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Why Is A Raven Like A Writing Desk or How I Literally Married the Internet

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I find myself these days on a regular basis having discussions, for one reason or another, about the impact of Information Technology and inevitably the Internet on organizations, life, society, culture, and in general, the individuals having the conversation.

About a decade ago, the first time I remember having this discussion with a friend of mine, he remarked that he felt his parents had experienced greater dislocation due to technological change than he had. His parents had lived through the growth of radio, the invention of television, the ubiquitous growth of telephones, and the creation and expansion of commercial air travel.

All he and I could come up with, at the time, were faxes, cell phones, and perhaps email; which while significant seemed less amazing than the list he had for his parents. That was a sobering conversation since the common wisdom was that everything was changing so radically. Having said that, I suspect that if I repeated that conversation today we would both come to a different conclusion.

Why FedRAMP Is Worth Caring About

Reposted from AOL Government, http://gov.aol.com/2011/12/12/why-fedramp-is-worth-caring-about/.

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”.

This blog entry is my attempt to answer the question “Who cares!”

I Once Was Young And Now …

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On weekends I generally try and get things done that I do not get to during the week, both at work and in my on-line classes I teach. However, almost always I am able to avoid accomplishing too much by wandering over to youtube and getting side-tracked in watching video’s.

While I am wasting time with youtube, I often will update my various social media connections with a link to a video with a song that I am particularly struck by. A recent interaction that resulted from that caused me to think about the mid-west.

When I was growing up I was always a little bit unclear as to exactly where the mid-west started and stopped.

Reflections At ELC: Why Klososky’s Keynote Missed The Mark

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This last weekend I attended the Executive Leadership Conference (ELC) sponsored by ACT-IAC in Williamsburg. The opening night keynote speaker Scott Klososky, presented some interesting points but I felt left out some key issues; probably… 

Moving Into the Cloud – Practical Experience

For all those who are near the Washington Convention Center today and tomorrow there is an interesting conference on Cloud Computing and Virtualization, http://govcloudconference.com/Events/2011/Home.aspx, Best of all, they reached back into ancient history, and asked me… 

Earthquakes, Emergency Training, and COOP

When I was at the Department of Transportation …

It occurs to me that a lot of my writing starts with that phrase. I haven’t yet decided if I use it because I learned a lot there or because I think people will be more likely to listen if I start a discussion with it.

Regardless, when I was at the Department of Transportation we would do emergency training. What if there was another 9/11 attack, what if there was a cybersecurity attack, and so forth. Some of us got to go to semi-secret locations and stay underground, walk down long corridors with lights along the top casting shadows, lots of clacking of shoes on the floor, eating together in the cafeteria, periodically getting messages of incident updates, doing reports, watching the pretend (or real) Secretary, talking to the (always) pretend President, and so on. It was pretty cool, like getting to go back to camp for a day. Some of the exercises were pretty extensive involving multiple Government agencies including in some cases State and Local governments.

July 4th & American Exceptionalism, Reposted

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In December 2009, I was asked by the Inter-American Development Bank to participate in a project to look at eGovernment for the Brazilian Government. During the time I worked on that effort, I got to…