Summaries for December 15, 2009

FTC'S STANLEY LOWE BUILDS 21ST CENTURY DATA CENTER IN HISTORIC BUILDING
Federal agency managers routinely talk about transformation and improving their infrastructures. For Federal Trade Commission (FTC) CIO Stanley Lowe, transformation of the infrastructure meant the infrastructure. In a building first occupied in 1938, that meant reinforcing floors and ceilings, adding new conduit, boosting power and putting in new racks, all without disturbing the appearance of a classic building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The space is now prepared, but that's only the beginning.  -> Read More

OPEN GOVERNMENT DIRECTIVE CAN ELEVATE ROLE OF CIOs
With each passing week, the management style, direction and specifics of the Obama administration come into sharper view. In the latest of what has been a regular drumbeat of presidential orders and Office of Management and Budget directives comes the Open Government Directive. It seeks to make reality out of the statement the White House issued on transparent government the day after inauguration back in January, and portrays an OMB working hard to try to blend specifics with forcing a change in agency culture. -> Read More

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Leading Reform for Mission Performance
Early registration rates for government are now available for IRMCO 2010.  Plan now to attend IRMCO 2010 on April 11-14, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. Federal Travel Regulation on Conference Planning-Prepayment of Registration Fee, FTR Amendment 2006-02 allows for the reimbursement of the prepayment of early bird registration fees to attend a conference, so take advantage of the IRMCO 2010's discounted 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.

Go to www.irmco.gov to register and receive early discounted rates for government's management conference or call 202-237-0300. For further information, email Peg Hosky at peg@hosky.com.

IN 2010, GWACs GO MARCHING ALONG
The good news is federal departments are getting solid boosts in discretionary spending for 2010, deficits or no deficits. The bad news is, the money comes only after Congress resorted to a last-minute omnibus spending package. With luck, it will become law around this week -- about three months late. Even for the seeming slowness of the government's pace, three months delay getting started can be significant. -> Read More

DATA.GOV DISPLAYS THE PROMISE AND FRUSTRATION OF OPEN GOVERNMENT
Bet you can't tell what "ORYX Inpatient Composite AMI" means. Neither can I, or at least I couldn't until I did a little research.  I tell you all this because I decided to see what's new with data.gov, now that the Open Government Directive has invoked data.gov as a component in the open government initiative. What I found was that "open" does not mean accessible in the sense that simply posting data -- even in machine-readable, open formats -- means the average person will necessarily know what he or she is looking at.  -> Read More

• FTC's Stanley Lowe Builds 21st Century Data Center in Historic Building

  Stanley Lowe

  Federal agency managers routinely talk about transformation and improving their infrastructures. For Federal Trade Commission (FTC) CIO Stanley Lowe, transformation of the infrastructure meant the infrastructure. In a building first occupied in 1938, that meant reinforcing floors and ceilings, adding new conduit, boosting power and putting in new racks, all without disturbing the appearance of a classic building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The space is now prepared, but that's only the beginning.

  "We're replacing every stick of equipment," Lowe said. The new equipment will support not only a new IT architecture but the very way the agency views IT -- as an information utility that will help drive faster and better decision-making by the agency, according to Lowe." We want to change the paradigm to one of more managing data and information to make more use it if for strategic decisions," Lowe said.

  But a boring taken of the old data center's floor, located above the parking garage, showed soft concrete. In addition, the data center's electrical service was obsolete. First things first, the transformation started with shoring up an aging building. The effort is called SURE, for secure, usable, reliable and expandable. Lowe said that the General Services Administration acted as general contractor in preparing the building itself, and now the network wiring infrastructure is completed as well. The FTC now uses voice over IP for telephony.

  "Now we need to fix the cooling, storage and servers," Lowe said. Storage capacity will be quadrupled to 100 terabytes, expandable to 200T. And all new servers are coming. Yet from outside of the data center doors, the hallway looks as it did the day the building opened, Lowe said. "It turned out wonderfully well," he added.

  At the data level, Lowe said, his shop is redesigning its Active Directory to take advantage of the security and management protocols available in up-to-date user directories. A new and unified messaging platform will let FTC workers have secure access to data resources from remote locations, whether using notebook computers or cellular devices. Some server consolidation will occur, with a 38 percent reduction in the number of physical machines, Lowe said. Plus, regional FTC offices are having their IT centralized at headquarters, and some legacy applications use older code that just doesn't play well in a virtualized environment. For example, Lowe cited the FTC's national registry of imported clothing tags, which is housed in an older Oracle database. Similarly, the agency's case management system, launched in 1995 and laden with many add-ons since, will still have its own server.

  But also in the plans is a central data repository incorporating several streams of information the FTC gathers as part of its mission. This will be overlayed with data analytics and business intelligence software and, on top of that, a web application layer. Meanwhile, Lowe's team is developing what he called a Logical Operational Data Model (LODM) to which new applications will be required to conform. The goal is to give the agency's economists and regulatory enforcement staff faster ways to spot consumer fraud trends or to perform econometric modeling in competitiveness determinations.

  As Lowe put it, "What will happen to the price of bananas if two banana companies merge? We can do it now, but it takes too long."

  Like many CIOs, Lowe is facing decisions over whether to use contractors or federal employees at a time when the administration is urging management to insource. For Lowe, a good guide to a decision is whether the activity is long term or short term. Installing, say, a new SharePoint server -- a discrete, one-time task -- might be better left to a contractor, while long term, daily operation of the data center might be better suited to employees. Lowe also looks at long term costs. One benefit of the new data setup will be a smaller proportion of the agency's budget being spent on infrastructure than before. He estimates the transformation will cost around $30 million over four years.

  Lowe said that he'll start considering using a cloud platform, but the new data center was in the works for several years before the government -- or at least the Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget -- went in whole hog for cloud computing. In the meantime, Lowe figured, "let's use what the taxpayers have already paid for."

  Lowe also thinks about the need to keep bringing in new people to the federal government as the aging workforce portends the departure of experience over the next few years. "Especially with the younger workforce, people coming into government will be used to doing things differently from us old geeks," he said. "They are used to being in constant contact, bouncing ideas off each other, no matter where they are. They expect that same thing here in government."

  The technology to support that mode of working needs to be secured but not blocked, Lowe said. "Security is a concern, but I think it is something we can address. It's something the government as a whole has to look at if we are going to attract the best and the brightest."

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• Open Government Directive Can Elevate Role of CIOs

  With each passing week, the management style, direction and specifics of the Obama administration come into sharper view. In the latest of what has been a regular drumbeat of presidential orders and Office of Management and Budget directives comes the Open Government Directive. It seeks to make reality out of the statement the White House issued on transparent government the day after inauguration back in January.

  A reading of the directive shows an OMB working hard to try to blend specifics with forcing a change in agency culture. The specifics are spelled out plainly in the directive. For example, within 45 days of the December 8 release of the directive, agencies must pick out three previously unpublished data sets or streams they generate, and post them to Data.gov in open, machine-readable formats. They must add a new web page from their sites, www.[agency].gov/open, at which visitors can see "agency activities related to the Open Government Directive." So there is a huge administrative and bureaucratic effort to take place.

  Beyond that, though, the memo is working hard to drive the idea of not just complying with the letter of the directive. Finding three sets of data to fulfill Section 1, Paragraph d won't be that hard. Section 2 of the directive gets beyond technical exercise by asking agencies to designate a "high-level senior official to be accountable for the quality and objectivity of, and external controls over, the Federal spending information publicly disseminated..." Section 3 urges the various agency functions to work together and, within 120 days, publish (online) their open government plans. And Section 4 requires the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, at the moment Cass Sunstein , to engage federal CIOs and chief technology officers in reworking policies, including how the executive branch deals with the Paperwork Reduction Act.

  OMB has created an ambitious directive. It carries a lot of potential and creates many challenges.

  One potential is to raise the level of authority and importance of the CIO job to something close to that envisioned by the 1995 Information Technology Management Reform Act, or Clinger-Cohen, which advanced the CIO position in the first place. Departmental CIOs are supposed to report to the Secretary. In practice, few do. From outward appearances, Roger Baker, the new Veterans Affairs CIO, is closest to this model as he tries to impose some sort of order on the chaos that is VA applications development. Horror stories about vets not being able to get their benefits have a way of focusing a department.

  The Open Government Directive adds to the urgency of the CIO being able to collaborate with the secretaries. The people behind this memo, such as Aneesh Chopra, CTO residing in the Science and Technology Policy shop, and Jeff Zients, the Deputy Director of Management at OMB who also carries the moniker of Chief Performance Officer, know what they want and how to articulate it. Their drawback is that not having been in federal service for long periods of time, they may not know how to deal with the subtle sorts of bureaucratic obfuscation of which career -- and other political -- officials are capable. Still, for agencies that really get behind the directive, there is great potential for the CIO, thanks to the quality and relevance requirements of data chosen for the open government mandate. That the agency top manager must oversee the effort, and the CIO carry it out, throws both positions together.

  A challenge from the directive is the data itself. The OMB is all but begging the agencies to not just publish any old information in any old format. The legislative branch (not subject to the OMB directive) provides an example of what I think OMB does not mean. It takes a shrewd cynic to become Speaker of the House, and no one exemplifies that better than Nancy Pelosi. She announced recently that House expenses would be posted online . What you get is neither clear nor machine readable, but rather big, ugly PDFs of scanned statements. That doesn't cut it as open government as described in the OMB directive. Because beyond the mere publishing of data streams, the administration is fervently hoping an industry will develop of developers who take the information and build applications on it. Thus the emphasis on open, platform-independent, machine-readable formats.

  An iPhone application site about trees in New York City is an example in which an enterprising developer used information on 500,000 individual trees that exist in the city's tree census database. One only wishes the information was available on a web site without the iPhone. But it shows that state and local governments are on a similar path, trying to engage the public in making use of data put out by governments.

  Then there is the case of Homeland Security, and the infamous posting of the Transportation Security Administration's airport screeners manual online. It was redacted in such a way that the redaction was easily removed, much as you would remove highlighting from a document. All hell broke loose, with five TSA employees currently on administrative leave. Early suspicions were that the posting was a horribly inappropriate response to the Open Government Directive, but actually the manual was put online months ago. The directive makes repeated references to making sure online data conforms to privacy and security laws and regulations, so there's no excuse for that sort of snafu.

  Several departments rushed out news releases to tout their responses to the directive. But it will take more than a few hours' thought and deliberation to come up with ideas for data that meets so many requirements for quality, relevance and importance.

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• In 2010, GWACs Go Marching Along

  The good news is federal departments are getting solid boosts in discretionary spending for 2010, deficits or no deficits. The bad news is, the money comes as Congress passes a so-called omnibus spending package and sends it to the president. With luck, it will become law this week -- about three months late.

  A senior cyber security career official told me the other evening that because the money for his projects is coming so late, he has told his bosses that some initiatives won't get done in the fiscal year for which they were planned. Even for the seeming slowness of the government's pace, three months delay getting started can be significant.

  Although the Obama administration came in promising to get the budgets done on time and avoid continuing resolutions, the fact is that Congress operates at its own pace. This year's climate and health care legislation have been higher priorities than getting appropriations done on time, at least in the Senate. That's where the omnibus originated; the House finished its budget bills on time. A conference committee over the weekend reached agreement on a bill with $447 billion for civilian agency operations at nine cabinet departments. (True to its penchant for opacity, what Congress has provided online is a non-searchable, browser-busting set of PDFs each exceeding 10 megabytes of scanned sheets complete with their hand markings. Truly a disgrace, but the Open Government Directive doesn't apply to Congress.)

  Most IT projects received the funding their sponsors asked for; budgets are up across the board.

  But the perennial lateness might be one reason why so many agencies continue to pursue multi-contractor, department-wide acquisition contracts. They comprise an avenue for starting long term projects that are broken down into discrete sub-projects awarded using these vehicles.

  For example, VA is launching Transformation Twenty One, a multi-year, indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity deal estimated to be worth several billion over its lifetime. Proposals are due Jan. 11. NASA named Deborah Diaz to oversee a revamping of its IT acquisition programs. The agency wants to consolidate 20 contracts into a single Infrastructure Integration Improvement Program, or I3P. The first of the consolidated contracts would deliver services to maintain NASA's gigantic Web presence. The National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) is working on a new governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC) for small business, CIO-SP3 SB. This would potentially accompany CIO-SP3 for all businesses, a first follow-on for all businesses to the NITAAC's ongoing series of IT GWACs. Of course, these all occur as GSA is trying to build traffic for its Alliant  and Alliant Small Business GWACs.

  Ironically, the year-long extension to the ban on A-76 public-private competitions that is part of the omnibus spending package might increase the popularity of GWACs for getting IT done. It will be politically difficult to outsource long-term arrangements, such as data center operations or building large-scale projects. So agencies, facing difficulties hiring the people they need, will find it advantageous to use the GWACs for building projects piece by piece.

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• Data.gov Displays the Promise and Frustration of Open Government

  Bet you can't tell what "ORYX Inpatient Composite AMI" means. Neither can I, or at least I couldn't until I did a little research. There is something called the Joint Commission -- not the Joint Commission on anything, just the Joint Commission. It has to do with health care, it's big, and it was founded way back in 1951. It developed and trademarked a measure of patient care quality called ORYX, which it has administered since 1997. The point is, for people in health care who would know, the Commission has a rich web site, full of information on the vital topic of health care quality. Its commissioners roster is a who's who in big time health care.

  I tell you all this because I decided to see what's new with data.gov, now that the Open Government Directive (see story above) has invoked data.gov as a component in the open government initiative. What I found was that "open" does not mean accessible in the sense that simply posting data -- even in machine-readable, open formats -- means the average person knows what he or she is looking at. You can stand at the foot of Mt. Ranier and see it clearly. But it doesn't mean the view from the peak is available to you without some effort.

  The public should not be lead to confuse data.gov with a dashboard where they can see what is going on. It is, rather, a vast catalog of downloads. So I decided to download the Veterans Affairs Department's latest hospital quality report that Secretary Eric Shinseki rather publicly announced the release of last week. This is one of the featured data sets in the rotating picture window on the data.gov home page.

  True to form, it was available in the common .csv format. I downloaded a nice compact file to one of my Macs, clicked on the download, and presto, the data opened into an Excel spreadsheet. But if you don't know the meanings of the nearly 30 column headers, each one a measure of quality, then you don't know whether it says a given hospital, listed on the left column, is a great place to get care or a death trap. That takes some diligent research into terms such as ORYX or NEXUS. For that matter, what does it mean that the VA hospital in Wilkes Barre, Pa. has a "male tobacco" rating of 81.9?

  Again, for those who know these things, the download and the data set are wonderful. But it would be naive to think the average citizen has the knowledge to make use of most of what is at data.gov, or the time and inclination to find out. So while data.gov and the open government initiative are hugely promising, the power of data.gov is also its limitation and challenge. Luckily, data.gov also has links to an executive summary of the hospital ratings, a PDF file that, by the way, is far bigger than the data set itself.

  If you go to this data set, you'll find one rating--mine. I gave it high marks except for accessibility, if by that term the data.gov people mean ability to get meaningful insight at a glance. To submit a rating, you must type in an anti-spam graphic word or two. It took me several tries before my comment "took." However many people are visiting data.gov, not many are leaving ratings of the data sets.

  Now I believe I understand why the federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, and CTO, Aneesh Chopra, and others are urging third party developers to make real sense of the raw data. Besides the difficulty of deriving wisdom from data, you need a fast connection and a roomy hard drive because some of the downloads are big. 

  Some of the data sets produce surprises to the lay person. Because I liked its name, I went to ACToR, the Aggregated Computational Toxicology Resource. The Environmental Protection Agency describes it as a collection of databases of environmental chemicals. A search for "benzene" produced a long list of chemical diagrams, with links to more about each one.

  Data.gov has grown impressively since its launch earlier this year. It has gained a great deal of functionality. Yet I feel it is daunting for the average citizen, whoever that is. This is inevitable, because some fields of endeavor, especially those requiring public policy, are not simple, and can't be made overly simple. That's life. For those who understand a particular field, or people wanting to get a toehold in understanding a topic like pollution or whether hospitals are any good, data.gov is a promising and ambitious effort.

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