Summaries for November 1, 2009

TINY OPIC HAS SAME IT CHALLENGES AS BIG AGENCIES
David Zeppieri likes to point out that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) is neither private nor a corporation. In fact, it doesn't have any overseas offices. As CIO of the small independent federal agency with 220 employees, Zeppieri brings his big-agency experience to the ongoing IT challenges OPIC has in supporting its mission of making loans, guaranteeing investments or insuring risks by private investors, to developing countries.  -> Read More

FRESH WAVE OF FEDERAL WEB DEVELOPMENT EXTENDS BEYOND RECOVERY.GOV
The Obama administration has swept in a new generation of federal web sites, revitalizing the energy of the mid-1990s. Back then it was news when an agency simply launched itself online. One challenge for many of the new sites is that the interactivity of Web 2.0 tools is not evident. Also, federal agencies developing highly vertical or spinoff sites must find ways to get these new URLs into their intended visitors' hands, or browsers. -> Read More

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WHY HEALTH IT IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS
Who is really driving health IT interoperability? The federal government is certainly a player, but developments are going on in the private sector as well. The $19 billion in stimulus dollars appropriated notwithstanding, the market will be a long time developing because there are so many pieces to it. -> Read More

OVERBUILDING? IT SEEMS TO BE NORMAL FOR GOVERNMENT DATA CENTERS
Last week, a squadron of governmental celebrities was on hand in Arlington, Va. as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano cut a ribbon to open the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, or NCCIC. Also last week, news broke of the National Security Agency's plan to break ground on a $1.5 billion data center at the National Guard's Camp Williams, near Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, in one of those exquisite juxtapositions, Vivek Kundra, the CIO at the Office of Management and Budget, was down at the Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, scolding the federal government generally for having too many data centers."  -> Read More

• Tiny OPIC Has Same IT Challenges As Big Agencies

  David Zeppieri

  David Zeppieri likes to point out that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) is neither private nor a corporation. In fact, it doesn't have any overseas offices. As CIO of the small independent federal agency with 220 employees, Zeppieri brings his big-agency experience to the ongoing IT challenges OPIC has in supporting its mission of making loans, guaranteeing investments or insuring risks by private investors, to developing countries. A 28-year veteran of federal service, Zeppieri has worked at OPIC for three years.

  While the CIO Council, the Office and Management and Budget and industry talk endlessly about how and when to move federal IT operations to hosted facilities, OPIC has just completed a cloud deployment. Planning for the cloud project started in 2008, and after a competition, OPIC chose Oracle Corp. for its Oracle on Demand. Oracle itself partners with Amazon to offer cloud computing. The service includes Oracle's E-business suite of Oracle government financial applications that OPIC uses in part to track its portfolio of loans and other financial investments throughout the world. Because it makes some loans, insures others against political and other risks, manages private funds that make loans in developing countries and borrows from the Treasury, OPIC is complex financially.

  The financial information was hosted on an aging, agency-owned Unix infrastructure. "Test restores would take seven or eight days," Zeppieri said. But having Oracle host the applications at a data center in Austin, Texas, OPIC is freed of many administrative duties and is assured that all users have the same version of applications. 

  And of data. "There is a single version of truth of our books," Zeppieri said. The Oracle host is reached by secure file transfer protocol and a web interface.

  His shop is also into the second year of developing a front end to support the loan suite's payables and receivables. The application is about to move to the user acceptance stage. Beyond that, the CIO office is developing an enterprise business reporting system to support the transparency required by partners including state governments, vendors, and the White House.

  "We have the vision, the funding and the motion, but have not connected all the dots yet," Zeppieri said.

  And, Zeppieri said, although OPIC is a for-profit agency via interest on its loans and premiums for insurance, it receives appropriated funds for operations. So it is subject to transparency requirements that have grown more demanding during the Obama administration, and it must submit Exhibit 300s to the Office of Management and Budget each year to justify its IT investments.

  Providing a framework for application development and IT purchases is an enterprise architecture and governance model for IT that Zeppieri has spent several years getting into place. "Now we're more formal in documenting IT investments that map back to our technical architecture," he said. "We're not ITIL based but we're moving that way," he said, referring to the British-pioneered collection of control procedures and policies known as Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

  Still hosted locally at OPIC are e-mail and Microsoft Office applications. Zeppieri's office maintains basic ordering agreements with nine service suppliers for application development and support. A project management office "monitors activities and gives performance metrics to vendors," he said. Just deployed on the agency's intranet is Microsoft Sharepoint with applications for time and attendance, calendars and forms processing.

  Zeppieri was CIO at the Transportation Security Administration and at the Office of Justice Programs at the Justice Department. Whether at a large or small agency, he said, "scale and human capital are always challenges. Security, government, enterprise architecture -- we have the same challenges as Homeland Security."

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• Fresh Wave of Federal Web Development Extends Beyond Recovery.gov

  The Obama administration has swept in a new generation of federal web sites, revitalizing the energy of the mid-1990s. Back then it was news when an agency simply launched itself online.

  The most visible site, recovery.gov, since the last edition of FedInsider has gotten an influx of data from state and municipal government grant information, which led to the administration's claim that the stimulus bill had created "or saved" 650,000 jobs. Divided by the money spent so far, that's about $370,000 per job. Whether the investment has made sense, I'll leave for politics. But the data display is emblematic of the larger trend of, let's call it federal web energy.

  A notable shortcoming in many of the new sites, though, is that the interactivity of Web 2.0 tools is not evident. So there is a bifurcation between sites specifically built to incorporate Web 2.0 tools and good, new sites that fail to integrate interactivity in an organic way. This will be the upcoming challenge.

  Here are a few that have come to life lately:

  • CCI tools for federal staff: At ccitoolsforfeds.org, the site was developed by the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. It is an example of a highly vertical site, appealing intensely to a narrow community. At issue is the fact that resources for people who deal with juvenile delinquency are scattered throughout the federal government, even within Justice. This site tries to make sense of it for federal officials who work with state and local program managers. Everyone has trouble negotiating the bureaucratic maze. The clarity, speed and refreshing lack of slow and distracting graphics make this site fast and useful.
  • The Federal Labor Relations Authority, at flra.gov has updated its site to coincide with a significant reduction in case backlogs and a revitalization of its staff. This is an example of an agency home page undergoing a step-function increase in quality. The site adopts the Obama administration rough template of a screen-wide box at the top with rotating features accompanied by large photos. It is better than many of the redesigned sites because of the clarity of its home-page links. There's even a paragraph explaining that the site was "redesigned in an all 'open source' framework using Drupal and Linux," for those that worry about those sorts of things. More relevant, the all-important case history volumes of the agency's ruling are now available online, albeit in clunky Portable Document Format.
  • The Census Bureau launched 2010census.gov. This is an example of a spinoff. The site is aimed at citizens with questions about the upcoming decennial count. The goal is to help reduce the suspicion of Census among people who don't trust data gathering by the federal government. It features audio, hypothetical conversations between people talking about Census. You mouse over people in a photograph of the National Mall, with radio waves emanating from them. Unfortunately the audio would not play using Safari on my Macintosh, so I can't vouch for how this novel idea works.

  Many other home page sites have gotten visible upgrades. Homeland Security is easier to navigate, for example. Perhaps this is all why the most recent web site satisfaction
  survey conducted by the University of Michigan found federal web sites to rank highly.

  One challenge for federal agencies developing highly vertical or spinoff sites will be getting these new URLs into their intended visitors' hands, or browsers. Even in 2009, web sites don't announce themselves very well unless the purveyors have good e-mail lists. When you go to the Census Bureau's home page, it is not obvious that the new talking site exists. Similarly, it takes five clicks from the Justice main site to get to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, although feds involved in this area presumably have it bookmarked. But from there, I could not find a link to the CCI tools page.

  Although visibly upgraded, the new federal departmental home pages go a bit too far with pictures of appointed officials and administration ballyhoo about controversial news. And ironically, one of the most-visited federal sites, whitehouse.gov, is arguably worse than before, coming across too visibly as an Obama propaganda organ. Some of this is to be expected from any administration, but the new whitehouse.gov goes beyond what is in good taste. (I do admit to enjoying the photo gallery of Mrs. Obama and Dr. Jill Biden at Yankee Stadium for the first World Series Game in a suite, looking like they are really into the game.)

  Returning to recovery.gov, I decided to try a march through my past, mapping it against stimulus spending. Typing in a childhood ZIP code, I found that an elementary school I attended from Kindergarten through fourth grade got a $1.3 million stimulus grant for improving scores. I wonder if any of my teachers are still alive. There is also a $300,000 grant to the adjacent Pennsylvania township to upgrade storm sewers. I remember the storm water collection culvert at the end of our cul de sac. It ran under the yards at the end my street and emerged in that other township into a large concrete cistern open at the top. The culvert was big enough to walk through, and we would often splish-splosh through 100 yards or so of spooky underground pipe. Emerging into the cistern, we would climb out and find ourselves in the next neighborhood, in a different township. So my one-time Churchill Borough, Pa. home is sandwiched between two federal stimulus grants.

  Boring deeper into my childhood, to my Cleveland, Ohio birthplace, I find that the Shaker Heights City School District received $3 million for the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, whatever that is. Zooming ahead in time to my teen years, by gosh, I find the schools in Needham, Mass. got $1.3 million from the Special Education Grants to States, a federal program to help states "in providing special education and related services to children with disabilities..." Nearby Babson College, a private institution, received $61,125 under federal work-study financial aid to students. Moving further into the future past, I see my alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology, received grants totaling $913,078 for several scientific research projects. My favorite was CIGAR, for the Community Infrastructure for General Relativistic Magnetohydrodyamics, "a collaboration [that will] create a modern, scalable and open community toolkit and cyber infrastructure for" -- you guessed it -- general relativistic magnetohydrodyamics. It's all aimed at grand challenge problems in astrophysics. Luckily, CIGAR "includes four core thrusts that capitalize on accumulated experience with the Cactus framework, the scalable Carpet adaptive mesh refinement driver and the Whisky code for general relativistic hydrodymamics."

  So, storm sewers to astrophysics. The stimulus effect is ubiquitous.

  Total jobs saved by "my" projects: 0

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• Why Health IT Is Still a Work In Progress

  Who is really driving health IT interoperability? The federal government is certainly a player, but developments are going on in the private sector as well. The $19 billion in stimulus dollars specified notwithstanding, the market will be a long time developing because there are so many pieces to it. That money is to help health care providers buy whatever systems are extant in 2011 through 2015. The payments phase out then. Members of the federal health IT community expect everyone to be using electronic health records (EHRs) at that point, or face Medicare payment cuts -- presumably beyond the cuts contemplated for everyone under health care reform.

  Here's a brief idea of the complexity of this effort.

  The National Health Information Network (NHIN) project at the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology dates to 2004. It is still in the pilot stage. And it is separate from Connect gateway, the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) office's project to establish a standard solution for federal facilities to hook up to the NHIN.

  And these developments are parallel to the establishment of standards for the electronic health records themselves. HHS has a federal advisory committee, the Health IT Standards Committee, which shares some members with the board of directors of a non-profit company in Ann Arbor, Mich., HL7, established back in 1987. (The name is from layer 7, the application layer, of the International Standards Organization's network reference model.) HL7 has an extensive project for standardizing health records.

  There is so much published material on this topic, and so many corporate players along side government, academia and non-profit medicine groups, that companies without technical expertise and participation now in place would have a hard time catching up.

  Yet some grassroots projects have popped up that may shortcut the whole apparatus that's grown up around health IT. A few of these were described by an advisor to FHA director Vish Sankaran, during last week's Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, Va. Brian Behlendorf is Sankaran's collaboration advisor. An expert in open source development, he noted that FHA's Connect is an open source project. Others include:

  • The National Cancer Institute's caBIG initiative. The Cancer Biometical Informatics Grid is essentially a knowledge repository for a constellation of cancer doctors, researchers and patients. With contractor support from Booz Allen, the information store is being developed in strict accordance with open development standards.
  • The Mirth project is from a company, Mirth Corp., a supplier of health IT systems. It is supporting multivendor, open source approaches to HL7 messaging, clinical data repositories and a master patient index.
  • Frontline SMS, a group messaging system using GSM cell phones but no central server (a la Twitter). It is being applied in developing countries, according to Behlendorf, by rural village health care workers, in effect creating instant health records.

  Meanwhile, the health IT community got a jolt when the Washington Post published an article on some horror stories associated with health IT implementations. Early iterations, according to the story, force physicians to spend literally half their time entering data. Decades ago, early implementations of computer-based automobile registration caused chaos at many a state motor vehicle office. Initial health IT systems should fare better since so many eventual users are involved in the standards development.

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• Overbuilding? It Seems To Be Normal for Government Data Centers

  Last week, a squadron of governmental celebrities was on hand in Arlington, Va. as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano cut a ribbon to open the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, or NCCIC. Also last week, news broke of the National Security Agency's plan to break ground on a $1.5 billion data center at National Guard Camp Williams, near Salt Lake City. Devoted to gathering intelligence and warnings of cyber security threats, it will cover 1.5 million square feet.

  Meanwhile, in one of those exquisite juxtapositions, Vivek Kundra, the CIO at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was down at the Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, scolding the federal government generally for having too many data centers. He cited a figure of 1,200, up from 493 10 years ago. Then he cited his experience in Virginia and the District of Columbia, where data centers were used at only 20 percent of their capacity.

  But D.C.'s average doesn't necessarily match that of the federal government. At this point, no one really knows the average utilization rates of federal data centers. Still, Kundra took the opportunity to renew the call for cloud computing, which conceptually is in fact a good way to deal with variable scaling needs.

  Most people thought the government had spent the last several years consolidating data centers, so perhaps the 1,200 figure is down from some peak reached since 1999. The larger point is, can anyone really say what the right number is? No. Maybe it is 500, maybe it is 1,500. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and future National Security Agency (NSA) centers are highly specialized. Maybe when NSA's center, the far larger one, starts up, it will be fair to ask if they can be consolidated. Kundra and others cite power consumption, as if the mere act of using electricity is somehow divorced from the benefit that electricity produces. Not that managers should ever stop striving for maximum efficiency, but consideration should be given to the lost opportunity cost of all the activity required to reduce the electricity consumption by whatever percentage someone thinks is correct.

  Consolidation is like cleaning out your closet. No matter how often you do it, a couple of years later there is always another bale of old clothes to be bundled and dropped off at the charity box. But you buy new clothes in the meantime.

  Also last week, John Berry, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), congratulated the government on consolidating its payroll systems down from 26 to just four shared services providers. The effort took seven years, but it should avoid a $1 billion in costs over the next 10 years. The four centers are the Agriculture Department's National Finance Center, the Pentagon's Defense Finance and Accounting Services, the  Interior Department's National Business Center, and the General Services Administration's National Payroll Branch. NextGov quoted Reginald Brown, OPM's director of the Office of Modernization and the HR Line of Business, who wryly noted that at least now all of the government is up to 1997 technology. So now it must all be modernized.

  So it goes with the yin and yang of data centers for the federal government. The Social Security Administration (SSA) is waiting for the GSA to secure the land, architect and contractor for a vast new data center SSA will need for the coming baby boom retirement wave. The stimulus bill provided $500 million for this effort. Homeland Security was dinged by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last week for the fact that seven years into the grand DHS enterprise, the department still has 13 financial systems. Two years ago DHS committed to consolidating them. The GAO estimates that effort will cost in the half billion dollar range.

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