“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.

The webinar, moderated by Adam Ross, the Managing Editor from the SANS Institute, will focus on some of the challenges faced in creating secure Federal Systems. With the growing movement for speed-to-market and the movement to the cloud, and associated buzz words, and with the increased publicity about cyber-attacks, how we should best deal with such issues is becoming a still greater issue.

Pat and I will look at these issues in three parts.

First, we will look at the context that we now face. I find that without understanding the context of a problem, it becomes difficult to really deal with the systemic issues. Second, I will review some of the high-level goals that I would focus on, putting on my now dusty CIO hat from my Department of Transportation days. Finally, Pat will tackle real-world issues with implementation suggestions, looking at how to integrate security planning rather than dealing with it as an afterthought. He will also offer his thoughts relating to SCADA design issues (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisiton – e.g. computers managing things like the electrical grid, power plants, and so forth).

Registration details are at:

http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=195825&s=1&k=D14C3C31F1889E77A82E235253D58190

The Government Executive website is at: http://www.govexec.com/

Powertek Corporation’s web site is at: http://www.powertekcorporation.com/

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s web site is at: http://www.nrc.gov

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

Despite my decision to move, CSC, the company I am leaving, continues to be a  great place to work  with committed and talented employees, many of whom have become friends over the last year. So why did I leave?

Simply put, it became clear to me that my need to help grow something and bring about change within my workplace is greater than I had realized. While I valued my time at CSC, my fundamental worth there was related to what I was not what I did. It brought home the fact that my happiest times were when I was valued for the changes I helped bring about.

At the US Department of Transportation I had in many ways the perfect position, at least for me. I was able to take advantage of my experiences to provide strategic insight into the use and management of Information Technology. I used my capital-P political experiences to work with the small-p organizational politics of being a Departmental CIO. At the same time I was lucky in that the DOT CIO had responsibility for a significant operational segment of the Department, managing the desktops and telephones for headquarters and a growing percentage of the field offices as well as a data center for the non-FAA agencies.

I tell people that during my three years at the Department of Transportation, no-one ever felt that any one person was in charge of Information  Technology BUT they agreed that IF someone was in charge it would have been me. I was able to use that general opinion to cause more change than I had expected.

Powertek provides a comparable opportunity to the one I had at the US Department of Transportation. This is a chance to bring my background in the public and private sector to support the development and implementation of a strategic vision, and to utilize my leadership skills to mentor employees who have less experience and to provide operational and tactical direction. I feel very lucky and privileged to be part of a company that has been very successful thus far but with hard work has the potential to make even more of a difference in the future.

As usual I am always interested in receiving input from the larger community. If there are people out there who are willing to provide advice regarding growing and transitioning an 8a company and/or would be interested in talking about business opportunities or partnerships, please feel free to reach out to me at dmintz@powertekcorporation.com or my personal email at dmintz@ourownlittlecorner.com . You can also find me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter at technogeezer.