible for a Pell Grant, for example? For the purposes of this article I checked eligibility for benefits using a fictitious person I dreamed up, and the site turned up 38 possible programs -- after I filled out a form of more than 100 questions.

  For this group, the McKinsey report is spot on. Even this far into the e-government movement, to really navigate the federal government requires knowing something of its Byzantine set-up. Portal progress, as exemplified by grants.gov, usa.gov and benefits.gov, has slowed. Perhaps this is simply the result of bureaucratic inertia at the wind-down of the Bush administration. Whatever the reason, there is good cause for looking at the workaday sites across government and see how they stand up to the latest standards.

  As for the public's appetite for blogs, that might be still on the rise. But regardless of the earnestness of government blogging efforts, it's a stretch to expect political appointees, or even high-level career officials, to match the frankness, tone or intensity of the raucous debates that characterize the blogosphere.

  A third group is emerging, or at least some in government hopes it emerges. These are people who, as the McKinsey report notes, created applications from data made available online by the District of Columbia government. The CIO there, Vivek Kundra, is of course now the CIO and IT Administrator at the Office of Management and Budget, where he is hoping to draw the same kinds of communities to data.gov (see June 15 issue of FedInsider).

  Postscript: Since we last wrote about recovery.gov, the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board had the General Services Administration, via the Alliant program, award a contract to Smartronix to redevelop the site. Amidst a flurry of concern over the price ($9.5 million up to a possible $17 million), the board released details of what it expected to get. Board chairman Earl Devaney told Federal News Radio that GSA had put its best procurement team on the job, and detailed the time line for getting a less-lame site up and running. "A little patience might be helpful," Devaney said.

  Return to top

---

• Dashboard Debuts As Straightforward Example of Transparency

  If I were an agency CIO, I would be spending an afternoon on the new dashboard for federal IT investment that was recently launched by the Office of Management and Budget to see how I look. Rooting around the dashboard I found one of the industry's favorite CIOs, Dave Wennergren of the DOD, smiling next to a bright red uh-oh! rating of the $236.6 million (in fiscal 2009) Expeditionary Combat Support System. Let's see, it is an average of 120 days late per milestone. It is seriously behind in terms of variance from planned cost. With a strategic goal of reshaping the defense enterprise, no less, it looks as no one has done a performance summary rating of the program. Over here is CIO Thomas Wiesner of Labor, where the modernization of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Producer Price Index and International Price Programs systems are late but well under budget. So the nifty meter, which looks like it was taken from one of the old vacuum tube testers in the back of the hardware store, swings over to a 5 out of 10.

  It's all there, for this and hundreds of other federal IT investments. I was skeptical that CIO Vivek Kundra could get a usable dashboard up and running so fast, but he did within a month of announcing it. You can see the government's IT investments as a whole or drill down to individual departments, agencies and projects. You can select data feeds to receive via RSS by a long list of parameters to stay up to date.

  The site is beta, and it has some flaws. It's great that you can link from a project to its OMB Exhibit 300, but the next site update should open the 300s and other auxiliary data, such as CIO bios, in new browser windows, rather than take users right out of the site. Noticeably missing are the names of prime contractors for many projects, as well as the CIOs' ratings of their own projects. These are less dashboard flaws than indicators of missing usaspending.gov data.

  The analysis section shows in novel graphic formats -- the helpful introductory video on the home page calls them visualizations --  trends in IT spending.  This section will take you to a listing of 7,409 Exhibit 53 investment records, where an alphabetical selector or search window would be extremely helpful.

  Presuming that Kundra's office will continually improve the site, it is accurate to say this site is a great example of extending the transparency of information that might have been already available. The clever and functional aggregation amplifies the power of the data. It creates useful shortcuts to key information not only for IT contractors, reporters, analysts and anyone else who cares, but also to agency IT and program staffs themselves. Just by presenting the missing evaluations and the troubled projects at a glance, the dashboard might spur action.

  Interestingly, the FAQ section is divided into two parts, one for the public and one for agencies. The agency FAQs are up there for anyone to see, another blow for transparency. Also noteworthy is that the much-maligned Bush era green-yellow-red rating system survives via the dashboard, but in a more dynamic form. The dashboard was unveiled with a bit of fanfare July 1 by Kundra. Yet it rated a story in the New York Times, not just the local trade press. The dashboard may seem at first like a wonky curiosity, but I believe this approach can and should spread to every program in government, not just IT projects. The dashboard, to mix metaphors, has legs.

  Added only this week is a blog from which visitors can submit feedback. I was amused by the large photo of President Obama sitting at a computer in a cubicle, intently navigating the site.

  Return to top

---

• Attacks Expose Need For Attention to Cyber Security Basics

  While Washington quivered in anticipation of monumental decisions -- the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, health care reform, carbon taxes -- a garden variety internet worm wriggled up from obscurity to cause widespread denial of service (DoS) attacks for federal sites. Even if President Obama had appointed his cyber security coordinator, it's doubtful the White House could have prevented the attack. It does make you wonder when the president will get around to appointing someone, though.

  While pointing out that the attack didn't seem to result in data loss or theft, federal network officials still weren't in a position to declare this denial of service no big deal. It was a big deal because it seemed aimed at the federal government and the government of South Korea, and it seemed to originate in North Korea. It started on the 4th of July and it coincided, more or less, with North Korea's latest demonstration of missile launch capability. Computerworld, though, quoted one expert who said there was no evidence the North Korean government was behind the attacks. 

  The AP reported that the White House and the Defense Department largely, but not completely deflected the attack, while the Treasury and Transportation Departments, and Federal Trade Commission sites were shut down. As late as Monday of this week, the web sites of U.S. forces in South Korea remained offline, according to Bob Brewin of NextGov.

  Federal response was bland, in contrast to the soul-searching and solemn mea culpas that regularly accompany data losses and laptop thefts. Perhaps that is because so many managers were caught off guard. For all the investment in cyber infrastructure, including the still-incomplete Trusted Internet Connection and Einstein initiatives, a revival of the 2004 MyDoom worm stopped many web sites cold. Just this week, the Defense Information Systems Agency put out a request for information on commercial products that would help defend against distributed DoS attacks.

  One also wonders about the service level agreements (SLAs) in place for the contractors hosting federal web sites, and whether they include an adequate response to DoS attacks. Especially as the government starts talking seriously about cloud computing, the need for SLAs that guarantee this sort of attack won't shut down a site, and the oversight capability to monitor compliance, will become more important. So will keeping up with the latest attack profiles. Because the MyDoom attack has been widely labeled as primitive and garden variety, the question arises: Well, what happens when a sophisticated attack occurs?

  If they haven't done so already, this is a good time for federal web managers and CIOs to call in their internet service providers and have a frank discussion. A few questions to ask:

  • What defenses are in place to give you and us a heads-up that abnormal traffic is occurring?
  • What techniques are in place to deflect this sort of traffic?
  • What is the minimum time you will guarantee that our web site will be unavailable in the event of a DoS attack?
  • Are you willing to take a performance payment penalty for downtime, if there is also an uptime incentive?

  Return to top