In the Pentagon that joke morphed. Whenever someone wanted to get additional budget, the reason was to ‘Deal With China’. Well, in fact, maybe that is still true.

In technology today, the current budget justification phrase is ‘Cloud Computing’. Except in this case, exactly what Cloud Computing is or what it can do is even less clear than normal. On the other hand, that lack of clarity means there are lots and lots of meetings, seminars, and conferences that deal with trying to define Cloud Computing and provide advice on what to do about it.

In that context, I was on a panel Monday, May 3, that discussed Cloud Computing and the kinds of new skills that would be needed to support Cloud initiatives, http://events.1105govinfo.com/Events/Cloud-Computing-Summit-2010/Sessions/Monday/CC4.aspx.

I had three major themes.

My first theme was that people tended to mean one of a number of radically different concepts under the general topic of Cloud Computing.

Many actually were talking about consolidating multiple applications on a fewer number of servers – virtualization. It was this step that accomplished much of the savings, if there were to be any, from Cloud Computing. In fact, it was certainly possible to do server consolidation and application virtualization without actually implementing anything that actually was ‘in the Cloud’.

Others used the term Cloud Computing to putting applications on the Internet; in the web. This approach is also often described as Service Oriented Architecture, SOA. I am probably not capturing all of the nuances of SOA but to me this basically means taking a program which traditionally was self-contained and isolated and treating it like a service which others could access or integrate into a larger set of combined services. Doing so efficiently requires writing programs a bit differently, adding the ability for a service to be discovered, that is found by others, and adding the capability to expose aspects of the service to others.

SOA in the end requires not just technology change but also cultural change. To be most effective it requires an organization to be much more collegial and standards based in how it designs and develops software.

Finally, some people meant having applications, or aspects of an application such as the platform it runs on, provided externally; that is, through a cloud. The big challenge here is that when using only internal resources it is possible, though in my opinion unwise, to get by without taking the time or applying the necessary rigor to develop service level agreements (SLA’s) for all of the aspects of your system.

You can tell if people are working hard by peering over their shoulders. You can measure performance by users calling and yelling at you, and dynamically reallocate resources by yelling at someone down the hall.

However, when you move a resource out of your internal operation it becomes absolutely critical to develop robust SLA’s to manage your provider’s performance and define your expectations. It turns out that this is very hard to do especially in areas that historically have not been defined in very precise terms such as security or privacy. This is, again in my opinion, one of the major underlying reasons why there is such resistance to moving applications to the cloud.

My second theme is derived from that last point. It was always useful to create business architecture’s to drive technology development. While it might be inefficient, it was historically possible when everything was accomplish internally to ignore that benefit and instead do what was in effect the opposite approach, develop technology solutions that ended up impacting the business.

However if an organization wants to move to the not-well-defined cloud, it becomes necessary to define the business architecture’s and business goals associated with the applications. Without that definition, the likelihood of achieving the promised benefits associated with Cloud Computing are highly unlikely to be achieved.

My third theme was that the major human capital impacts were:

• Technical and operational IT assets were likely over time to move to external service providers and away from user organizations
• The demands on procurement and legal professionals were going to change as their responsibilities became more and more ‘horizontal’ between organizations and their providers of service and less ‘vertical’ supporting internal hierarchical organizations
• The importance of technical staff who also were comfortable with business issues would dramatically increase.

Federal Computer Week, http://fcw.com/Articles/2010/05/04/cloud-computing-implications.aspx, covered the panel.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

And thus it is with Cloud Computing. The question on the table is whether we are to be the master of the Cloud Computing concept and what it means to us as practitioners and/or users or whether we will treat it as magic providing whatever value we have need of during that moment in time.

For those of you, who are willing to brave Washington during the Nuclear Security Summit, April 13, I encourage you to drop by a Digital Government Institute sponsored event called “Use Secure Cloud Today to Optimize Customer Experiences”, being held at the Willard Hotel, from 8:30am to 1pm; registration opens at 7:45am.

I was asked to be on a panel at the conference starting at 10:30 entitled Meeting Customer Expectations In the Cloud, Practical Experience”. The panel will be hosted by Chris Dorobek, the ever popular host of the Federal News Radio afternoon show The Daily Debrief, and is scheduled to have:

• Gil Guillen from the Office of Electronic Services at the Social Security Administration;
• Laef Olson, CIO, RightNow Technologies;
• Thom Rubel, Vice President, IDC Government Insights; and
• Joe Thele, Director Air Force Personnel Operations Agency.

Based on the last phone call interaction with the other panelists Chris will lead us through three sub-topics:

• Current status,
• Thoughts on why one should consider ‘doing’ Cloud Computing, and
• Examples of lessons learned and how to deal with the barriers that tend to get in the way when doing so.

It should be fun and informative.

You can get further information at:

http://www.digitalgovernment.com/Events/Conferences/Use-Secure-Cloud-Today-to-Optimize-Customer-Experiences.shtml.

And as an added benefit, you can go out before or after and demonstrate for or against the Summit activities.

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.