Summaries for October 15, 2009

CLOUD COMPUTING II: AMAZING STORIES FROM INDUSTRY
In the last issue of FedInsider, I expressed skepticism that many federal agencies would end up embracing cloud computing. Two industry case histories of cloud adoption show the potential pitfalls and therefore why the cloud must be approached step-by-step. And you need a good business and technology case to justify it.  -> Read More

WINTER MIGHT BE COMING, BUT GOVERNMENT SEES GREEN AHEAD
Next to cloud computing, green IT is looking to be one of the leading Next Big Things. At least, it will be a component in the greening of the federal government. You might want to bring a sweater to keep in the office this winter. Accelerating a major push started by the Bush administration in 2007, the Obama administration issued an executive order earlier this month for agencies to "lead [the nation] by example" when it comes to reduction in the consumption of energy and materials. -> Read More

                                                                            Advertisements



IRMCO Early Bird Registration Is Now Open
Early bird registration for IRMCO 2010 is now open.  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.

RECOVERY.GOV VERSION 2.0 HITS THE WEB. OR IS IT VERSION 0.9?
You might remember, or maybe you've seen film, from the early days of the U.S. space effort. With much build-up and fanfare, at the conclusion of countdown some rockets would barely leave the launch pad before plopping over or blowing up. It is by no means a mission failure, but the recovery.gov site, now that it is populated with data reported by agencies, is clearly a Version 0.9 -- somewhere beyond beta but with a long way to go. -> Read More

THE OBAMA MANAGEMENT AGENDA STARTS TO TAKE SHAPE
How do you measure program performance? As the government metastasizes into more and more areas of life, the question is taking on ever more importance. And now the administration is rolling out an agenda for measuring programs that emphasize, to use a signature Obama phrase, "what works."  -> Read More

• Cloud Computing II: Amazing Stories from Industry

  Sheila Davis

  In the last issue of FedInsider, I expressed skepticism that many federal agencies would end up embracing cloud computing. Cloud computing has moved past the science fiction stage, for sure. But two industry case histories of cloud adoption show the potential pitfalls and therefore why the cloud must be approached step-by-step.   And you need a good business and technology case to justify it.

  Federal IT spending in fiscal 2010 will rise a bit from the $75 billion level around which it has been hovering, and a big part of that is the cost of maintaining IT infrastructure. The Bush administration emphasized consolidation of resources to support functions agencies have in common, like HR process or accounting. That was the Lines of Business initiative, which never really had a name that accurately captured what it was all about. The Obama administration likes cloud computing, which emphasizes the resource more than the applications.

  At the monthly luncheon put on by the Association for Federal IRM (AFFIRM), federal listeners got a good jolt of reality about the difficulties of cloud computing from savvy IT people in industry.

  FedEx, the delivery company known for its strategic use of IT, sent Sheila Davis, manager of FedEx's cloud systems infrastructure and development team. She described highly specific reasons why FedEx is using cloud provider Appistry for some of its work. The challenge, according to Davis, was how to solve two problems at once: rising infrastructure costs and fluctuating capacity needs that make for difficult load balancing. The two problems are related because investing in infrastructure to accommodate peak loads adds to the basic expense.

  Davis described FedEx's route optimization process as one in which up to 300 algorithms must be run in a short period of time at the start of each shift, "a complex load balancing challenge." Each individual box or envelope the company handles from point to point represents several megabytes of data, added Michael Rains, FedEx's cloud technical lead, and that was what was driving the basic infrastructure costs. So for Fedex, the benefits of cloud are:

  • Automatic provisioning of processing and storage capacity on demand.
  • Horizontal scalability. Roughly, that's the ability to link separate servers so they operate as a single virtual one.
  • Always having room for adding another application.

  I can think of lots of federal applications that feature similar characteristics to those of FedEx. Military logistics and veterans claims processing come to mind. Also tax return processing, but it may be that the IRS should always maintain internal capacity because the risk of outsourcing might be too large for something so essential to the government.

  Warnings came from Victor Nightingale, the Director of Global Technology and Infrastructure for Manpower Inc., the temporary employee provider. He voiced the number one concern that federal officials cite, security.

  "We need to ensure security for millions of resumes in our systems," Nightingale said, adding, anyone embarking on a cloud journey must take time to make sure the provider understands explicitly what its compliance responsibilities are.

  And don't think moving into the cloud will happen as fast as lightning. Nightingale said that for Manpower, it took 18 months to move three applications into a cloud facility operated by Amazon. Two danger signs that an application might not be cloud-suitable: If it is custom or an overly customized commercial application, expect what he called a support nightmare. And ditto if your business process supported by the application is too convoluted.

  Nightingale also had advice for how to get started, and that is to start with the more basic functions like administration of operating system, e-mail, telecommunications, patching, and tape backup. Those may not be sexy, but they will save money.

  Since the last installment, federal agencies have made some more concrete progress of their own into the cloud. Linda Cureton, the CIO at NASA, said last week that her agency's cloud, Nebula, was to begin hosting the web site, USASpending.gov. In September, USA.gov, operated by the General Services Administration, moved to a cloud host. And earlier this month, the Defense Information Systems Agency started offering its cloud platform as a runtime and production environment.   It had been offered as a safe place to test new software code.

  Return to top

---

• Winter Might Be Coming, But Government Sees Green Ahead

  Next to cloud computing, green IT is looking to be one of the leading Next Big Things. At least, it will be a component in the greening of the federal government. You might want to bring a sweater to keep in the office this winter. Here are just a few of the recent developments:

  Accelerating a major push started by the Bush administration in 2007, the Obama administration issued an executive order earlier this month for agencies to "lead [the nation] by example" when it comes to reduction in the consumption of energy and materials. The order starts with the energy targets that have the biggest potential for savings, namely transportation and operation of buildings. This is where agencies are going to have to spend money to make money, whether replacing fleets of cars, retrofitting buildings with smart thermostats and living roofs, or reducing real estate altogether. But the order devotes considerable verbiage to promoting what it calls electronic stewardship.

  Several agencies have joined the bandwagon. Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, on the same day as the presidential order, announced a green awareness month. The Army, also this month, said it would help the Marine Corps develop greener IT systems that would have the additional benefit of producing lighter field gear. All of the military services have announced greening initiatives, with the Navy announcing a green procurement program back in April.

  This is only the latest. The green government movement goes back at least a decade, but in the past 18 months has accelerated, thanks to the temporary but extreme run-up in petroleum prices a year ago and the gathering momentum behind the theory of global warming. Still ahead is what the Congress will do with climate or carbon dioxide legislation.

  Green is a great, moral concept, and who doesn't want to save the planet? It should get easier now that industry is starting to see the business opportunities in green products it can sell to the government. IBM is perhaps the first to achieve prominence with its "smarter planet" public relations and ad campaign. Many of its efforts are aimed at municipalities. Cisco, Computer Sciences Corp., Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and many others are stressing their green product offerings, meaning products that are themselves more efficient and easier to dispose of, and products that enable customers to reach their energy reduction goals. German enterprise resources planning software vendor SAP even flew over its CEO, Leo Apotheker, for a National Press Club event last week to tout the company's goal of reducing its carbon footprint by 70 percent by 2020, and to introduce the federal government to software products aimed at helping large organizations do the same.

  Apotheker said that even the design of software and the efficiency of code can be green if they are aimed at reducing processor cycle times and require less disk access, with disk drives being among the more electricity-intensive components in IT systems. VA's Assistant Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, Tammy Duckworth, took a more practical approach in an interview, pointing out how much paper federal offices could save if they simply printed on both sides. Most network printers can do this. They just have to be set to do so.

  Vendors are sprouting titles such as chief sustainability officers, and creating green councils. And now the interagency Steering Committee on Federal Sustainability is supposed to get underway. Each department is to have a senior sustainability officer.

  The danger in all this is forgetting that the heating and cooling of buildings, the consumption of power in data centers, the operation of vehicles for fleets and getting to work, and the use of water for drinking and hygiene all have a purpose: delivery of the mission. Luckily, when it comes to IT, buying Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) certified products isn't difficult. And technology trends that improve efficiency and lower costs, principally server consolidation and virtualization, and cloud or shared resource computing, tend to be green.

  The challenge will be harder in energy initiatives where the investment is larger and the payback slower. For example, if an ERP type of application can monitor equipment and usage patterns with, say, a 2 percent annual payback, it might be time for agency buyers to dust off a contracting idea that has never fully caught-on: share in savings.

  Return to top

---

• Recovery.gov Version 2.0 Hits the Web. Or Is It Version 0.9?

  You might remember, or maybe you've seen film, from the early days of the U.S. space effort. With much build-up and fanfare, at the conclusion of countdown, some rockets would barely leave the launch pad before plopping over or blowing up. It is by no means a mission failure, but the recovery.gov site, now that it is populated with data reported by agencies, is clearly a Version 0.9 -- somewhere beyond beta but with a long way to go.

  That's not an unprecedented condition for a federal web site. When www.usa.gov first launched, it was slow and missed a lot of information. Over the years, the General Services Administration tweaked, poked and prodded it, switching out pieces of technology and extending the reach. Every so often, you notice a big improvement in a site. Literally the day I wrote this, I was visiting GSA's own site and for the first time, all the pages displayed properly with Safari on a Mac. Somebody nailed down one recurring problem.

  Like usa.gov, the recovery.gov site was conceived, announced, launched, re-launched and flown with a payload under a lot of publicity and promise. It is to be the centerpiece of the Obama administration's transparency approach. Under the auspices of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board, this is showtime for public disclosure of stimulus spending. And so while we've talked about it before at FedInsider, it is time to revisit. What goes on with the site and the plumbing behind it matters to every agency. Earl Devaney, the affable chair of the Board, told me on Federal News Radio the other morning that he expects the accounting and reporting procedures spawned by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and subsequent regulations to become the standard for all federal spending, not just stimulus spending.

  A review of last week's events:

  Saturday: Recovery Board gives agencies another 10 days, or until Oct. 20, to submit their contracting data.

  Tuesday: Trade press breathlessly anticipates intake of the first batch of data, derived from federal contracts for stimulus dollars (grants come later).

  Wednesday: Data, submitted through a back-end site, FederalReporting.gov, starts flowing in.

  Thursday: Data hits the site, and good-government groups immediately list shortcomings.

  To be sure, there are shortcomings. Chief among them is the delivery of some data in the dreaded Portable Document Format (PDF) format, not an XML or spreadsheet format that could be manipulated. (Example: The report on non-competitive, non-fixed price contracts).

  Some server tweaking is needed. I launched a search from the home page for awards from the Transportation Department in Indiana. The first page to load next shows the entire U.S. and all the contracts. It took about 10 seconds for the data for Indiana came up. Perhaps worse, there is no tabular data for the 35 Indiana contracts listed -- the summary table has no links. Rolling the mouse over the word contracts instead produces a balloon telling you the information (35 contracts worth a total of $78 million) comes from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). Of what use is that to the millions of citizen IGs who mostly have no idea what FPDS is?

  Navigating deeper into Indiana and the locations of grants, loans and contracts takes some doing, but I could find individual awards, although some of the "more detail" links went nowhere.

  The main shortcoming is that machine-readable data that would let users search by zip code, award size, type of project or any other parameters is still largely absent.

  And yet, there is a lot of easily accessible information at this site which would have been difficult to get before the effort was launched.

  To be fair, while there is a long way to go, what the Board has sought to do is non-trivial. As Devaney pointed out, the contract to re-design Recovery.gov, at first widely derided for its $9 million price tag, involved much more than a pretty interface. It is a way of graphically integrating information from many sources in large volume. More than 12,000 reports came in initially, and there are tens of thousands more to go. The administration's principal challenge now is to stay with the site and follow a plan of continuous improvement. Certainly having the Recovery.gov site early if imperfect is preferable to a multi tens of millions of dollars development that might never see the light of day. Perhaps someday an interagency task force will take the FPDS, agency contracting and financial systems and the data-gathering sites and rationalize them into one open source, XML system. But until nirvana, we have Recovery.gov. It's a big step forward in opening up the government.

  Return to top

---

• The Obama Management Agenda Starts To Take Shape

  How do you measure program performance? As the government metastasizes into more and more areas of life, the question is taking on ever more importance. And now the administration is rolling out an agenda for measuring programs that emphasize, to use a signature Obama phrase, "what works."

  As a case in point -- mine, not the administration's -- consider the Car Allowance Rebate System, in the vernacular, Cash For Clunkers. A relatively small and short-lived program at $3 billion, it found surprising popularity. CARS moved 700,000 new vehicles -- mostly Toyotas -- into the market and retired an equal number, each of which had lower gas mileage. But CARS briefly became a symbol for those opposed to the health care reforms still grinding their way through Congress. Opponents cited the seeming inability of the government to get the checks out to car dealers in a timely way as an example of why it would be a mistake to turn health care financing over to the federal government.

  So how do you measure a program like CARS? Think for a moment of the possible metrics:

  • Did the Transportation Department properly estimate the staffing it would require to get $3 billion out? (Answer: No)
  • Were dealers paid on time? (Answer: No) After all, they laid out the cash to finance their inventory in the first place, then made deals with customers minus $4,500 per deal they expected to get back from the government.
  • Was the rather complex process required for verifying all of the program parameters, such as age and mileage rating of the cars involved and assurance that traded-in cars were destroyed, properly anticipated? (Answer: Doesn't seem like it.)
  • Given the cars taken out of use and the cars introduced, what is the total subtraction of carbon emissions over the anticipated lives of the vehicles involved? Does this take into account the emissions associated with manufacturing new cars? (Bet no one can answer that one.)
  • How many jobs were created as a result of moving 700,000 already-built cars off dealer lots, and does this figure take into account the downturn in auto-making that occurred after conclusion of the CARS program? Where were these jobs, given that Japanese nameplates were among the most popular cars sold during the program. (Ditto)

  As you can see, just a moment's pondering about a single, simple program produces lots of possible metrics, some related to the efficiency of the operation itself, and some related to the mission goals of the program.

  These are the kinds of questions federal program managers are going to have to ask themselves as the Obama Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rolls out its ambitious program performance management agenda. Performance evaluations are to be tied to 2011 budget submissions. Although this is normally the season in which the agencies would be looking at the "passbacks" on 2011 requests, OMB appears to be willing to slow up the budget preparation process in order to put the performance stamp on it.

  What appears to be taking place is not an outright replacement of the Program Assessment Rating Tool, or PART, of the Bush administration, but rather a sharpening of it. OMB Director Peter Orszag put it this way in his Oct. 7 memo on program evaluation: Some "evaluations that have been done have not sufficiently shaped Federal budget priorities or agency management practices." OMB is establishing an interagency working group for promoting program evaluation. The examinations will emphasize evidence that programs are working, building in agency capabilities in the art of evaluation itself, coming up with new evaluations and clearing away "impediments" to rigorous program evaluation. But OMB is leaving out procurement as something it wants agencies to spend a lot of time evaluating, in favor of public- or constituent-facing program outcomes.

  In a bit of a surprise, OMB is making the first round of evaluations voluntary. In his blog post accompanying the memo, Orszag says simply, "This is a first step." And that initial efforts will be treated as demonstrations, and that a sort of continuous improvement process will be applied to future evaluations.

  OMB promises to put evaluation research online. So expect yet another transparency web site to launched at some point. In the meantime, agency heads have until Nov. 2 to submit evaluation plans for which there is little money available from OMB. Agencies are encouraged to "consult with outside research and evaluation experts" in developing their cases for going ahead with evaluations. Shrewd contractors will study the documents and see how they can help their agency clients make the case for increased 2011 funding.

  By the way, OMB is not doing this alone. It is joined by Aneesh Chopra, the chief technology officer located in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Dave McLure, formerly of OMB before retiring to the private sector, is now back at the General Services Administration as head of the Office of Citizen Services and Communications, seems to be part of the effort as well -- and OMB is wise to include him.

  Although no one has pointed out the coincidence, or maybe the connection, but the new program evaluation initiative hits just as agencies are using a modern day suggestion box methodology for improving programs. There is the Veteran Affairs contest to find from among employees ways to improve its claims processing (see FedInsider #42). And now GSA's Better Buy project. GSA teams with the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Council for Technology to use -- you guessed it -- social media to get ideas on improving the market research, pre-solicitation and solicitation stages of acquisitions.

  Return to top