As I was driving back from a customer meeting the alternator/battery light came on in my car. After a few moments I realized that steering had become more difficult, though possible. I called the place I take my car to be fixed which is over off New Hampshire Avenue. They said it was ‘the belt’, it probably snapped. I should bring it in. I said I would that evening.

SO last night I took the now convenient Intercounty Connector (ICC), Route 200, over to New Hampshire. While driving over there I learned, through experiential data, that when ‘the belt’ snaps, the batter is now being recharged so well. And when you have been driving for a while and your headlights are on (and your radio is on) your batter eventually goes dead. In this case about 1/10 of a mile from the New Hampshire Avenue exit. Luckily I was able to coast to the right shoulder and the emergency blinker worked (which meant I figured out what to push to turn the emergency blinker on).

I called Ellen who was almost at the car place to tell her I might be a bit delayed. And I called AAA to have me towed there. They had to put me on hold for a LONG TIME since they had difficulty getting their system to find me, the ICC being so new, and thus identify who would be assigned to come get me (and my car). It is an unhappy experience to be sitting on the side of a highway with a pretty dead battery, the emergency blinker being the only thing to warn drivers not to hit me, the AAA’s telling me the safest place to be was in my car, and watch the battery on your cell phone drain while listening to a recording of how my call was important to them and they would be back to me as soon as possible.

However, the young woman doing the assignment came back on before the cell phone turned off, the AAA tow truck came before the emergency blinker stopped, and the car place was less than 3 miles away so I didn’t even have to pay extra for the towing.

Which leads me to this morning. This morning I can safely claim, unlike many who do, that I had a very low incremental carbon foot print. I took the ride-on bus from a block from my house to the Grosvenor Metro stop, the metro to Rockville, and then the ride-on bus to two blocks from the office, and got in by 7:30am. As to how I will handle tonight we will leave that to later.

About a decade ago, the first time I remember having this discussion with a friend of mine, he remarked that he felt his parents had experienced greater dislocation due to technological change than he had. His parents had lived through the growth of radio, the invention of television, the ubiquitous growth of telephones, and the creation and expansion of commercial air travel.

All he and I could come up with, at the time, were faxes, cell phones, and perhaps email; which while significant seemed less amazing than the list he had for his parents. That was a sobering conversation since the common wisdom was that everything was changing so radically. Having said that, I suspect that if I repeated that conversation today we would both come to a different conclusion.

When Information Technology first had an impact it was in large part to make conceptually things that already existed, better; faster and larger filing cabinets, faster calculators, and typewriters with thousands of fonts. As the internet was added to the mix, they became enhanced phones with email, instant messaging, and products like Skype.

And as I have pointed out a number of times before, in the same way TV eventually became much more than radio with pictures, Information Technology and the Internet are increasingly becoming something else, integrated much more tightly with what we are, not just what we do.

A class example of that was an article from last year, about how the memory of people who make use of the Internet has been impacted, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/health/15memory.html. The brain, which is a truly remarkable thing, is pretty smart as an information retrieval device. Information which is likely to be accessible on-line is not remembered as well as information less likely to be retrieved. In effect, all of these ‘cloud’ (oh that awful term) extensions to our computer systems in fact has become an extension of us. Where that will go over time is an interesting question.

As the lines between home and office, work and play, or near and far, and in a broader sense between physical and virtual reality become less and less clear, Computational Nodes are becoming less something to interface with but part of the conversation.

In those happily few times over the last few years that we have lost electrical power to our house, the thing I miss most is connectively. Those who grew up with 24 x 7 connectivity to everything are different than those of us that grew up before that was true. I suspect that the latter, like me, do not appreciate how different we are and the implications of that difference.

I was reminded of that over the last weekend when we visited Westport CT for the Bat Mitzvah of one of Ellen’s cousin’s children (I am sure I am not identifying the relationship correctly, but I assume you get the idea). At one point there was a mild change in plans and we were going to have drive from where we were staying to an unexpected intermediate destination. The person who knew how to get to that destination started telling me the directions.

I immediately stopped them and said to tell all that to Ellen since she in fact was in charge of knowing where we were going and how to get there (with the peripheral advantage that I could blame-shift to her when we got lost). It was at that moment that I remembered the article on how memory works for those people who have access to information on-line, referenced above, and realized that in a real fashion Ellen served that exact same function for me, allowing me to not have to remember directional information that would otherwise be stored in my personal cloud storage, Ellen.

Who knew when I got married 31 years ago next month that I would have gotten such a jump on the rest of society who had to wait decades before they too were able to be transformed by on-line access on a 24×7 basis to the Internet.

If you have been at a recent Washington Capitals hockey game when the opponent scores a goal, you know the crowd routinely shouts out “Who cares!”

Last week, Steven VanRoekel, Federal CIO, released the long awaited OMB plan for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP; which reminds me to be thankful for pronounceable acronyms. The purpose of FedRAMP per the implementing OMB memorandum, is to “provide a cost-effective, risk-based approach for the adoption and use of cloud services”.

So were I a federal CIO, which I was, or an executive working for a provider to the Federal Government, which I am, what are the short- and long-term implications?

First, and most important, I think there are short- and long-term implications, which is not always the case with long awaited announcements and OMB produced memoranda.

However, I suggest the longer term implications tie more to the general topic of infrastructure rationalization than focusing specifically on the ever popular and impossible to avoid ongoing cloud frenzy.

It has long been my contention that while the IT focus in commercial organizations should be top-down to be most effective, in federal government it is the opposite: better off focused on a bottoms-up approach.

This difference reflects how funding, or revenue, is achieved.

In a commercial company revenue comes in from customers, is filtered through a sales organization and the decisions are controlled by executive leadership. IT leadership focuses on using the defined strategic goals to drive derived IT goals down into the rest of the organization.

In a government entity, funding comes through the appropriations process, and except in very rare circumstances, such as the Veterans Administration, is associated with the individual components that make up larger agencies or department, rather than with the overall mission of the department.

The real value of initial cloud implementations is they represent the next big step in allowing federal CIOs to get a handle on what IT provisioning is going on within the organizations.”

Because of this, the first hurdle for government CIOs is overall situation awareness; discovering what IT assets exist and figuring out how to put in place configuration management to keep track of those IT assets.

To just take one example, when OMB started pushing to consolidate data centers, it took months or longer to get an accurate inventory of how many data centers there were, let alone put together a plan to consolidate them.

Reducing costs is a reasonable goal to associate with cloud computing. Be warned that recent articles question whether cost savings will be large as some are articulating. See, for example, the discussion I participated in this last Friday on the Federal News Radio Countdown, hosted by Francis Rose.

The real value of initial cloud implementations is that they represent the next big step in allowing federal CIOs to get a handle on what IT provisioning is going on within the organizations. Every application that is moved to the cloud is one that now is visible to and can be managed and measured by the CIO. Consistent security approaches can be taken. And it is the inconsistencies, not whether an application is internally hosted or externally hosted, that lead to security weaknesses.

There are a few additional specifics from the OMB memorandum that I wanted to note.

First, the process still has some time before it will be put into place. The goal is to have the FedRAMP PMO, to be run by GSA, operational no later than 180 days from issuance. This follows interim steps including establishing formally the list of security controls, creating a Concept of Operations, and creating a charter for the Joint Authorization Board (run by DoD, DHS, and GSA) dealing with governance.

Second, it will interesting to see how robustly the effort will be funded over the next few years. Congress has not been consistently supportive of shared service implementations. From my stint at DOT, I remember the difficulties that OMB had keeping the various eGovernment initiatives sufficiently funded.

While outside the scope of this write-up, I contend that one reason that DoD continues to make progress in this area is because of the existence of a home, what I refer to as a “center of gravity”, for managing the resulting shared infrastructure, namely DISA. While I have nothing but the greatest admiration for Richard Spires and Casey Coleman, running shared services is not currently the primary mission of either DHS or GSA respectively.

Third, I found it interesting that both the CIO and the chief financial officer need to certify together the list of all cloud services that cannot meet FedRAMP security authorization requirements within their agency. The dividing line between what is expected from CIO’s and CFOs regarding program management is not always clear cut, and is made even less clear when the CIO has been folded underneath the CFO.

In April, 2009, I asked the question “Why are 42 or so different procurements now looking at clouds?” I was quoted as saying that I thought that instead cloud computing could be offered in a way … in which any federal agency can access a handful of major … contracts.”

And now a little over 2 ½ years later, we are only six months away from saying “You can.”

Daniel Mintz is chief operating officer of Powertek Corp. He served as CIO of the Department of Transportation from 2006-2009.

While I am wasting time with youtube, I often will update my various social media connections with a link to a video with a song that I am particularly struck by. A recent interaction that resulted from that caused me to think about the mid-west.

When I was growing up I was always a little bit unclear as to exactly where the mid-west started and stopped.

I knew it began somewhere to the west of the Allegheny Mountains. When I was in Cleveland, I knew I was in the mid-west. But exactly when did I leave the mid-west on the other side?

When I drove around the country with Bill Sullivan in his Mustang, and where has Bill Sullivan gone anyway, in 1975 in an effort to forget my then former college girl friend and find exciting and hopefully inappropriate adventures (sadly, none of which happened), I knew when we got to Los Angeles that we were not in the mid-west anymore but when did we cross the line from mid-west to not-mid-west? A mystery unsolved, at least by me.

By the way, Bill’s Mustang had a very high-horsepower engine, could it have been 390 (did they put that kind of engine at the time in a Mustang?). We got perhaps 9 miles per gallon of gas. On the other hand, I remember driving through Arkansas and seeing gas for 23.9 cents/gallon; which actually says more about the lack of inappropriate adventures that happened than it does about gas prices in 1975.

In Phoenix, Bill and I went to a pretty nice French restaurant. When Bill’s steak came, he caused the waiter to become extremely pale when he asked for ketchup to put on the steak. I guess we were not very sophisticated traveler’s.

Other than how big and beautiful and varied the United States is, which you really cannot appreciate without traveling around it on the ground, the other strong memory from that trip was how we fought over what was to play on the radio. That issue became more and more important as the ultimately two-month long drive came to a close. I had to leave it in Minneapolis since I had to report to basic training for the Army Reserves July 6th (only remembered because of that date’s proximity to my birthday). But, as we say, that is another story altogether.

Well, actually I misspoke above, I actually thought about the mid-west because I reflected on whether I was in or past middle-age. I knew that I had entered middle-age at some point though once again not entirely sure when but was unclear as to the exit point. I suspect that the classical definition of the end of middle-age, assuming there IS a classical definition, may be changing as people have longer life-spans. I read somewhere that 50% of all children born in the US now will live to be 100 years old, a remarkable thing.

My question about middle-age came about after I tweeted the link to one of my favorite Danny Kaye song’s “Inchworm”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXi3bjKowJU. I got a response to that tweet from a young woman I knew who told me that she really liked the song a lot. BUT she had to look up who Danny Kaye was in Wikipedia. When I asked her if she was kidding about having to do the Wikipedia search, she pointed out that she was only three when Danny Kaye had died.

So seriously it was at that moment that I realized I had left middle-age, but when exactly did that happen?

The opening night keynote speaker Scott Klososky, presented some interesting points but I felt left out some key issues; probably a bit of an unfair feeling since he only had an hour to cover a lot of material.

I wrote up my summary of what I thought was missing at AOL Government where I am a contributing blogger:

http://gov.aol.com/2011/10/25/reflections-at-elc-why-klososkys-keynote-missed-the-mark/

The first, and as of now only, comment came from Scott Klososky himself who graciously said he agreed with most of my points.

Best of all, they reached back into ancient history, and asked me to moderate a panel Friday, September 9th, from 10:15 – 11:15, entitled Moving Into the Cloud – Practical Experience.

We will four great panel members:

• Fred Whiteside, NIST; who will focus on the Government policy issues
• Wolf Tombe, Customs and Border Protection, DHS; who will take the perspective of the Government implementor
• Bob Hansmann, Blue Coat; who will discuss what it is like to be a commercial provider supporting cloud initiatives
• Dmitry Sokolowski, BAH; who will talk about the issues in providing support as an internal to Government consultant

It occurs to me that a lot of my writing starts with that phrase. I haven’t yet decided if I use it because I learned a lot there or because I think people will be more likely to listen if I start a discussion with it.

Regardless, when I was at the Department of Transportation we would do emergency training. What if there was another 9/11 attack, what if there was a cybersecurity attack, and so forth. Some of us got to go to semi-secret locations and stay underground, walk down long corridors with lights along the top casting shadows, lots of clacking of shoes on the floor, eating together in the cafeteria, periodically getting messages of incident updates, doing reports, watching the pretend (or real) Secretary, talking to the (always) pretend President, and so on. It was pretty cool, like getting to go back to camp for a day. Some of the exercises were pretty extensive involving multiple Government agencies including in some cases State and Local governments.

I was reminded of that recently when the great Washington Earthquake of 2011 hit. Many Federal agencies and departments practice implementing their COOP training. For the uninitiated, COOP stands for Continuity of Operations. COOP planning is actually pretty serious stuff dealing with how to ensure an organization can keep its essential functions running in an emergency. When the organization is one that many citizens depend on, COOP planning is very important.

In any event, at one Government agency, when the actual emergency happened, the earthquake, everyone scattered to leave their building.

On a side note it was only when some of us were outside, like me, that we learned that we had done exactly the wrong thing according to FEMA. Evidently I was to fling myself under a heavy table or find a load bearing door or something similar and stand there, so as the ceiling fell in, it would not fall on me. My instinctive reaction of getting off the second floor before the building collapsed was completely wrong, thus proving once again that no one should pay attention to me when an earthquake occurs.

Back to the agency in question, when all of the IT staff involved in COOP support tried to get to their COOP places, the building guards, who evidently weren’t involved in the emergency practices, and also evidently were not staying under a table, would not let them do so. After some argument, the IT staff gave up and left. So much for COOP training.

So what are the lessons to be learned here. I have two (of course).

First, in my opinion, emergency training is, as are most things, upside down. We spend all our time practicing the procedures we have set up to deal with an emergency. While this is useful and should continue to be part of emergency training, in a real emergency it is the unexpected that happens. It is, in fact, because of the almost certainty of unexpected circumstances that an event becomes an emergency.

Instead in my opinion, the major focus of emergency training should be to help people figure out what to do when they do not know what to do.

In true emergencies, everything breaks down. The expected leadership doesn’t show up and/or isn’t able to communicate effectively to the people who need advice and leadership. The congregation point where people are to meet becomes inaccessible. Something happens that is not in the plan at all. Chains of command fall apart because many of the links are gone.

In all of these cases, actions still need to be taken; collective behavior implemented; goals defined; and problems solved. People who are not prepared to deal with what to do when they do not know what to do, panic or take what often in retrospect are irrational paths of action. It is these issues that emergency training needs to focus on more than it does currently.

My second lesson is that much of this training requires some kind of virtual environment. One of the biggest problems when an emergency hits is problems with communications. However with almost all emergency training if you kill the communications, the training exercise would just stop. The training participants, and the people providing direction for the exercise, would not be able to interact.

In a virtual environment on the other hand you can do almost anything. If a major part of such training is to get individuals used to situations where they have to improvise as a stated goal, virtual environments become a much more plausible way to accomplish this.

We went back and  forth over a number of topics. I, of course was up at my whiteboard drawing things on it and proving key points with insight and wit, or I suppose using the fact that I was the senior person in the office to dominate some of the conversation.

Suddenly my office, on the second floor of our four floor office building, started to move up and down and shift seemingly back and forth. I  had no idea as to what was going on.

If I might digress for a bit, the human mind, or at least mine, tries to interpret completely unexpected events by relating them to something familiar. Many years ago at our previous house in a neighborhood that backed on a small park. I was reading and happened to look out the window. “Funny”, I thought, “when did my wife buy a deer statue to decorate our back yard with.”  It seemed so large for something Ellen would get. Of course then the head of the deer statue leaned down and munched on a plant in our yard.

Back in my office, the only thought that occurred to me was that the floor felt like it would suddenly collapse, but then among the longest 20-25 seconds of my life stopped when the floor stopped shifting.

My staff person and I looked at each other, he said “What was that?”. We opened the door and looked in the hallway to see everyone else in the office milling around. Showing the executive decision making ability that I was hired to demonstrate as the COO at Powertek, I walked out the office door and down the one flight of stairs to the outside, moving away from anything that might fall on me.

After about fifteen minutes of milling about aimlessly, we all decided to go back in the building.

A friend of mine told me a story about when he was in San Francisco when one of the major earthquakes happened. He remembers putting his hands on the wall next to him and pushing as hard as he could to make sure the wall didn’t fall down. When the quake stopped he realized that this was one of the stupidest thoughts he ever had. When he walked outside, it was night, it was eerie since there were no lights anywhere in San Francisco.

During the time I was walking out and milling about, I checked in with my wife who was at home and confirmed that we had suffered an actual earthquake and my younger daughter who texted my wife that she had run down eleven flights of stairs and was safely protected by coffee at Starbucks.

By the time we went back in to the office and accessed the source of all current knowledge, Wikipedia, we were amazed (though we shouldn’t have been) that there already was a full story about the earthquake. Our CTO mentioned that he would have been more impressed if the entry had been made before the earthquake. It occurs to me that quantum computers could have that side benefit if designed correctly.

This book tells parallel stories about what happened to Lincoln’s body after his assassination as it was taken on a train ride back to Springfield Illinois and what happened to Jefferson Davis during his escape from Richmond to his capture and then to the end of his life. It is well written and for those interested in the general subject area, a fairly short read with a lot of information that at least I was unaware of.

One of the events that was described toward the end of the book stayed with me after I finished. The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922, with among others, Robert Lincoln, Lincoln’s surviving son attending. The crowd listening to the dedication was in large part segregated.

It took many years before the serious beginnings of the promises made at the end of the Civil War to penetrate American society in a meaningful way.

During the time I worked on that effort, I got to know a number of the IADB staff. One of them who was born in  Spain, married an American wife, and now lives in the US, told me that in his opinion there was one particular thing that made America unique. It was that unlike any other country America was founded on the principal that all Governmental power was derived from the people. In most countries, he said, the opposite was the case. In other countries, rights were conferred by the Government.

I am not enough a student of International Political Science to know how accurate that conversation was. But I do believe in the first part, that is that the premise of the American experiment was that Governmental power was “derived from” not “established for”.

Quoting from the Declaration of Independence, a document which will be often quoted today, July 4th, but not paid enough attention to:

“”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

As a second generation American, all of my grandparents were born in Europe, I remain thankful that I am able to be a small part of this continuing attempt to expand the barriers to freedom that America has and continues to represent. I continue to believe that freedom is at its most basic not “freedom from” but “freedom to”.

While I worry that currently we are losing our way a bit, like most American’s for these over 200 years, I remain optimistic that the experiment will continue unabated.

Happy July 4th to all friends of liberty.