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.

For those of you are are thinking of becoming a political appointee or wonder about the process, it is worth reading.

In December, 2008, I wrote a column about what I learned from personally being a political appointee in President Bush’s Administration for FedScoop, http://fedscoop.com/2008/12/lessons-from-a-political-cio/.

I thought it might be useful to repeat it here:

“As one of the chief information officers who was politically appointed and thus will be out of a job January 20, 2009, I have been reflecting on the lessons learned that I might pass on to the CIOs who will have a chance to serve in the next administration. Perhaps a few of these thoughts may be useful to any political appointee.

I mention six of them here. I suspect given time I could come up with many more.

First, respect, reach out, and work with the career staff that report to you at the agency you serve. You will find them dedicated, caring, competent, and tremendously hard-working. You will learn much from them, and it will be only with their support that you have an opportunity to accomplish great things.

One of the real values that a political appointee can bring is to provide broad-based support (“high air cover”) for those career staff who want to cause change but are not empowered to do so. When you can use your connections to the departmental political leadership to provide that support, take advantage of those relationships.

Second, remember that political appointees can never speak in a whisper. A truly wonderful professor, Shelley Metzenbaum of the University of Maryland, who has done work supporting the Department of Transportation, provided me that insight. I have never forgotten it though sadly not always kept in mind. The point is that I have found that most career staff very much want to be as supportive as they can. However, if you are not clear in what you want accomplished, or if you are like me and think out loud, you will unintentionally provide inconsistent and confusing direction, especially until your staff gets used to how you operate.

Third, participate in the various groups that exist within the government to allow the exchange of information. These include the federal CIO Council and perhaps more importantly the committees associated with the Council. Also participate in those groups set up to allow information interchange between the Government and their partners including ACT/IAC, AFFIRM, ITAA/AEA/GEIA, and NAPA. If nothing else, you can learn what all of these abbreviations and acronyms mean and be entertaining at cocktail parties and other events. By attending and perhaps speaking at these meetings, you will meet truly interesting people who will provide advice that will make your job easier.

Fourth, learn to accept that you will not get everything done, and therefore make the hard decision to prioritize. If you have never been in public service before you will find that unlike the private sector where the goals are fairly simple and the stakeholders relatively consistent in their interests, the opposite is true in government. Private company goals are generally to make more revenue and/or reduce expenses. In the public environment, the goals are less distinct and more complex. Your many bosses on the Hill, in the White House, among the public, and within your own organization often will provide contradictory and ever-changing direction. Try telling a congressional committee or the inspector general that their issue was a low priority and let me know how that goes for you.

Fifth, reach upward as much as you can. The CIO position within government is often or even completely focused downward toward technology optimization. While this is important, the real value you bring is in enhancing your organization’s mission by looking upward. One clear emphasis of the next administration — on social networking and the use of the Internet — will provide new opportunities to make IT useful in enhancing the interaction of the government with the American citizen and other key external stakeholders. Seize the opportunity to be supportive of such efforts — become an Internet gardener.

Sixth, and finally, have fun. I can honestly say that the last two-plus years have been the most enjoyable and rewarding time I have ever had as a professional. I would not have traded one minute — well maybe one or two — for anything. You will have the opportunity to have great consequence at a place that itself has great consequence for the American public. Enjoy it and pass on that feeling to all you work with.”

For most of my professional career I did not particularly think about the differences between management and leadership. I was not in a position where it mattered particularly; I was always ‘in the room’.

Generally I was either managing a single large program generally customer facing or managing people who themselves were managing single large programs. The way one achieved results was to use the importance of the program, either due to the importance of the customer or the size of the program, to leverage the rest of the organization I was working for.

“You need to listen to what I am asking”, a typical interaction would occur, “This is worth $100 million to us this year.” Few had the nerve to say no at that point.

When the projects were small it generally meant the other part of the conversation WOULD have the nerve to say no.

As the years passed, I was given additional responsibilities and had to learn to prioritize and help my staff prioritize better, but fundamentally had the same kinds of responsibilities.

In early 2006, I was appointed the CIO for the US Department of Transportation. Suddenly I was in a situation where I had hundreds of people reporting to me directly and thousands who I had at least nominal impact on through the myriad policy responsibilities that a Departmental CIO was responsible for.

I had sort of very faint dotted line relationships to all of the DOT agency CIO’s, created by the Clinger-Cohen Act, which established what I refer to as the negative authorities of CIO’s. By negative authorities I mean the Act gave CIO’s the authority to prevent results, for example not agreeing to a budget submission, but much less power to implement results, for example, without Department or Agency specific legislation or implementing authority, a CIO couldn’t consolidate or modify the resulting budget.

My ability to get things done was almost completely dependent, not on managing a project, but on providing leadership, whatever that was, to get people to do what I wanted without the direct ability to tell them to do it.

Now that I serve as the Chief Operating Officer at Powertek Corporation, www.powertekcorporation.com, while a bit smaller than the Department of Transportation, I still have the same issue of having indirect impact.

Having thought about this a lot over the last almost five years, I have come to five thoughts that provide me with some direction as to how be a good leader, or being perhaps a bit more realistic, to be as good a leader as I can be.

THE NARRATIVE. In my opinion the best leaders are storytellers. They explain how they want people to behave and what values are important to them by telling stories of behavior illustrating those values and actions. It amazes me how often I find out that the stories I have told are repeated to others. Amazed and pleased.

If you have read biographies of President Lincoln you will read how many anecdotes he told.

Even people who do not consciously or explicitly do this, they still are conveying a narrative about themselves and what they expect from others. How often they talk about their family, what they wear, the jokes they tell (or don’t tell), how they deal with people, whether they raise their voice or not, and so on.

NIGHT AND DAY. If you are in a leadership position everything you do and how you do it is watched and analyzed. It all becomes part of that narrative thing, whether you like it to or not or intend it to or not.

My father-in-law, a wonderful person I have been very lucky to get to know, used to tell me when he was President of a manufacturing company in Michigan, that when he was feeling sick and acted that way around the office, this impacted negatively the work of everyone at the plant. At first this surprised him, but over time he came to understand how important how he acted every day was.

About a year after I started at DOT, a young woman who worked for me asked for a meeting. When she came in she told me that she had heard that I was in a good mood and thus wanted to go over some difficult issues that she needed to be resolved. I reflected on the fact that never before in my business life had anyone cared about what mood I was in, or generally noticed.

I reached out to a wonderful person, Shelley Metzenbaum, who is now an appointee within OMB, who gave me advice about being a political appointee at DOT. Shelley told me “Political appointees are unable to talk in a whisper.” Wise advice. Over time I have come to recognize that this advice is true for all people in very senior positions in any organization.

BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL. My final comment about narratives is to emphasize that the most important aspect of the narrative is to be true to who you are. Over time people can tell if you aren’t. The rare exceptions being if you are an extraordinary actor or a professional politician. When people detect a false note, everything else you say or do will be much less likely to be paid attention to.

I have read many books about leadership which provide lots of advice on how to act. All the advice in the world is of limited value if it is inconsistent with your nature. Understand yourself and go with that.

ROADRUNNER VERSUS COYOTE. I tell people who work for me that sometimes you have to go running off the cliff without knowing if you are the Roadrunner or the Coyote, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUq9hynzCVo, and not knowing how far down the ground is.

If you want people to attempt great things and run off cliffs for you, you need to be there to catch them and not blame them for trying. Toleration for the occasional failure is a characteristic to me of great leadership.

EMPATHY, NOT SYMPATHY. I read somewhere that leaders needed to show empathy, but not necessarily sympathy.

What I take that to mean is that it is important to understand the motivations of the people who work for you. You want to use those motivations to support your goals. You double the level of energy by having people working toward your objectives both to support you and to achieve their own goals.

At the same time, you have obligations to the entire organization, not just one person within it. Sometimes you are able to scratch individual itches, but often you cannot or at least not in the way that the individual might like.

TREAT PEOPLE WITH RESPECT. I say frequently that people will never act better than they are treated.

If you treat them poorly, not sharing information or objectives, just ordering them around, not empowering them in any fashion, most will act just like they are treated and no more. To have a successful organization you need people to take ownership of their responsibilities.

IN SUMMARY. So there you have it my five rules of leadership, reworded slightly:

• Understand and articulate a coherent narrative that explains to everyone what kind of person you are and what kind of organization you want to lead
• Recognize that everything you do regardless of the setting impacts on that narrative
• Be authentic, people will see through a false story over time
• Tolerate risk taking and its inevitable partner, the occasional failure
• Treat everyone with respect

I divide leaders into two types, those that want to win and those that want to avoid losing. These rules will help you be the first type, the winners, who are much more enjoyable to be around and build the best organizations.

In a separate post, I will talk more about that, but until I get that written, one of my students in my Syracuse University class on CIO on “CIO’s and the Global Enterprise”, wrote an interesting discussion about Ambient Organizations.

As I understand the various phrases that use the word ambient in this context, what is being said is that we come across information all the time; conversations, books we read, news sources, and so on. Over time even when we do not realize it, we tend to process and integrate this information often in unexpected ways. This is becoming even more relevant as the number of information sources and the pervasiveness of them increases.

For a simple example, for those of us who participate in such things as twitter or facebook, it is not infrequent that we when we run into someone for the first time physically that we are connected to on one of these social networks, it is as if we already know them. Even when we didn’t notice it, we pick up on what a person is interested in and what their opinions on a variety of topics are.

Helen Patricia McKenna is one of my students in this semester’s CIO class, the class itself in fact is completely on-line; taught asynchronously – that is, no direct lectures. It is part of the on-line graduate curricula at Syracuse University’s iSchool,  http://ischool.syr.edu/. She often posts very interesting comments, this one I thought was of particular interest – I will warn those who go on, that in addition to being interesting it is a bit long.

BTW, in the interests of full-disclosure, I also teach at the University of Maryland University College. I find that the “do not want to appear like an idiot” syndrome forces me to keep relatively up-to-date in the topic areas I teach – which typically range from Cyber-Security Policy to CIO Management to IT Acquisition.Helen Patricia McKenna

What will the CIO position look like in 10 years, and in 20 years?

It is difficult to know what the CIO position will look like in 10 or in 20 years but I would guess that it will have transformed considerably. In responding to part of quiz question number 3 for this course — What would you predict would impact on CIOs in the next 3-5 years — I wrote about the ‘ambient enterprise’ as follows:

In the next 3-5 years I would predict that it is the emergent ‘ambient organization’ or ‘ambient enterprise’ (Elliot, 2006)¹ that will have a great impact on CIOs.  Bjorn-Andersen (2003) defined an ambient organization as:

“a networked entity of organizations that, enabled by emerging technologies, exploits virtual resources, communication and collaboration schemes and defines an organizational structure and business model to create sustainable value.”²

We note from this definition the very technologies and elements that have been coming together to transform business as we know it — collaboration, virtualization, networking, and the ‘social’ enterprise.

Elliot (2006) explores the industry context for ambient organizations and examines their impact on ‘theory and practice.’ He points to “the increasing dependence on alliances as a critical factor in the implementation of transformative strategies.”  Elliot goes on to refer to ambient organizations as ‘amborg’ and proceeds to develop a series of characteristics noting that:

“the Amborg represents an emerging organizational form … there is a move from a focus on activities performed by enterprises to a focus on reconfiguring roles and relationships among a constellation of suppliers, business partners, and customers in order to mobilize the creation of value in new forms by new players.”

And on another level³ “the idea of ‘Ambient Business Intelligence’ simply means that it will surround and inform, even in ways that may not be perceived directly. The value of BI will no longer be assessed by its functionality or ‘ease of use,’ it will be valued by what it can deliver for an organization at the top line and the bottom line.”

Schmitt et al (2008)⁴ encourage us to think of  ‘ambient business’ enabled by open source and mobile technologies allowing for open innovation.  Cripe (2010)⁵ brings ambient to the level of metrics:

“Ambient metrics center on business intelligence that comes not from rows and cells in a database, but rather from unstructured content itself … Tracking and identifying consumption patterns of similar kinds of users in an organization can yield actionable intelligence … This allows relevant content from one part of a company to be suggested to a worker in another part of the company … What makes that information uniquely relevant is its contextual appropriateness to the business problem or business process at hand. What makes any of it workable at all is user-centricity.”

And Hinchcliffe’s research leads him to the development of ‘The Emerging Transition To Social Business Models’,⁶ a component of which is ‘ambient communication’, the notion that “today, everyone can talk to anyone, just about anywhere for nearly … at zero cost.”  Ambient communication, together with the other elements of the model — global information flows, social computing, market discontinuity — are rapidly transforming the business world as we know it and, in the process, the business of the CIO.  My advice would be — watch the ‘ambient business space’ and the ability of the CIO to understand, engage with and navigate this space and its potential.

Skarler (2009) explores 3D models for e-managing arguing that, “As we work in different constellations, levels, networks, and sub networks etc., we need to see networking in multiple dimensions, i.e. as ambient organizations.”⁷ ( Skarler, 2009)

Moving on to other thinking on the topic, Watson (2009)⁸ considers whether the CIO position is in crisis and notes that:

Guy Currier, who oversaw our CIO Role study and wrote its accompanying analysis⁹, doesn’t see CIOs disappearing, per se, but says that the function is clearly in trouble. ‘The possibility of the demise of the CIO position seems overblown … but the fact that nearly 16 percent of our survey respondents this year agreed with the statement, ‘The CIO position will have virtually disappeared in 10 years,’ represents a profound crisis brewing for IT leaders.’

Watson goes on to say that “about two in three respondents to our annual CIO Role study believe the CIO role will look very different in 10 years” and by working with this realization the “transition into the future will strengthen the CIO community — and potentially help stave off an even greater crisis in their ranks.”

Research on women and IT leadership, mentoring and other related factors suggests that women are increasing in numbers in the CIO role in higher education concluding that “Higher education appears to be a more favorable environment for the development of female IT leaders than the technology field in general.”¹⁰

Acknowledging the changing role and competencies for the CIO, a ‘Future-State CIO’¹¹ has been established by the CIO Executive Council global community claiming that “outstanding CIOs most resemble outstanding CEOs” and providing a leadership competencies journey document.¹²

In 2008 PricewaterhouseCooper emphasized the ‘I’ in CIO and pointed to the importance of the innovation role for the CIO¹³ while in its most recent report,¹⁴ PricewaterhouseCooper focuses on the CIO and ‘big data’ -

“Big Data isn’t merely a new model; it’s a new way to think about all data models. Big Data isn’t merely more data; it is different data that requires different tools. As more and more internal and external sources cast off more and more data, basic notions about the size and attributes of data sets are likely to change. With those changes, CIOs will be expected to capture more data and deliver it to the executive team in a manner that reveals the business —and how to grow it —in new ways.”

Guterman (2010) claims that:

“As companies with a history of cautious data policies begin to test and embrace Hadoop, MapReduce, and the like, forward-looking CIOs will turn to the issues that will become more important as Big Data becomes the norm. The communities arising around Hadoop (and the inevitable open-source and proprietary competitors that follow) will grow and become influential, inspiring more CIOs to become more data-centric … Whether learning from Google’s approach to Big Data, hiring a staff primed to maximize its value, or managing the new risks, forward-looking CIOs will, as always, be looking to enable new business opportunities through technology.”

Dignan (2009) sees the CIO role splitting into two areas of concern, operational:

“a purely operational group that keeps the networks up, builds and maintains the virtualized infrastructure, and maintains shared business services like email and ERP. Complex and critical, yes, deserving of a C-suite role, no.”

And more importantly, ‘internal consultancy’:

“This group will be equally at home in both the business and technical worlds (just as its colleagues in business units will be extremely well-versed in technology), and will work to leverage corporate infrastructure to build new functionality. This group might advise on a new digital marketing campaign, or it might help finance determine the right mix of outsourced and internal infrastructure to support a new system. Rather than being compensated for technical objectives, they are compensated for business results and succeed or fail along with their business counterparts … the CIO becomes a mix of process officer, information broker and skunk works-type researcher. … the “Information” portion of IT becomes far more relevant than the technical aspects.”¹⁵

FastCompany magazine recently ran a blog series on the C-Suite where Elkington (2010) used the metaphor of the ‘wild card’  referring to CIOs as ‘Chief Innovation Officers ‘ and ‘a new breed of aces’¹⁷ – the CIO, CTO, CCO (chief creativity officers) :

“In the new order, by stark contrast, much of the change is bubbling bottom-up, cutting across established hierarchies, and it turns out that many of the most powerful solutions to the great systemic and market challenges we face are to be found outside the confines of the company. Tomorrow’s corporate Aces will know how to play the wild cards that have [been] so disruptive to earlier generations of CEOs and senior executives–and they will know how to source suitably disruptive solutions, whether from customers, competitors, NGOs, public agencies or social and environmental entrepreneurs.”

Elkington goes on to speak about innovation, sustainability and the new business environment claiming that:

“The tragedy is that so many business schools betrayed their students for so long by failing to equip them for a world where environmental, social and governance issues are becoming part of the C-Suite agenda in one sector–and geography–after another. Having worked with MBA and other postgraduate students at business schools and universities around the world, we have experienced at first hand the incredible appetite of so many of these young people for exposure to these new challenges and to those who are innovating solutions.

And Elkington sees “sustainability as innovation’s new frontier” rather than a choice “between the largely social benefits of developing sustainable products or processes and the financial costs of doing so.” He concludes by suggesting that:

“whatever your business, it’s time to find and learn how to play your Aces. Ranking as either the highest or lowest card in the deck, depending on the rules, the Ace symbolizes the top-down, bottom-up world into which we are headed. But however it gets into your hand, it is the most powerful card in poker–a key to making the highest possible pair, straight, flush, or full house. It’s time to find these people, whether inside or outside today’s C-Suite, inside or outside the corporation. And to work with them to create new forms of capitalism fit for the new century.”

Changing values and the pace at which technology is changing is demanding massive transformations for business and in how we conduct business, in and around the social and organizational  structures we create.

¹ Elliot, Steve. (2006). Technology-enabled innovation, industry transformation and the emergence of ambient organizations.. Industry and Innovation.

² Bjørn-Andersen, N. (2003). Ambient organizations. Centre for Electronic Commerce. Copenhagen Business School.

³ Hired Brains Inc. (2007). Ambient business intelligence: pervasive technology White paper.  Framingham, MA: IDG Connect.

⁴ Schmitt, Christian, Schoder, Detlef, Fischbach, Kai, and Muhle, Steffen. (2008). Towards ambient business: enabling open innovation in a world of ubiquitous computing. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

⁵ Cripe, Billy. (2010). User approach, processes and ambient metrics differentiate Enterprise 2.0 strategies.  Washington, DC: FierceMarkets.

⁶ Hinchcliffe, Dion. (2010). Exploring why social business will drive 21st century enterprises. Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog.

⁷ Skarler, Viktoria. (2009). eManaging ambient organizations in 3D. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, v. 4(3):30-42.

⁸ Watson, Brian P. (2009). The CIO in crisis mode. CIO Insight.

⁹ Currier, Guy. (2009). CIO blowback. CIO Insight.

¹⁰ Brown, Wayne & McClure, Polley. (2009). Women as current and future CIOs. EDUCAUSE Review, 44(6).

¹¹ Kelner, Steve & Patrick, Chris. (2010). Your leadership portfolio: developing the competencies of a Future-State CIO. A Leadership Competencies Development Series from the CIO Executive Council and Egon Zehnder International.

¹² Egon Zehnder International & CIO Executive Council. (2010). Leadership competencies journey.

¹³ PricewaterhouseCooper. (2008). I for innovation*: the next-generation CIO. Center for Technology and Innovation. (* connectedthinking).

¹⁴ Guterman, Jimmy. (2010). Revising the CIO’s data playbook. In: Making sense of big data. Technologyforecast: a quarterly journal, Issue 3, p. 45. PricewaterhouseCooper.  < http://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology-forecast/assets/PwC-Tech-Forecast-Issue3-2010.pdf >

¹⁵ Dignan, Larry. (2009). The CIO is dead (long live the CIO). ZDNet, News & Blogs.

¹⁶ Elkington, John. (2010). Wildcards for tomorrow’s C-Suite.  Fastcompany Magazine.

¹⁷ Elkington, John. (2010). Playing aces: going for the C-Suite flush. Fastcompany Magazine.

“Welcome to the first Upstate CIO Conference, where CIOs from Upstate New York will connect, discuss industry trends and emerging technologies, and inform course content for information executives.

The Upstate CIO Conference is a one-day conference, held on Friday, April 16, 2010, at the School of Information Studies (iSchool) on the Syracuse University campus. The conference brings together Upstate CIOs and information technology professors to explore how academic research and professional experience come together to create innovative solutions to industry challenges, create industry trends, and educate professionals who can meet the needs of the 21st century global workplace.”

I was invited to give the keynote for the conference and to serve on a panel focusing on IT Governance. My keynote will discuss my thoughts regarding governance and how it differs between the private and public sectors. I’ll also cover what I call First Principals which are some of the key trends that are underneath some of the current technology trends.

I have included a copy of the slides below. In the interests of full disclosure, I also serve as an adjunct professor at the iSchool teaching graduate distance learning classes related to CIO Management and Cyber-security Policy.

Upstate CIO Conference Slides

The link to the conference site is: http://ischool.syr.edu/newsroom/cio/conference.aspx.

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

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.

The Editor’s Letter headline is:

“Whac-A-Mole” Approach to Security

and contains the following paragraph:

“It’s hard to imagine more appropriate imagery for our cover story (“Moving Target”) about the widespread frustration with mounting cybersecurity threats and the lack of an effective U.S. government response. CTO Daniel Mintz of consulting firm CSC aptly describes the feds’ “Whac-A-Mole security” approach as one where long-term strategy takes a back seat to daily tactical responses.”

http://www.cio.com/article/495811/A_Whac_A_Mole_Approach_to_Security

I appreciate the mention and anyone who has heard me talk about cyber-security will know I use that term a lot. My one question is whether it should be “whack” or whac” …

The full article is located here:
http://www.cio.com/article/496125/Obama_s_Cybersecurity_Push_What_It_Means_for_CIOs