This years winner of the Franke Award was recently retired from Government service Jim Williams. Independent of his obsessive Red Sox fandom (is there any other kind of Red Sox fandom come to think of it?), Jim is one of the wonderful people. Jim has represented the best qualities of Government service at least to me. He has been consummate professional, dedicated to achieving the highest possible results, and at the same time a good partner to work with for the private community that supports Federal programs.

I was lucky to get to know him during my time at the US Department of Transportation and am proud to have him as a friend. Now, if we could only cure him of his Red Sox’ism.

Dan Heath’s talk was an interesting one, I am sure my memory and this short summary will not do it justice.

He basically said that there are two aspects to how people react to change. First, there is a rationale perspective which he likens to a rider sitting on an elephant. Second, there is an emotional component which he likens to the elephant the rider is sitting on. He notes when push comes to shove which one is the powerful, the answer being the elephant.

His opinion is that we focus too much on the rider, emphasizing the logic of change. Though we cannot ignore the rider, we need to make sure we pay attention to the elephant.

In simple terms it is important that we explain the reasons for the change in explicit terms so the rider understands. But it is critical that we illustrate for the elephant why it is advantageous to change. He pointed out that the elephant needs that information often in an illustrative fashion.

One example he used was a financial executive who showed using spreadsheets how a billion dollars could be saved over ten years by centralizing purchasing. Almost everyone at the company he worked at ignored him. To prove his point he had his staff go out and get an example of every type of work glove they bought in each of the many divisions in the company. Attached to each work glove he attached the price paid for the glove, which varied not just between different types but even the same type bought by different divisions. He then had all of these gloves dumped in a conference room and invited all of the corporate executives to come to the room. A few months later he was given the authority to centralize purchasing.

I think his points were cogent. The challenge, as usual, is to apply those generic principals to my (or your) specific situations. The value however is that they do provide a context for thinking through what steps to take to cause change.

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

This year ELC is being held October 25-27 in Williamsburg, VA, http://www.actgov.org/events/ExecutiveLeadership/ELC%202009/Pages/default.aspx.

On Monday, October 26, most of the day is taken up by panels organized into four tracks. I had the privilege to chair along with Eric Won of GSA, one of the tracks focused on Infrastructure and Cloud Computing.

This post will provide an overview of what we intended to accomplish during the course of the track and thus why we made the decisions we made in creating the panels. My discussion at the beginning of the track will in large part echo what I write here, subject to any suggestions made by my vast reading audience.

WHAT IS IT, WHO CARES. There has been a lot of publicity and discussion already about Cloud Computing, what it is, what it isn’t, even if it is or not. As someone once pointed out to me, we went through the Industrial Revolution which was not well-defined at the time and it still happened. The reality is that NIST has created a pretty good working definition which I like (and more importantly GSA likes; a link to version 1.5 can be found here http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/index.html, it has been given a high-priority by the current Administration, and many pilots are in process or soon to begin.

We decided to deal with four issues:

• How will this affect what is currently in-place and operational
• What are the institutional hurdles that will need to be dealt with to make success, however we define success, more likely
• How will the classical Government oversight functions measure cloud implementations
• What lessons learned are already available based on real-world examples

INTRODUCTION. In addition to these subjects, we felt that there were still a significant number of people who have never actually seen how easy it is to instantiate a server based in a cloud (which is easier than porting an already running application to a cloud). Therefore during the introduction we will use an environment that JPL, one of the panelists from the Real-World Examples panel (panel 4), has in place and instantiate two servers.

Dave Wennergren, the DoD Deputy CIO, and I will be providing an overview of the day. I will focus on the logistics and panel details. Dave will give an overview of his take on cloud computing in the Government.

PANEL 1, SHARED SERVICES, LOBS, AND MOVING TO THE CLOUD. Who can remember that long-ago time when the focus was creating shared services that would provide relatively centralized provisioning of capabilities to the Federal Government. Oh, right, that was 2008.

In reality as the current Administration has said the cloud journey is, in fact, that, a journey. And it is a journey that will take some time to travel along.

Where are the current Lines of Business focused right now, what is their thinking about the next few years for their offerings, and how are they thinking about cloud computing?

John Marshall, the Vice President, of the CGI Global Sector is moderating a panel with Doug Bourgeois, Director of the National Business Center, one of the most successful government shared operations, Adam Goldberg, Chief, Financial Analysis and Systems Branch, Office of Federal Financial Management, OMB, Mike Hill, VP, Enterprise Initiatives, IBM, and Jim Williams, Commissioner, Federal Acquisition Service, GSA.

PANEL 2, CXO PANEL, HURDLES & OPPORTUNITIES. This and panel 3 are very exciting for me, since we were able to have a significant number of non-IT functions represented. One of the values of ELC is the opportunity to reach outside of our ‘normal’ space.

The panel looks at the kinds of issues that are associated with cloud computing implementation. Having been lucky enough to be part of some of the planning discussions, I can honestly say that if the actual panel is as informative and stimulating as those conversations, it will be very enjoyable and interesting.

The panel is moderated by Casey Coleman, the GSA CIO, and the designated focal point for Cloud Computing for the Federal Government and includes Tom Sharpe, Senior Procurement Executive, Department of the Treasury, Susan Swart, the CIO of the Department of State, Patti Titus, CISO for Unisys Federal Systems and a former CISO at DHS, and Kathleen Turco, CFO for GSA.

PANEL 3, OVERSIGHT.  Federal CIO’s get much help and advice when implementing the many regulatory and legal requirements associated with their job responsibilities. How they are measured by these various oversight functions impacts CIO behavior more than many people realize. We have put together on this panel many of the functions that provide internal, program office, or external oversight to discuss how they are thinking of approaching cloud implementations.

The panel is moderated by Mary Ellen Condon, Principal, Assurance & Resilance, Booz Allen Hamilton, Rebecca Leng, Inspector General’s office, Department of Transportation, Ron Ross, Project Leader, Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Implementation Project, NIST, Greg Silshusen, Director, Information Security Issues, GAO, and Gary Winkler, Program Executive Officer, Enterprise Information Systems, Department of the Army.

PANEL 4, REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES. Images of locking the panelists in a house until they instantiate large applications in the cloud, with the audience voting one panelist off each week have popped up more often in the last few weeks leading to ELC; perhaps lack of sleep has this impact.

The goal of this panel is to look at actual experiences that the panelists have encountered and to look at some of the early lessons learned.

The moderator for the panel is Pete Tseronis, the Dputy Associate CIO, Department of Energy and Chair of the Cloud Advisory Council reporting to Casey Coleman. The panelists include Henry Sienkiewicz, Technical Program Director for DISA, Tom Soderstrom, CTO, for NASA JPL, Susie Adams, CTO, Microsoft, and Pieter Poll, CTO, Qwest.