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.

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