Regardless I had a great time recording Mark Amtower’s show last Friday, for broadcast today, Monday, April 9th, at noon, and rebroadcast Thursday, April 12th at 11am.

The other guest was Ed Swallow, VP of Business Development, for Northrup Grumman’s Civil Systems Division.

We kicked around the differences between working for a large or small company, in my case Powertek Corporation, www.powertekcorporation.com; as well as how the two can work together.

Technology topics include Cybersecurity and mobility. No technology discussion would be complete without some mention of ‘the cloud’, so we covered that also.

We talked about how small companies can differentiate themselves, Mark’s summary of the program discusses Ed’s approach:

http://blog.federaldirect.net/2012/04/some-great-small-biz-tips-on-amtower.html

I discussed how Powertek has taken the concept of the Voice of the Customer which we use to ensure we get usable feedback on projects and added additional structure to it in order to make it a Powertek value-add.

Thanks to Mark for inviting me and for Ed Swallow for being such a great fellow participant.

http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2011/04/10/our-annual-passover-seder/

and

http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2011/04/11/our-passover-seder-quotes/

In 2008, one thing we focused on was “We think about from what, to what, and what we have to accomplish to initiate and complete the transition.” This year we want to expand a bit on that: thinking about what risks have to be taken in order to successfully achieve freedom and have to happen to enable people (or communities of people) to take those risks. Perhaps we can consider what implications this has for the current day.

I read a passage from a Dvar by Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, rabbi of B’Nai Yehuda Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Homewood, Illinois, during my preparation this year:

“If we were to try to summarize the purpose of the Seder ritual in one sentence, we could find that sentence in the Haggadah itself: 

“Bechol dor vador, chayav adam lir’ot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza miMitzrayim—In every generation, each of us must see ourselves as if we, ourselves, went out from Egypt.” 

The foods we eat and dip, the prayers we say and sing, the telling of the story—all these are designed to enable us to relive the experience of the Exodus.

It is not a story of some other people long ago; it is OUR story. We were there. We were slaves, who tasted bitterness and wept salty tears and made mortar for bricks and baked flat bread. And we were liberated, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with signs and wonders. We, ourselves, experienced these things and, each year, we re-enact them out of our primal memory. We raise our cups and remember both our oppression and our freedom—together.”

At our Sedar we have gotten in the habit of passing out quotes associated with our theme.

The following are the quotes we are using this year:

Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983, American social writer

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Helen Keller, 1880-1968, American author, political activist

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826, 3^rd American President, author of the Declaration of Independence

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895, American social reformer, orator, writer

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.

Edward Abbey, 1927-1989, American author and essayist.

Freedom begins between the ears.

Andre Gide, 1869-1951, French author, Nobel Prize literature winner.

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Wayne Gretsky, 1961-, Canadian hockey player.

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.

Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16^th American President.

If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.

Amelia Earhart, 1897 – 1937, American aviator and author

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

Trina Paulus, Hope for the Flowers, a novel for adults and others (including caterpillars who can read, American author, advocate for organic farming

“How does one become a butterfly?” she asked pensively.

“You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”

Louis Carroll, pseudonym for English author Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“Thinking again?” the duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin. “I have a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried. “Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly.”

Rosellen Brown, 1939-, American author, wrote Before and After

A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.

Mignon Mclaughlin, 1913-1983, American journalist and author

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Charles Kettering, 1876-1958, American inventor, engineer, businessman

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832, German writer, artist, biologist, physicist

Everybody wants to be somebody, nobody wants to grow.

James Gordon, American psychiatrist

It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t.

It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.

Gerry Eberstadt, the CEO and founder of Turnto Networks,  compared the difference between teaching a class and hosting a party.

In both everyone is in the same room. But in the first the focus is all on the teacher as a brand. As Eberstadt put it, the flow is hub and spoke. At the party, the participants may or may not even interact directly with the host. Chances are the guests are going to be as positive about the host as the students were about the teacher, maybe more so. The issue isn’t what is the right approach, but that each has its own value and implications.

A further comment was that the challenge regarding the party analogy is how to ‘monetize’ the event. It is necessary for have the guests ‘do something’ in relation to the host and often that is one of the challenges.

One of the great things about doing this is how much I learn each semester, I find I always gain much, much more than I bring to the class (pointed out to me by the observant students …).

In a recent discussion thread one of the students had some interesting things to say about telecommuting which I thought deserved a wider audience. So with a tip of the hat to Neelima Jampani …

Critics of telecommuting believe that Internet communication will never truly replace face-to-face contact, and to some degree, they’re right. The touch of a keyboard will never take the place of a strong handshake, a hug, or body language. But many of the social benefits of face-to-face interaction can easily be replicated in cyberspace if employers simply learn to utilize Internet technology to their advantage. Companies must adapt their business strategies to create opportunities for casual social interaction among employees, to establish interactive work opportunities for employees.

Companies with successful telecommuting programs have identified several concrete ways to accomplish the goal of creating an active on-line “community” for their telecommuting workers (Carpenter).

• At Aetna Insurance Co., each telecommuter is assigned a “buddy.”By pairing its workers, Aetna ensures that telecommuters have regular social interaction with other employees, and creates a social network wherein telecommuters develop social relationships with employees they would not otherwise have met.
• Alan Fowler suggests assigning every remote worker an office-based mentor as well, in order to keep telecommuters in touch (via e-mail) with any social developments occurring in the office. Whenever possible, these mentors should be senior employees, so that telecommuters can develop the types of impromptu mentoring relationships that often occur in the workplace.
• IBM has scheduled social events using “chat” technology for its on-line workers, and Arthur Anderson holds informal chatroom “lunches” for its telecommuting employees. These companies have found it necessary to actually schedule social interactions for telecommuters, interactions that usually take place automatically for office-based workers.
• Several successful telecommuting programs provide a “place” where remote workers can go to hang out during breaks, lunch, and other free time. At Cisco, telecommuters congregate in “virtual cubes.”At Merrill Lynch, they go to the “virtual water cooler.”These “places,” which are essentially chatrooms, enable remote workers to communicate with co-workers they’ve never met or worked with, and to enjoy all of the social benefits of a traditional office environment.
• Finally, companies may find that threaded conferences give telecommuters yet another “place” where they can join in an ongoing discourse with co-workers. While threaded discussions may not offer the psychological benefits of live dialogue, they can still keep telecommuters in tune with what’s happening at the company, while at the same time providing them with an opportunity to develop reputations, identify workplace personalities, and make friends.

References:

Carpenter, J.L. Building community in the Virtual workplace. Retrieved on February 5, 2012 from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/fallsem98/final_papers/Carpenter.html

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