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THE FEDINSIDER’S VOICE TOM TEMIN - A trusted member of the Federal community, Tom has had a seat at
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OBAMA: TECH FOCUS, BUT TIGHT MONEY
While the unsuspecting revel in the historicity of it all, the old hands are already alert to clues on how federal government programs will be managed under the soon-to-be President Obama. And, by extension, what the information technology policies and initiatives will be. So what does it all mean? It appears the outlook is a Web 2.0-oriented government. -> Read More
COMING TO INTELLIPEDIA: PICS & VIDEOS
Michael E. Kennedy learned to fly large, multi-engine aircraft 25 years ago. He designed a lights-out data center 20 years ago, just about the time he helped design what was then the Navy's most powerful computing center. Do you think a guy like that is afraid of a wiki? He's certainly not afraid of managing, as he puts it, "the largest instance of Google technology outside of Google." -> Read More
RULING ROCKS FOUNDATIONS OF CONTRACTING PREFERENCES
No one is saying agencies aren't allowed to have contracting set-asides for minority-owned businesses, but the legal underpinnings for such set-asides have been dealt a blow. As reported by AP, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District ruled unconstitutional the law requiring 5 percent of Defense Department contracting dollars be held for minority suppliers. What will happen to the idea of minority sourcing as a government goal? -> Read More
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Early bird registration for IRMCO 2009 is now open!
Plan now to attend IRMCO 2009 on April 19-22, 2009 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 2009 early bird rates. The 48th 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.
Bookmark www.irmco.gov to register early for government's management conference. To register call 202-237-0300.
AFFIRM December Luncheon
Attend the Association For Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) Luncheon on December 18 at George
Washington University in Washington D.C. Hear from Margaret B. Reid, Associate Administrator for Financial Management
and Administration, Federal Railroad Administration, Patricia Prosperi, Associate Administrator For Administration, Federal
Highway Administration, and Terry T. Shelton, Associate Administrator for Research and Information Technology and
Chief Information Officer, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as they discuss IT and the mission of the Department of Transportation.
To register visit http://www.affirm.org/events/monthlyluncheons/dec08/.
Complete Articles for November 15, 2008
Obama: Tech Focus, But Tight Money
So what does it all mean?
While the unsuspecting revel in the historicity of it all, the old hands are already alert to clues on how federal government programs will be managed under the soon-to-be President Obama. And, by extension, what the information technology policies and initiatives will be.
Austerity is likely to lay over government initiatives. The Obama platform calls for hundreds of billions in new spending, according to estimates, and this year the federal deficit will have hit $500 billion or so before the economic bailout and a planned second and possibly third stimulus package. Obama's promise to examine the federal budget line by line might be hyperbole, but the sentiment is clear. Social, health care and bailout spending will continue to grow at a breathtaking pace, so savings, however insignificant, will come from the sliver of discretionary spending that keeps the bureaucracy running.
Technology generations have a momentum of their own. For instance, the Clinton presidency was on just as the web browser caused an explosion of the online world. Even if a Luddite like John McCain had been president, likely there would have been a www.whitehouse.gov occurring when it did. Coming on now are shared services using Web 2.0 technologies
The incoming team clearly possesses cyber chops, as evidenced by the now-famous, multi-million-name database to which Candidate Obama pushed text messages and asked for money, and the sophisticated use of social networking tools. These tools alone didn't put Obama in the White House, but they did provide, augment, and amplify an operation noted for its planning, discipline and attention to detail.
Not a bad prescription for how government's programs and supporting projects should be run.
So we'll have a Web 2.0-oriented government. Again, this is happening already [see interview with the intelligence community's Michael Kennedy in this issue] with agencies as diverse as Kennedy's to the Environmental Protection Agency using collaborative tools online.
Expect these types of efforts to accelerate. This administration is likely to put some shoulder behind efforts to establish a clearer administrative framework for tools such as instant messages and wikis. That is, figuring out the details of how records management and privacy guidelines apply to them, so agencies can employ them with more confidence. If you read Obama's campaign technology plan, you'll see the kinds of efforts that don't require multi-hundred million dollar investments.
The outlook?
Defense: The choice will be between new platforms, such as the Littoral Combat Ship and a horde of new F-22s, and rebuilding what's been ground down by the six years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The left wing of the Democratic majority will be a stern enforcer, and a key member of that group, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is pushing for twenty-five 25 percent reductions in defense spending.
If new platforms go, it still may bode well for projects like Future Combat Systems (FCS). FCS can be applied to retrofitted old platforms as well as to new ones.
Civilian agency systems: The incoming team would like to cut spending on contractors by $40 billion, or around 8 percent of the federal acquisition budget. I don't expect this to affect IT as much as some other areas, but I don't expect much growth in IT either.
A NextGov piece is typical of the reporting about federal IT. While accurate, it misses a larger point. The Obama administration may be reluctant to invest in classic, grand design, systems integration projects. But if the Web 2.0 revolution has taught us anything, it is that you can get a lot more functionality out of the existing infrastructure with a small investment.
Michael E. Kennedy learned to fly large, multi-engine aircraft 25 years ago. He designed a lights-out data center 20 years ago, just about the time he helped design what was then the Navy's most powerful computing center. He directed the Defense Department's contingency planning and intelligence community testing for the year 2000 conversion about 10 years ago.
Do you think a guy like that is afraid of a wiki?
Today Kennedy is the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence and CIO, Intelligence Community Enterprise Solutions(ICES). It's a mouthful. But it boils down to this: His office, within the CIO section of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides the newly integrated intelligence community with the Web 2.0 tools with which the community is making its celebrated progress in information sharing.
The way information is handled and shared, Kennedy said, is "massively different" than it was in 1995, when he first joined the intelligence community (IC) in the information systems domain. To share or see what others in the community were doing back then required visits to "basically dumb Web sites."
Today, "we're the largest instance of Google technology outside Google," Kennedy said.
That is, using Google's search technology on a computing patch other than Google's own. Search functionality is a key piece of what Kennedy's ICES office provides to the intelligence community. But its centerpiece is the widely praised Intellipedia, a wiki that rates its own entry in Wikipedia. Establishment of this ultimate information collaboration tool was a natural when the IC's governing information doctrine shifted from "need to know" to "need to share."
You might add "need to see" to that philosophy. For the last six months, Kennedy's ICES team has been developing iVideo. Using the same technology underpinnings as YouTube, it lets anyone in the IC with an ICES account tag and upload a video. So far, Kennedy said, posted videos number in the thousands and include instructional materials, speeches, imagery of aircraft and missile launches, and even videos of natural disasters.
Gallery, the photo sharing site ICES had developed, uses Flickr technology adapted by ICES for photography, also tagged and searchable by attributes. Kennedy said his group is looking into image-matching technology where attributes of, say, a face could be the basis for searching for other images with similar faces. But those products might not be ready for production deployment yet.
Web 2.0 adopters cite the low cost of these tools, both their initial acquisition price and the fact that they don't require vast administrative and maintenance dollars. But Kennedy isn't ready to move to a cloud computing setup in which the support infrastructure is outsourced. He cites security concerns.
All of the functions, which users access via a customizable home page, receive hundreds of millions of page views per month from the more than 30,000 users from 16 IC agencies and from the wider community that includes some law enforcement and first response agencies at the state level. Kennedy said, quipping, "If I could put ads on it I could make a pretty penny."
If that's one measure of success, Kennedy said, there are others. "It's users telling us it is needed and useful. Users are climbing on board for this." He added, "We see the collaboration going on."
"The beautiful thing is, it's left up to users to use it as they want to use it. There are no limits to sharing."
"Light bulbs are starting to go off across the community," Kennedy said, as people recognize Web 2.0 as "an innovative way to do the business of business." Thus the FBI is embarking on a wiki called Bureaupedia and other components in the Defense establishment are traipsing by to look at what the IC has done.
Still another benefit is that new, young employees, having been weaned on Web 2.0 technologies, can be productive from day one. As Kennedy put it, "Kids walking in off the street know how to use this," adding, "It's amazing what high school kids can teach you."
Will Federal Information Technology End Up In the Clouds?
Microsoft is doing it. So is Google. And IBM and Amazon. And now the government is starting to look at it.
Cloud computing has become a hot conference and article topic, but is it something the government is likely to adopt in a big way?
First of all, here's what it is, in a nutshell. Cloud computing is the use of a fractional part of a large computing infrastructure that is owned and maintained by someone else. You get access to vastly more power than you could afford, but pay only for the amount you use. Cloud computing sounds like time sharing, but it is actually more. You get scalability on demand - both up and down.
Cloud services are available from the aforementioned companies, and others, because they have built gigantic capacity to serve their own needs. Many people already are cloud-using individuals but may not be aware of it. At a recent Booz Allen Hamilton conference, Michael Nelson, visiting professor of Internet studies at Georgetown University, gave an example. Rather than maintain a complex, expensive, ever-changing, directory-based e-mail system, the school simply uses Google's Gmail for its students.
Nelson, who was a technology advisor during the Clinton administration, advises agencies that might benefit from cloud computing to pick a discrete project to test it. An example might be the soliciting of public comments for a proposed rule, where the peak storage and bandwidth demand might be more than the agency has under its roof.
Michael Farber, a Booz Allen partner, thinks the government could probably create its own cloud by combining the computing resources it has already. He envisions a government-owned, contractor-operated cloud that might command more security trust than one of the commercial clouds.
Whether that trust differential is justified is debatable. Nelson said that using encryption and technology which logs all I/O activity, a cloud can be more secure than an agency's own client-server infrastructure.
Ruling Rocks Foundations of Contracting Preferencess
No one is saying agencies aren't allowed to have contracting set-asides for minority-owned businesses, but the legal underpinnings for such set-asides have been dealt a blow.
As reported by AP, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District ruled unconstitutional the law requiring 5 percent of Defense Department contracting dollars be held for minority suppliers. The court found that DOD hadn't discriminated against the suppliers in the first place. (You can read the entire ruling here.)
An irony is that, for all its alleged contracting clumsiness, DOD exceeded its 5 percent mandate in recent years. The case decided dated back to 1988, a dispute between a company owned by a white woman and one owned by a Korean-American couple.
The idea of minority sourcing as a government - or business - goal gained a lot of momentum in the early 1980s. Large manufacturers as well as federal agencies argued in those days not that they were against the concept of helping minority-owned companies, but that they could not find suppliers with the products or skills they needed. That problem has disappeared in more recent years as minority entrepreneurs have joined the ranks of technology products and services.
My guess is that DOD and, really, all of the federal government will maintain its efforts to use minority-owned suppliers. An abandonment of such efforts could be construed as discriminatory. And besides, Barack Obama will soon be the commander in chief.
MARTHA JOHNSON Administrator, General Services Administration THE HONORABLE JOHN BERRY Director, Office of Personnel Management VIVEK KUNDRA Federal Chief Information Officer and Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget (invited) DANNY WERFEL Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management (invited) DR. SHELLEY METZENBAUM Associate Director for Personnel & Performance Management, Office of Management and Budget (invited) MICHAEL ROBERTSON White House Liaison, Associate Administrator for Governmentwide Policy and Chief Acquisition Officer, U.S. General Services Administration WILLIAM D. EGGERS Co-Author, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon…Getting Big Things Done in Government; Global Director, Deloitte Research-Public Sector JOHN O'LEARY Co-Author, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon…Getting Big Things Done in Government; Executive Editor of Better, Faster, Cheaper; Research Fellow, Ash Institute of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
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