The webinar, moderated by Adam Ross, the Managing Editor from the SANS Institute, will focus on some of the challenges faced in creating secure Federal Systems. With the growing movement for speed-to-market and the movement to the cloud, and associated buzz words, and with the increased publicity about cyber-attacks, how we should best deal with such issues is becoming a still greater issue.

Pat and I will look at these issues in three parts.

First, we will look at the context that we now face. I find that without understanding the context of a problem, it becomes difficult to really deal with the systemic issues. Second, I will review some of the high-level goals that I would focus on, putting on my now dusty CIO hat from my Department of Transportation days. Finally, Pat will tackle real-world issues with implementation suggestions, looking at how to integrate security planning rather than dealing with it as an afterthought. He will also offer his thoughts relating to SCADA design issues (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisiton – e.g. computers managing things like the electrical grid, power plants, and so forth).

Registration details are at:

http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=195825&s=1&k=D14C3C31F1889E77A82E235253D58190

The Government Executive website is at: http://www.govexec.com/

Powertek Corporation’s web site is at: http://www.powertekcorporation.com/

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s web site is at: http://www.nrc.gov

In this entry I wanted to give a Workshop committee update, encouraging readers to either comment here or send me an email, and also talk a little bit about ACT-IAC.

Management of Change Workshops

Each year Government and Industry IT and associated functional leadership get together to discuss key challenges facing the Government usage of IT. This year the conference is being held in Philadelphia, May 23-25, http://www.actgov.org/EVENTS/MANAGEMENTOFCHANGE/MOC%202010/Pages/default.aspx.

Monday afternoon there will be four workshops, two per session. Our current thinking is to focus on the following four topics:

Panel 1: Increasing Citizen Engagement

One of President Obama’s Technology Guiding Principles is “restoring a culture of accountability through openness and transparency of government operations and information.”  Part of this initiative involves opening communication and increasing engagement with citizens..This panel will bring together individuals from different lines of business and organizations, who have had experience with these efforts to not only discuss their efforts and the technologies used, but also best practices and lessons learned and how to measure whether these efforts have actually resulted in the desired results. 

Panel 2: Top Commercial Practices by the Global 500; Organizer

This panel will present CIOs from global, industry-leading companies discussing their solutions to challenges common to CIOs everywhere. Our plan is to select 3 or 4 topics from the following list to focus on:

• Program management, program managers, project failures
• Budgeting, budget justification, capital planning
• Interactions with executive managers, bringing value to product managers
• Recruiting staff, training staff, retaining staff
• IT Security, balancing risk and cost, publicizing breaches
• Standards, policy enforcement, working with component CIOs
• Oversight, audits, transparency 
• Cloud versus CoBOL – Risk of implementing new versus risk of maintaining old 

Panel 3: Human Capital: To Insource Or Not To Insource?

Today’s political climate has the President and the Congress putting pressure on Agencies to insource contractor jobs, in particular those jobs having to do with acquisition.  OMB is providing new guidelines on what is inherently governmental.  Join panel members as they consider the value added (or not) of increasing the federal workforce.  Gain insight into the challenges associated with altering the federal employee /contractor employee staffing proportions.  Consider the operational and cultural adaptations necessary to effectively move professionals from the private to the public workplace.  Share insights concerning how a partnership of government and industry can contribute to efficiently accomplishing a major workforce transition.  Perhaps, most importantly join the panel in examining possible and probable impacts to agency mission and how to mitigate potential risk to high profile projects.

Panel 4: Innovation and Performance focusing on Sustainability/Green IT focused

The Green IT track provides a forum for presentation and discussion of planned and ongoing Green IT initiatives designed to provide new services, improve operations, and reduce the cost of IT. Topics of discussion include energy efficiency improvement of data centers, green computing initiatives, new communication tools, improved operations of legacy systems, and leveraging new technology.” 

Our Thoughts 

We want these to be much more interactive than in the past. Typically these panels have a moderator and three-to-four panelists. Each speaks for 10-15 minutes, then the audience gets to answer a few questions, with the moderator having a question handy in case everyone is too shy to ask anything. 

We are thinking of doing a debate for Panel 3 picking speakers who will be on different sides of the premise of the panel. For some of the other panels we are thinking about posting a summary of the panelists opinions and pass copies out before and at the workshops. There would be no formal presentation, rather the entire interaction would consist of the audience asking questions or presenting arguments and having the panelists respond. 

What Are Yours? 

What do you think about the topics as well as the areas of focus for Panel 2? Any comments on format? Suggested panelists for any of the panelists? Questions about the Management of Change conference or as it is popularly referred to as MOC? 

If so, feel free to add a comment here or send me an email at dmintz@powertekcorporation.com and I’ll pass your comments on to the organizers of each of the panelists. 

A Final Word About ACT-IAC 

For those of you who have not heard of ACT-IAC, it is a great organization to join if your company hasn’t joined; and participate in if you have not done so. 

You get to interact with great people, learn from serious practitioners inside and outside Government what the real issues are, and how they are grappling to deal with them. 

Perhaps most important you have the chance to make some great new friends. 

http://www.actgov.org/Pages/default.aspx

Despite my decision to move, CSC, the company I am leaving, continues to be a  great place to work  with committed and talented employees, many of whom have become friends over the last year. So why did I leave?

Simply put, it became clear to me that my need to help grow something and bring about change within my workplace is greater than I had realized. While I valued my time at CSC, my fundamental worth there was related to what I was not what I did. It brought home the fact that my happiest times were when I was valued for the changes I helped bring about.

At the US Department of Transportation I had in many ways the perfect position, at least for me. I was able to take advantage of my experiences to provide strategic insight into the use and management of Information Technology. I used my capital-P political experiences to work with the small-p organizational politics of being a Departmental CIO. At the same time I was lucky in that the DOT CIO had responsibility for a significant operational segment of the Department, managing the desktops and telephones for headquarters and a growing percentage of the field offices as well as a data center for the non-FAA agencies.

I tell people that during my three years at the Department of Transportation, no-one ever felt that any one person was in charge of Information  Technology BUT they agreed that IF someone was in charge it would have been me. I was able to use that general opinion to cause more change than I had expected.

Powertek provides a comparable opportunity to the one I had at the US Department of Transportation. This is a chance to bring my background in the public and private sector to support the development and implementation of a strategic vision, and to utilize my leadership skills to mentor employees who have less experience and to provide operational and tactical direction. I feel very lucky and privileged to be part of a company that has been very successful thus far but with hard work has the potential to make even more of a difference in the future.

As usual I am always interested in receiving input from the larger community. If there are people out there who are willing to provide advice regarding growing and transitioning an 8a company and/or would be interested in talking about business opportunities or partnerships, please feel free to reach out to me at dmintz@powertekcorporation.com or my personal email at dmintz@ourownlittlecorner.com . You can also find me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter at technogeezer.

This was an animated cartoon based on the series where DC killed off Superman in the early 1990’s. At the time, it cause quite a reaction, getting coverage in the national and even international press. Millions of readers who had never read comics, bought copies.

While I had religiously read lots of comics when  young, by 1992, under the pressure of pretending to be adult, I had stopped. Thus I never read the original series.

Evidently throughout the 90’s there were attempts to turn this series into a movie; it almost got off the ground with of all people Nicolas Cage scheduled to star as Superman with Tim Burton directing. The mind boggles at what might have been the result, however it was never made.

Instead a direct to DVD animated cartoon was released in 2007, it was this that I got from Netflix.

I thought it was pretty good. It was interesting watching the story of how the original comics were created. A number of the people got pretty teary about some of the scenes in the comics when Superman died. Don’t tell my daughters, but so did I a little bit when watching the cartoon.

If you ever read Superman comics, I would recommend renting it. It brought many fond memories.

AND as an added bonus, Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne in the Firefly TV series, was the voice talent for Superman.

I discussed two topics under the topic of Bringing Governance, Performance Management, and IT Together.

Here is the presentation:

My Potomac Forum Presentation

The presentation is divided into parts.

The first part discusses my thoughts about what should we are trying to do with the Open Government initiative. I am a very enthusiastic supporter of these initiatives.

My major point, however, was that much of what has gotten public attention such as Transparency or externally published data sets are not the goal, it is what they are intended to accomplish that is the goal. Specifically, we want to cause something to happen that would not have happened if they were not performed.

As one of the other speakers noted, if this only became a compliance exercise then we would not be accomplishing enough.

The second part of the presentation dealt  with how I attempted to use transparency and a status dashboard at the US Department of Transportation during my last year at the Department to improve oversight of cyber-security status. The approach turned out to be partially effective.

Our ability to see into the various networks, most of which were independently managed, improved a great deal. However, I was unsuccessful in setting up a process that carried over across the chasm of the change in Administration. I indicated some of the lessons learned and how I would have improved our approach.

]]> http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2010/02/11/social-media-and-open-government-my-presentation/feed/ 0 http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2010/02/09/the-big-bang-theory-hearts-firefly/ http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2010/02/09/the-big-bang-theory-hearts-firefly/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:10:36 +0000 Daniel http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/?p=156 For those who knew me when I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, you will know that I held a monthly lunch with a small band of fans of both the TV show Firefly, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series), and the movie Serenity, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/serenity/.

For references to this, see the end of the interview I gave for the DotGov Buzz, http://www.usa.gov/Federal_Employees/USA_Buzz/Newsletter_0522.html#dotgovspotlight, and the reference from a column in Federal Computer Week, written by then rising star Chris Dorobek, http://fcw.com/Articles/2007/09/16/Circuit_633659049783559373.aspx.

I even ran into Firefly fans when in China this last summer when we went to see a solar eclipse, http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/21/serenity-on-the-yangtze/.

I was glad to observe a Firefly reference last night in the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory, http://www.cbs.com/primetime/big_bang_theory/. In it the two leads, and roommates, Sheldon and Leonard have a big fight over who will get to accompany Leonard to see the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva on Valentine ’s Day, Leonard’s girl friend Penny or Sheldon.

Even when Sheldon points out that in their very detailed Roommate Agreement  it states clearly if one roommate is going to see the Large Hadron Collider and can bring the other roommate with them, they have to; Leonard still insists he will take Penny. Other Agreement clauses include one that if one roommate becomes a Zombie, the other promises not to kill them.

Sheldon tries to embarrass Leonard by saying that Darth Vader, Rupert Murdoch, and Leonard were three notorious traitors. Rupert was in the list because he owned Fox and Fox canceled Firefly. And thus the reference.

I was on January 15^th, you can listen to the entire show that week at http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007.

In this post, I wanted to briefly touch on the second of the two articles I discussed, DISA expands access to ProjectForge cloud environment, http://gcn.com/articles/2010/01/13/disa-projectforge-collaboration.aspx.

The article illustrates the greater comfort level that Government has with using open-source software produced by non-Governmental organizations. While not explicitly mentioned, this increased involvement is leading to open-source development going the other direction; being produced by Government and then placed into the greater community.

Just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, I should explain a few terms.

DISA, which stands for Defense Information Systems Agency, provides an increasingly large part of the Information Technology infrastructure for the Department of Defense; http://www.disa.mil/.

As I have mentioned in a number of venues before, I believe there needs to be a Civilian version of DISA to serve a similar purpose. The most logical candidate to me for this is GSA, though historically GSA has done a better job of managing contracts than managing the implementation of contracts. Regardless, as the Government increasingly understands the value of centralizing the provisioning of infrastructure, allowing the Program staff to focus on their program mission, DISA has increased its responsibilities; not without growing pains but that is a different blog entry.

The article talks about DISA expanding its ProjectForge effort associated with Cloud Computing, this effort is part of its forge.mil program. The word ‘forge’ comes from the original efforts to develop Open-source software.

Open-source software typically is created by crowd sourcing, which is with the participation of many contributors often in a fairly loosely coupled fashion. The process and the resulting source code is presented transparently. Companies typically make money around open-source efforts by selling training, consulting, and/or support contracts of one sort or another.  For more details, see http://opensource.org/.

There has been a continuing argument within Government over the proper place for open-source software. Some people are uncomfortable with the thought that the software has no single creator or owner.  Open-source advocates would argue that the gains achieved by making the source code completely visible are significant. Security experts tell me that security that is premised largely on secrecy ultimately fails. In the same way, the power of exposure, at least in theory, reduces the possibility of bugs and/or trapdoors which cause security vulnerabilities in a software application.

Fundamentally this discussion represents the much broader issue of the real-world value or power of crowd sourcing versus classical hierarchically produced results. I plan to talk more about this in later blog entries a bit more.

Returning to the article I presented, it is clear that the argument over Government use of open-source is being largely decided in favor of use. Here we have one of the largest providers of IT in the Federal Government with an active open-source effort both in concept and execution within the Federal Government.

The article also illustrates one of the under-reported stories; that of Government produced open-source software. It is increasingly common that the Government makes use of privately produced open-source software. But there are an increasing number of situations where the Government is creating open-source software and either making it available to a larger community for usage or even setting up relationships with non-Governmental organizations to manage the resulting open-source community.

The premise of the panel is that every Friday, Francis asks three people from the ‘community’ to each select three news stories having something to do with the Federal Government. I selected three Information Technology related stories.

You can hear the panel which consisted of myself, Jon Desenberg, President of the Performance Institute, and Jeff Sural, a former DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary, and now of Alston and Bird at:

http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007

I thought I would summarize and perhaps expand a bit on why I picked those stories and what they meant, at least to me. In this entry, I talk about the first story:

Transparency, public input to guide IT policies

http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20100113/ACQUISITION03/1130306/1009/ACQUISITION

 The emphasis of the current Administration, and in particular CIO El Jefe Vivek Kundra, has been great. As many have said sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But like many good things, transparency has some complexity to it.

The first complexity is we can use the term transparency to apply to at least three different kinds of data.

We want to expose data that the Government collects and potentially uses in a transparent fashion. The value of doing this is that we increase the chances of getting public input as to the quality or makeup of the data. In addition, by exposing the data we allow people and various organizations to make use of it quickly. The Apps for Democracy competitions, http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/, ended up with applications that took government data, used the data very creatively in ways that were unlikely to happen anytime soon.

We also want to expose data about the processes the Government is following. Many of the dashboards that were created through the leadership of Karen Evans under President Bush as part of the President’s Management Agenda, and adapted, modified, and expanded under President Obama, aim to accomplish just that. By using the classical green/yellow/red ratings or something similar it is possible to capture the status of various Government projects, whether they are meeting schedule and/or spending goals, and help to identify those that need fixing.

Finally, we want to expose data about the results of the Government programs and their associated impact. In fact, ultimately it is this kind of transparency that can have the greatest impact. The goal of transparency is not; if I may use sort of an anti-tautology, just to be transparent. It is to allow something good to happen that would not have happened without being transparent. It is the ‘something good’ we are aiming for; transparency is often just the intermediate step.

One other point regarding making data available, as Vivek has pointed out, if you are going to expose all of this data on the web it is important to format the data in a way that external users can easily make use of it, download it, and manipulate it. There are the associated issues of data standardization and consistency which I will talk about sometime in the future.

The second complexity is that what is good for the organization is often not so good by those we depend on accomplishing that better good.  Creating the systems or enhancing the data flow to expose it on the web takes resources. I know of few if any agencies or departments who feel they have lots of resources sitting around, whether we are talking about money or staff time. When investments are made to accomplish these important projects it typically means something else is not getting done. However important these are (and I think they are very important), the positive impact may not be immediately obvious while the incremental pain of not completing other projects will hit immediately.

Also, when first exposing data, there almost inevitably is going to be some that will be embarrassing for one reason or another. For example, data may be made available before it is actually clean; or it will become obvious that some of the data sets are incomplete or poorly constructed. While the result may be positive, cleaning and creating better data, the short-term impact of news articles or in a worse case, Congressional testimony, is not a way to have a great day.

The point of this is that not only is it important to establish goals and set deadlines, but also to at least spend a little bit of time thinking through to the extent possible about the benefits that will accrue to the people responsible for the implementation. The more the career staff support these initiatives because they think it is a good idea, as opposed to just a required one, the better the results will be.

The third complexity is how to keep in place these improvements over time. I would suggest there are two important ways to make it more likely to stick.

The first is to continue what is already being pushed, publishing the data externally in the most public fashion as possible. If data is exposed to the public and external interest groups, then when the data becomes stale or disappears altogether, someone is likely to raise a public red flag.

The second is to make sure as much of the data is created and published automatically as part of the normal course of events. This is as opposed to having a staff person take data and manually manipulate it and create some kind of table. The reason is that over time if the data is created manually, eventually the staff creating the data will get reassigned to some higher priority project. This is particularly true when there is significant change in senior staff. If the system produces the data automatically then it will stay current and available.

What I see happening thus far at locations such as http://www.data.gov/ and as exemplified by the Open Government Directive, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/, are very positive steps in increasing the interaction between Government agencies and their external stakeholders. It will be important to pay attention to the operational details to keep these projects moving forward.

We spent Saturday in Hershey PA. That night we saw the Hershey Bears, http://www.hersheybears.com/,  wallop the Wilkes Barre/Scranton Penguins 7-2. And we then returned to Washington Sunday in time to watch the Capitals beat the Philadelphia Flyers 5-3.

We hadn’t been to Hershey since our two daughters were young. That last visit, we went to a number of the Hershey Chocolate themed places, the names blur in a memory that cannot recall last week well these days. We also visited Hershey Park, where as I vaguely recall I even went on some of the roller coasters which is normally not my favorite thing to do.

The Gibson House. Lately when we travel we try and stay in Bed and Breakfasts whenever we can. You get a bit more of a sense of a location and the opportunity to interact with the other guests is much more likely which often can be fun.

The prevalence of the Internet has dramatically increased the information available about B&B’s. Typically I spend a couple of hours investigating places, leaning a lot on the Trip Advisor ratings and any other references we run across.

In Hershey we stayed at The Gibson House, http://www.gibsonhousebandb.com/, which ended up a great choice. It was a 1925 Victorian style house, which had been updated and decorated by the owner Tom Powers. The rooms were very nice, and the “and B” part which was Blueberry pancakes was great.  Equally important it was close to the tourist areas, but in a quiet neighborhood, and just a few minutes from Giant Center, http://www.giantcenter.com/, home of the Hershey Bears.

The Museum on Choclate Avenue. We only had time to visit one of the Hershey sites, the newly built Museum on Chocolate Avenue, which replaced the old Hershey Museum, http://www.hersheystory.org/splash.aspx. We enjoyed wandering around including have some Mexican Chocolate Cake.

 I was surprised at the details of what is now called the Milton Hershey School, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Hershey_School. Milton Hershey and his wife Catherine, did not have any children. Instead, or perhaps as a result of that, they created a school to help orphan children.  Originally limited to only white boys who were orphans, over time the school, happily, became available to all children in great need.

The school has controlling interest in the Hershey company, owns the Entertainment company, runs many of the local hotels as well as Hershey Park. Over 1700 children currently attend with the plan to increase that to over 2100. All students who graduate receive an $80K scholarship to attend college. The videos of former students are really heartwarming. I didn’t realize what a rich legacy Hershey, who evidently never completed fifth grade, left.

DA BEARS. That night we attended the Hershey Bears game. Evidently when the hockey team was originally formed, it was called the Hershey Bars, but was forced to change its name when it wanted to play competitive hockey, or at least that is the story we were told.

It turns out that by coincidence, the Capitals Road Crew was also attending the game that night. So we met the busload of other Caps fans at the Bear’s Den in the Hershey Lodge for dinner before going to the game that night.

We got to Giant Center around 6:00pm, an hour before the game. There already was a large crowd present; the crowd ended up at the capacity of 10,500. The Giant Center is a great arena, anyone who hasn’t gone and who loves hockey should consider the short trip up to Hershey. You get to see lots of players who have been up to the Caps plus future stars, and the crowd is great. Minor league hockey is a lot like minor league baseball, really community based and fun to attend. Hershey has  a very long and deep relationship with the Hershey Bears. The fact that they won 7-2 AND beat the farm team of the hated Pittsburgh Penguins was an added bonus.

While the Caps have two very good young goalies in Semyon Varlamov and Michal Neuvirth, it is very possible that the best of their young goalies is playing in Hershey, Braden Holtby. With both the Hershey Bears, the Capitals number one minor league affiliate, and the Carolina Stingrays, the Capitals other minor league affiliate, both far in front in their respective divisions, the organization is very deep in talent.

BREAKFAST. Sunday morning, one of those added benefits of staying in a bed and breakfast happened. We had breakfast with a couple from Carroll County, MD, who visit Hershey once a year to see the Hershey sites and go to a Hershey Bears game, and a family, with a young boy and girl, who were in from South Carolina. The wife was from the Pennsylvania area and was visiting her grandmother and other family.

We had a great conversation about hockey and to Ellen’s distress wandered into South Carolina and Massachusetts politics. It turned out that the mother from South Carolina and I had a number of mutual friends as well as an intense interest in political campaigns and politics in general. Great fun.

C-A-P-S, CAPS, CAPS, CAPS. Sunday, we return to Washington, saw the Capitals beat the hated Philadelphia Flyers 5-3 in a very physical, almost playoff atmosphere. And then sadly we had to leave the hockey cocoon to return to ‘real life’. A great two days.

In addition, there are always great things to do and see and learn about when we visit Hilton Head and the area around it, as we did this last weekend, January 9^th and 10^th.

Among David’s many volunteer activities he does in his very active retirement has been over the last year to arrange the children’s programs for the Hilton Head Branch of the Beaufort County Library; a program called Super Saturdays, held every second Saturday of the month at 11:00am, http://www.beaufortcountylibrary.org/bcl_calendar

The Saturday we were in Hilton Head, the program entertainer was a local ventriloquist and puppet maker called Conrad Hartz. Naturally, since I offered to join David, along with soon-to-be ticket taker Ellen, I looked up this guy on the Internet. It turned out that not only was he one of the leading professionals in the business, http://personal.lig.bellsouth.net/g/k/gkoepke/hartz/ and http://www.puppetcircus.com/conrad.htm, but had a long history of making all of his puppets by hand out of wood.

To top it off, it turned out that perhaps the last performance, albeit informal, that Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody ever did, was in Beaufort with Hartz operating Howdy for the routine. Coincidentally, Buffalo Bob lived in New Rochelle, when not visiting Doodyville, and his son Chris was a fellow student of my wife’s. It was years before she learned that not every school had Howdy Doody come visit on a regular basis.

The show was really terrific. Over 100 kids and their parents attended. They got to see puppet birds who laid an egg, puppet clowns who blew balloons and floated up above the ground, puppet jugglers who actually juggled wooden balls in the air, and even a puppet replica of Conrad Hartz when he ran away and became a clown in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. At the end they were entertained by magic tricks as the multi-talented Hartz finished with a flourish.