Daniel

Retail, Customer Service, How Things Change

I was born in Southeast Washington, moved to Montgomery County in the mid-50’s and that is about it for me geographically.

When I was younger THE grocery store to go for ‘standard’ shopping was Giant Food. While a large organization it felt, at least in my memory, as a neighbor grocery.

I will be honest that most of the grocery shopping in our house is done by my wife, Ellen. Some number of years ago she decided that she just didn’t like Giant anymore. There were a number of reasons, none important to this post. She goes to Trader Joe’s sometimes, Whole Foods sometimes, Shoppers Food Warehouse sometimes, and more recently Harris Teeter.

Earlier today I needed to get sandwich ingredients for Bethesda Cares, http://www.bethesdacares.com/. Our synagogue, Ohr Kodesh, http://www.ohrkodesh.org/, has supported Bethesda Cares which provides food for the needy for many years. I am not entirely sure how I got on the mailing list. For those who know me, they recognize that I mostly focus on knowing people who do socially useful things, feeling that their goodness might rub off on me. Though I blame Ellen for this happening, regardless it is my name on the list and twice a year I make sandwiches and put together fruit and cookies and deliver it to a local church for distibution.

I tend to go to the nearest grocery store because, well, it is the closest. The nearest grocery store is a Giant. So I carefully bought items that were both consistent with the Bethesda Cares direction and were on sale. When I got to the check-out line, there was no line. I remarked to the check-out guy that I guess people were out walking in such beautiful weather.

“No”, he said, “they are probably all at Harris Teeter. I would be.”

“What?”, I responded.

“Don’t you know where it is, its just north of White Flint Mall, there’s no reason to shop here in my opinion.”

“Right. Thats where my wife shops, this just happened to be closer and I’m …”, as I thought to myself perhaps the phrase is ‘without judgement’.

So, somewhere in there is a lesson to someone about something. In our electronic, fast-moving, interconnected, twitter/facebook facing existence, I will leave it up to others to detect it.

Webinar on Cybersecurity: Building Secure Federal Systems

I was pleased to be asked to be part of a webinar sponsored by Government Executive this Thursday at 2:00pm EST and even happier when Pat Howard, the CISO from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted an invitation to join me.

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. Continue reading “Webinar on Cybersecurity: Building Secure Federal Systems”

Management of Change Conference, May 23-25, Philadelphia, Be There or Be Unchanged

This year I was lucky enough to be allowed to be one of the Workshop Co-Chairs for the Management of Change Conference, sponsored by ACT-IAC; with two wonderful co-chairs Goldy Kamali, the Goddess of FedScoop!, and Valarie Burks, from the Department of Agriculture.

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. Continue reading “Management of Change Conference, May 23-25, Philadelphia, Be There or Be Unchanged”

Ch-ch-ch Changes, or Why I Decided to Join Powertek Corporation

I recently accepted a position to serve as the Chief Operating Officer at Powertek Corporation (www.powertekcorporation.com). Powertek is an 8(a) woman-owned small business involved with all aspects of information technology, including business engineering and program management. Nancy Scott, President and CEO, and Samar Ghadry, Executive Vice-President, are both talented and delightful leaders I look forward to supporting. The staff they have put together is bright, hardworking, and creative.

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? Continue reading “Ch-ch-ch Changes, or Why I Decided to Join Powertek Corporation”

Superman Doomsday

I finished Superman Doomsday, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/superman_doomsday/, this morning.

This was an animated cartoon based on the series where DC killed off Superman in the early 1990’s. At the time, it cause quite a reaction, getting coverage in the national and even international press. Millions of readers who had never read comics, bought copies.

While I had religiously read lots of comics when young, by 1992, under the pressure of pretending to be adult, I had stopped. Thus I never read the original series.

Evidently throughout the 90’s there were attempts to turn this series into a movie; it almost got off the ground with of all people Nicolas Cage scheduled to star as Superman with Tim Burton directing. The mind boggles at what might have been the result, however it was never made.

Instead a direct to DVD animated cartoon was released in 2007, it was this that I got from Netflix.

I thought it was pretty good. It was interesting watching the story of how the original comics were created. A number of the people got pretty teary about some of the scenes in the comics when Superman died. Don’t tell my daughters, but so did I a little bit when watching the cartoon.

If you ever read Superman comics, I would recommend renting it. It brought many fond memories.

AND as an added bonus, Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne in the Firefly TV series, was the voice talent for Superman.

Social Media and Open Government – My Presentation

I was honored to be invited to speak at the Potomac Forum’s conference held February 3-4 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, “Planning and Implementing Social Media and Open Government Strategy and Efforts: What Executives and Managers Need to Know”, http://www.potomacforum.org/.

I discussed two topics under the topic of Bringing Governance, Performance Management, and IT Together.

Continue reading “Social Media and Open Government – My Presentation”

The Big Bang Theory Hearts Firefly

For those who knew me when I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, you will know that I held a monthly lunch with a small band of fans of both the TV show Firefly, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series), and the movie Serenity, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/serenity/.

For references to this, see the end of the interview I gave for the DotGov Buzz, http://www.usa.gov/Federal_Employees/USA_Buzz/Newsletter_0522.html#dotgovspotlight, and the reference from a column in Federal Computer Week, written by then rising star Chris Dorobek, http://fcw.com/Articles/2007/09/16/Circuit_633659049783559373.aspx.

I even ran into Firefly fans when in China this last summer when we went to see a solar eclipse, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/21/serenity-on-the-yangtze/. Continue reading “The Big Bang Theory Hearts Firefly”

DISA and Open-Source

In an earlier post, I talked about the radio show Countdown hosted by Francis Rose on WFED at 2pm Friday’s. The deal was that Francis would have three people select their top Government-related stories of the week and present them in sort of a Casey Kasem 3-2-1 countdown.

I was on January 15^th, you can listen to the entire show that week at http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007.

In this post, I wanted to briefly touch on the second of the two articles I discussed, DISA expands access to ProjectForge cloud environment, http://gcn.com/articles/2010/01/13/disa-projectforge-collaboration.aspx.

The article illustrates the greater comfort level that Government has with using open-source software produced by non-Governmental organizations. While not explicitly mentioned, this increased involvement is leading to open-source development going the other direction; being produced by Government and then placed into the greater community. Continue reading “DISA and Open-Source”

Transparency

On January 15^th, I was part of a panel for the Countdown show hosted by Francis Rose on WFED, 1500 AM, here in Washington DC.

The premise of the panel is that every Friday, Francis asks three people from the ‘community’ to each select three news stories having something to do with the Federal Government. I selected three Information Technology related stories.

You can hear the panel which consisted of myself, Jon Desenberg, President of the Performance Institute, and Jeff Sural, a former DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary, and now of Alston and Bird at:

http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007 Continue reading “Transparency”

Hockey Weekend in Hershey and Washington

This last weekend Ellen acquiesced to my winter hockey obsession.

We spent Saturday in Hershey PA. That night we saw the Hershey Bears, http://www.hersheybears.com/, wallop the Wilkes Barre/Scranton Penguins 7-2. And we then returned to Washington Sunday in time to watch the Capitals beat the Philadelphia Flyers 5-3. Continue reading “Hockey Weekend in Hershey and Washington”