I was lucky enough to be asked, again, by Francis Rose to be on his regular Friday ‘Federal News Countdown”, this last Friday, January 31st. The show can be heard here: Federal News Countdown.
The other guest was Jon Desenberg, the Policy Director for the Performance Institute, The Performance Insitute.
For those unfamiliar with the show, each guest selects their three top stories of the week relating to the Federal Government. The third most important story is discussed first by each, the second next, and the most important last.
COBOL, 3rd Most Important Article. My third most important story was entitled Railroad Retirement Board sets strategy to move off COBOL, 3rd Most Important Story, and appeared January 30th on the Federal news Radio site, reported by Jason Miller.
The story talks about how the Railroad Retirement Board had decided to move off of the old business programming language, COBOL. They gave two reasons:
- They felt there were more efficient solutions now available to run their back-end systems
- Many of their COBOL programmers had as much as 30-40 years of experience and will soon retire
Note: organizations often divide their computer systems into front-end systems, which typically interface to their customers, and back-end systems, which maintain the databases, used to run the company.
An additional requirement was the need to implement mobile access to the data in their systems, they did not feel COBOL would provide that capability.
The article was interesting because it touched on two issues, one of which has been in the news a lot and the other one often overlooked amidst the rapid changes in technology.
The first issue related to the growing number of Federal employees who are eligible to retire. For years this was merely talked about but the retirements seem to finally be happening. Losing employees who have long-term institutional knowledge will put pressure on Federal agencies to develop methods of knowledge retention and transfer.
The second issue deals with the fact that while some percentage of the workforce and organizational stakeholders are interested and able to deal with change, many are not. Further, the need to support, and at least understand, older technologies as well as staff uncomfortable with new technologies will only increase with time.
An extreme example was from another article which I quoted from during the show. This story talked about how developers for smartphones often didn’t understand and thus overlooked the difficulties many people have, particular seniors, when using software developed for smart phones and comparable devices. The article reference a company which develops software for Android devices. On the company’s website they note that their goals are to:
- Enchant me
- Simplify my life
- Make me amazing
It was not clear to the author what “make me amazing” meant in practical terms for the average user. And thus one of the problems, the inability of the social networking/mobile technologist to understand what the newbie/sometimes user wants or can utilize effectively.
Transparency, 2nd Most Important Article. My second most important story was entitled White House seeks to defang transparency bill, 2nd Most Important Story, and appeared January 29 in Federal Computer Week.
The bill in question, called the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), intent was to establish financial data standards to allow consolidated access to information relating to grants and other financial transactions.
The Administration has proposed a series of changes to the current version of the bill prompting Senator Warner (D-VA) to claim that the Administration was trying to gut the bill.
Ironically the initial legislation related to these kinds of requirements was passed when I was at the Department of Transportation when then Senator Obama and Senator McCain co-sponsored legislation to make such data transparently available.
The part that most interested me related to the watering down of data standards which caused organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation to consider pulling their support.
I have been saying for years that if I were setting priorities for OMB in the IT space, one of the top 2-3 priorities would be to focus on establishing standardized data. In addition to saving money over time by having such standards, they tend to be ‘sticky’. That is, once established they tend to stay in place where policy decisions are often swept away during the next political cycle.
Snowden Fallout, 1st Most Important Article. My most important story was from the NY Times, U.S. Relaxes Some Data Disclosure Rules, 1st Most Important Story, and appeared January 27.
The revelations of how the NSA collects and uses information, some of which have been accurate and some perhaps not so much, coming from the now Nobel peace-prize nominated Ed Snowden has driving a great deal of public discussion.
Among other sufferers of collateral damage have been U.S. based technology companies who have the sources of much of the information which was collected. A number of companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook brought suit against the Government so they could provide the public with information about how often they were asked to provide information and what information they were being asked for.
The US came to an agreement that was sufficiently robust to cause the lawsuit to be dropped though it did not satisfy a number of privacy advocates. The article notes that there are a number of bills in Congress which go further than the agreement thought it is not obvious, at least to me, which if any of those bills have a realistic chance of passing.
The companies will be able to reveal that they have been asked, only are able to provide general information about how often (either increments of 250 or increments of 1000 depending on the nature of the request) and nothing about what the requested information was. The released information would only be done every six months with a six-month delay.
Interestingly intelligence officials, according to the article felt that the agreement was too stringent until an additional part was added that said startups would not be covered for the first two years of their existence. Some people feel that the larger companies involved in the lawsuit agreed to this additional provision partially because it would hurt their smaller competitors, who would operate for two years under more of a cloud.