Summaries for October 1, 2009

COMMITTED NASA TECHIE TRIES OUT ALL THE LATEST TOYS
If some people dabble in technology, Tom Soderstrom immerses himself in it. For the past three years, Soderstrom has been bringing that technology enthusiasm to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he is the IT Chief Technology Officer. His mission is to support 'lots of smart scientists' — whom he describes as his principal stakeholders — with world class IT.  -> Read More

INSOURCING: HEADACHE FOR THE INS AND THE OUTS
Is the Defense Department poaching brigades worth of contractor employees in a bid to pull back work from contracted services? No, but the so-called insourcing question hasn't received a full enough airing in the greater IT community. The Professional Services Council, which represents some 330 services contractors, called in the press last month to point out problems it sees with the way the government is dealing with Obama administration directives on insourcing. -> Read More

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IRMCO Early Bird Registration Opens September 15
Early bird registration for IRMCO 2010 opens September 15! Plan now to attend IRMCO 2010 on April 11-14, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. Federal Travel Regulation; Conference Planning-Prepayment of Registration Fee, FTR Amendment 2006-02 allows for the reimbursement of the prepayment of early bird discounted registration fees to attend a conference, so take advantage of the IRMCO 2010 early bird 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, GSA's Interagency Resources Management Conference, has been produced by GSA since 1961 to serve the needs of the government's senior executives. The three-day retreat provides these leaders the opportunity for dialogue with experts in organizational change, peer-to-peer discussion of strategies to transform their agencies, and insightful keynotes from industry and government visionaries.

Go to www.irmco.gov to register and receive early discounted rates for government's management conference. To register call 202-237-0300.

SILVER LINING IN CLOUD COMPUTING HASN'T POKED THROUGH YET
In the form of the General Services Administration's storefront launched last month, the first Obama-era computing cloud has come in overhead. Now we'll see whether it produces pennies from heaven for federal agencies. Cloud computing encompasses many ideas, all aimed at increasing flexibility and reducing fixed computing costs, but the cloud storefront will probably not have customers lining up around the corner just yet.  -> Read More

WE'RE ALL CHANGE AGENTS NOW
The Recovery Accountability Board and the Veterans Affairs Department have one thing in common. They are reaching out beyond the narrow confines of their own senior staff to tap the ideas of many. Call it crowd sourcing or call it a 21st century suggestion box, but it represents a spreading phenomenon enabled by smart IT and aimed at producing better IT.  -> Read More

• Committed NASA Techie Tries Out All the Latest Toys

  Tom Soderstrom

  If some people dabble in technology, Tom Soderstrom immerses himself in it. Whether new online services or promising new devices, he tries them, sees how they work, lets others try them and adds their reactions.

  For the past three years, Soderstrom has been bringing that technology enthusiasm to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he is the IT Chief Technology Officer. His mission is to support “lots of smart scientists” – whom he describes as his principal stakeholders – with world class IT.

  “Our business at JPL is to put rovers on Mars. But we can make the people who do that more productive with IT,” Soderstrom said.

  His approach to bringing in technology might be called the crowd sourcing method. Soderstrom calls it partnering. Partners include the potential users inside JPL, peripheral organizations such as other agencies of NASA or Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, and the companies supplying the technology.

  From the third group, industry, Soderstrom said, “we hope to partner at the prototype stage. What if you could informally say, ‘We want to do YouTube for JPL, but with encryption'? Industry will do the pilot at no charge and they own it,” while JPL gets a bargain.

  The crowd sourcing comes in when partnering with potential users. Soderstrom employs an acceptance testing methodology used by Google Labs. It basically consists of having employees try out proposed new applications. The same thing occurs for JPL employees via JPL IT Labs, as Soderstrom dubbed it.

  “If it doesn’t get a high rating, we drop it. If it gets a high rating, we keep developing it,” he said.

  Some examples:

  • An energy consumption dashboard for JPL buildings shows quarterly changes in utility bills resulting from various changes, such as installing intelligent thermostats. This proved popular with workers and is saving money.
  • “JPLTube” – the YouTube adaptation – makes digitized, scientific films available to scientists at their desks.
  • An iPhone application for scheduling conference rooms, which tend to be a premium at JPL, on the fly. It keeps track of who is using what room and when, and can divert an incoming group to another open room if a meeting in one room runs overtime. The ease of developing small but innovative applications "is why we like the iPhone,” Soderstrom said. In fact, JPL staff have created many iPhone applications, ranging from the conference room application to downloading telemetry information.The CIO office makes them available via an in-house version of iTunes. The iTunes was in turn created using Apple’s enterprise developers kit.

  Ideas can originate outside the IT shop, Soderstrom pointed out. In one case, an idea came from the legendary John Casani, Special Assistant to the JPL Director and director of several fabled space exploration programs. Casani suggested a system to record, transcribe and then automatically e-mail meetings. Tests showed that transcription software just isn’t yet capable enough for this application.

  “So it was an interesting idea, but we put it on the back burner. Every so often we revisit” the technology, Soderstrom said. He added that he and his staff regularly visit big trade shows such as the Consumer Electronics Show to see what’s new. They carry back what looks promising and have created a JPL technology petting zoo, open to anyone in JPL who wants to examine a particular gadget or application more closely.

  JPL is also exploring cloud computing as a way of lowering IT costs and avoiding obsolescence. Soderstrom explained that in the current model, a data center is built for a mission.

  “Suppose you want a mission to Europa,” a moon of Jupiter. “In the old days you’d need 100 servers, and buy 200 for safety. So you’d build before you can do anything. Eventually you have 200, eight-year-old servers,” he said. “We’re hoping, with cloud computing, to empty out data centers of anything that doesn’t need to run there.”

  This dovetails with NASA’s Nebula, a department-wide cloud effort originating at the Ames Research Center. But JPL is also talking with Amazon.com, the online retailer and one of the first large scale data center operators to offer its infrastructure to other organizations as a paid service. Whether to use an agency cloud or commercial depends on the severity of an application’s security requirements, Soderstrom said.

  Either way, he said, “you don’t know a thing until you try it with real data.”

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• Insourcing: Headache for the Ins and the Outs

  Is the Defense Department poaching brigades worth of contractor employees in a bid to pull back work from contracted services?

  No, but the so-called insourcing question hasn't received a full enough airing in the greater IT community. Presuming Daniel I. Gordon  is confirmed as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, insourcing-outsourcing would be a good issue over which he could assert some strong guidance. The Professional Services Council (PSC), which represents some 330 services contractors, called in the press last month to point out problems it sees with the way the government is dealing with Obama administration directives on insourcing. It got a little ink, but that's about it.

  Here's the rub: A series of memos from the White House, OMB , the Defense Department; plus language in the 2009 omnibus federal spending law and in the 2008 Defense Authorization have been interpreted by some agency managers as a call for massive retreat from outsourcing, in particular from the Bush administration OMB's emphasis  on and approach to the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act, which seemed to ask agencies to outsource as much as possible. Here's a sample of the new talk: The 2008 Defense Authorization requires the undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness to create guidance "to ensure that consideration is given to using, on a regular basis, DOD civilian employees to perform new functions and functions that are performed by contractors and could be performed by Department of Defense civilian employees." The 2009 Omnibus uses essentially the same language, only spread out to all agencies and citing the FAIR Act.

  Persistent reports have surfaced of certain agencies, mostly in DOD, eagerly using this guidance, an expected flattening of Defense spending and the generally weak economy to offer contractor workers government jobs. No small irony here. It seems like just a few years ago it was government howling that the best talent was being poached by industry.

  Counter-insourcing, or at least cautionary, voices have not been silent. Democratic Congressman Gerald M. Connolly of Virginia -- his district has both contractors and federal workers -- wrote to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, cautioning him that the DOD insourcing drive was occurring ahead of a statutorily-required analysis of what functions are inherently governmental. So much back and forth among Congress, DOD, and the PSC took place in the spring that by July, Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, Director of the Missile Defense Agency, had to remind his management team not to simply convert contractor workers wholesale to government in violation of Merit Systems Principles.

  PSC President Stan Soloway pointed out that neither the Bush nor the Obama administration actually put a quota on jobs to outsource or insource. Since public-private competitions under OMB Circular A-76 were outlawed, how do agencies go about the task of determining what to contract and what to keep or return to in-house? The former Defense procurement chief has argued for more openness on the part of agencies who opt to insource about how they made the decision. And he said that competition, not between government and contractors, but among contractors is not getting enough emphasis in the drive to cut costs. Hardly an unreasonable suggestion.

  The whole question is complicated by a kaleidoscopic range of opinions being asserted of the range of activities that should be subject to the potential of outsourcing. And by pressure from unions, who think nothing above lawn mowing and painting should be done by anyone except government employees.

  It is unrealistic to think that the federal government's dependency on contractors for even mission critical functions will lessen appreciably, even if this were a desirable goal, which is questionable. If the goals of the current leadership are better performance, lower cost and more accountability -- and which administration in the last 20 years has not articulated those goals in one way or another -- wholesale reduction in contracting isn't synonymous with them.

  A lurching change in administrations, contracting scandals in Veterans Affairs and in Iraq reconstruction, and a new assertiveness by federal employee unions have contributed to an anti-contractor tone in Washington. Now is the time for honest people on both sides, government and industry, who really know how things should work, to bring reason and balance to the laudable goal of making sure missions are executed by the best combination of resources.

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• Silver Lining in Cloud Computing Hasn't Poked Through Yet

  In the form of the General Services Administration's storefront launched last month, the first Obama-era computing cloud has gathered overhead. Now we'll see whether it produces pennies from heaven for federal agencies.

  I'm not cynical about cloud computing, but skeptical. About a dozen years ago GSA launched with great fanfare a program called seat management. Under seat management, agencies were to buy their desktop hardware and software, including in those days Novell networking, as a service. Trouble is, very few people signed on. I remember the retirement dinner for a high level (and very capable) GSA official who was one of the architects of seat management. When it was my turn to speak, I commented that there were more people at the dinner than had signed up for seat management -- and I got a pretty good roar of laughter, I sheepishly admit. No one ever could explain why seat management wasn't more popular. Probably for the same reasons as people who are wary of cloud computing: lack of control, security worries, or simply that people are busy and keeping what they have now is an easier path than upending everything to join the cloud.

  On the other hand, cloud offers a more nuanced approach to "X" (infrastructure or software) as a service than seat management, because it separates the individual user's device from the rest of the infrastructure -- data centers, servers, networks, and software. There is a compelling case to be made for avoiding the costly and time consuming constancy of application and utility software acquisition, hardware infrastructure acquisition and maintenance, and keeping everything up to date with respect to versions and security patches.

  And yet, to continue the game of mental ping pong, the cloud storefront will probably not have customers lining up around the corner just yet. Here's why:

  • As a grand opening, this one was inauspicious. There is actually very little product yet within the storefront, certainly not enough offerings that an agency or bureau could commit to a total cloud solution and buy it all from the storefront.
  • Proponents of cloud computing are diluting the meaning of the term as they try harder and harder to convince agencies that it's the way to go. For example, USA.gov, GSA's federal information portal, recently switched hosts from a government data center to a commercial one operated by Terremark  Worldwide. No doubt GSA will realize significant savings, but if cloud and commercial hosting are the same thing, why does a computing setup dating back to the 1960s need such an intensive re-branding campaign?
  • The Office of Management and Budget under CIO Vivek Kundra has in effect deputized GSA for its cloud point agency, but should do more to tie cloud computing with the Lines of Business initiative of the previous OMB. That would give a wider range of variations available to agencies under the shared services concept.

  Ideas in IT run in cycles. Some, like client/server computing, bloom and wither when the technology shifts. Some, like seat management, never do take off. Still others, like application service providers initially fall flat because they are ahead of their time, but later become common. Cloud computing encompasses many ideas, all aimed at increasing flexibility and reducing fixed computing costs. So if agencies choose any of the component ideas that make up "cloud," then the cloud proponents can claim a big win.

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• We're All Change Agents Now

  The Recovery Accountability (RAT) Board and the Veterans Affairs Department have one thing in common. They are reaching out beyond the narrow confines of their own senior staff to tap the ideas of many. Call it crowd sourcing or call it a 21st century suggestion box, but it represents a spreading phenomenon enabled by smart IT and aimed at producing better IT.

  Whether asking the masses to weigh in on big questions will produce worthwhile ideas remains to be seen. And whether the government is nimble enough to act on great ideas from the outside, well, that’s an open question too.

  First let’s examine the RAT Board’s newly re-launched recovery.gov site, now being dissected by the good-government groups. It is almost as good as two privately-operated sites (see FedInsider #35). More data will be flowing in next week and through the end of October as federal agencies and state governments, in theory, start to get a better handle on where their stimulus dollars have gone.

  Special Presidential Advisor Ed DeSeve is working on the front end of recovery, making sure agencies get the money out the door for stimulating projects and grants. At the back end is Earl Devaney, the chairman of the RAT Board and keeper of recovery.gov but more importantly, also the person leading the group making sure the money is spent correctly and accountably. Devaney told the press recently he hoped the web site would spark a million inspectors general, that is, citizens keeping an eye on presumably local (to them) stimulus efforts.

  It’s a worthy goal, having citizens watch how government spends money and having the ability to let the feds know when a grant or project is going wrong. Trouble is, not many people have the time nor inclination to actually become involved in local political matters. Having covered local selectmen and school boards at one time, I can tell you that precious few people relate to the minutiae of local government.

  But local newspapers, broadcast outlets and bloggers can now easily punch in a zip code at recovery.gov and see where and for what stimulus money is being spent. If they are alert enough to see the news opportunities, then Mr. Devaney’s hope of a million IGs could be realized.

  Equally interesting is VA’s seeking answers to its benefits application backlog by sponsoring an employee contest for ideas. Ideas can be submitted online until Veterans Day next month. VA Under Secretary for Benefits Patrick Dunne will chair a selection committee that includes Chief Technology Officer Peter Levin and the administration’s Chief Performance Officer, Aneesh Chopra. The winning ideas are promised funding for development.

  In the old days, VA would have presented this problem to a contractor, and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars later, a new system might be delivered for processing claims benefits. But the answer to claims backlogs is likely to be a series of much simpler steps. Many years ago a steel executive, in trying to respond to the superior quality of Asian steel, appealed to line workers for ideas. One worker suggested doping the threaded ends of finished pipe products so they wouldn’t rust in storage and end up being delivered already corroded to customers. Cheap and easy.

  A contract might yet result from the VA contest, but it will be fascinating to see what sort of contract and how the government-industry dynamic shifts when the technical ideas have been generated in-house.

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