NJVC's CTO Blog

Guest lecturer at The George Washington University (EMIS)

2011-10-12T13:58:00.002-04:00

I had the pleasure of being a guest lecturer at The George Washington University Executive Master of Science in Information Systems (EMIS) program's class on “Emerging Technology” taught by the cool and capable professor Andrea Armstrong. My conversation with the class focused on innovation, which I will share in this blog. As an alumnus of the program, it was great to do a good turn and give back to a program that helped me grow professionally.

My approach to the class was to be provocative and a source of information for the students. After a brief introduction on my background and current areas of interest, I launched into the presentation. The synopsis of the key points of my presentation is provided in this blog.

The areas where I am currently spending my time and energy on innovation are:

IT automation
Mobility and pervasive computing
Big data and data analytics
Data centers

First, I presented the typical innovation graph (shown to the right of this paragraph) and posed the question: "Why should you believe this graph?" From my point of view I am suspicious of anything that looks like a normal distribution. The world is so complex that I rarely believe it can be synthesized into a pretty curve. I then challenged the class's thinking about successful Innovators. Their textbook listed five key visionaries who I would not dispute their contributions or the authors’ research. As an innovator, I wish I could have the same impact they had. From my lens, however, the book also should have included all the visionaries’ failures and other work that fills the gap between both the extremes of success and failure. Would a sample show that the pool of innovators analyzed had similar traits, but the outcome was that some succeeded while others landed into obscurity. Maybe good intentions are not enough. Perhaps time and space or something else is the key descriptor. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers makes a good case for this hypothesis.

After some fun group discussion, we moved to the second point of my presentation: innovation is likely an idea that germinated over a long period of time.

I provided an example about Charles Darwin. Darwin believed that his theory of natural selection came to him in a “flash,” but after his death researchers poured through his notes and found that his idea evolved over time (no pun intended). My aim during this part of the presentation was to encourage the class members to be passionate about their ideas and not give up on the first try or 100 tries to create something significant.

The third and last point of my presentation was innovation leverages human networks. Using the example of Burning Man (on my bucket list to attend), I posed the question: “Does innovation happen there?” My next slide showed an image of Silicon Valley and posed the question: “How are Burning Man and Silicon Valley different?” After some discussion I opened up the conversation to discover was on the class’s collective mind other than their Capstone project. The most popular topic was how to handle the grey line between the business and personal spaces of employees regarding the use of social media.

Burning Man

Thank you EMIS Cohort for the opportunity to present to you also to learn from you that day.

DIA 50th Anniversay Gala

2011-10-05T15:09:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaI had the pleasure of attending the 50th Anniversary Gala in honor of the Defense Intelligence Agency last Saturday, October 1 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC. Fifty years ago the idea of shared military intelligence was a new concept, and a fledgling agency rose to the challenge using borrowed office space. Today DIA’s capable staff is deployed around the world providing military support 365 days a year 24x7. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the asymmetrical threat of terrorists, DIA is out there collecting and disseminating shared military intelligence. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta provided the evening’s keynote address. As a former Army intelligence officer, Secretary Panetta was able to personally describe his experience, then and now, to the role DIA plays in to further both military and diplomatic missions, keeping warfighters one step out of harms way and ahead of our adversaries. To learn more about the history of DIA, visit http://www.dia.mil/history/ .

For all the men and women who are serving and have served the DIA, and especially those who paid the ultimate sacrifice to protect our country and its citizens, the 50th anniversary of DIA allows us time to say:

Thank you and God bless you.

Intertwining Interactive Technology with Popular Culture

2011-08-30T15:12:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaWe are at the dawn of intertwining interactive technology with popular culture. The Internet has radically changed our culture and the way we go about business. A quick list of some of the major impacts includes the rise of instant communication from anywhere…to anywhere using:

Email
Instant messaging/chat
Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP)/ Video
Webinars

In addition, the web has enabled us to communicate with people all across the world to discuss their opinions, instantaneously, on any topic imaginable via blogs, discussion forums, social networking and online shopping sites.

To fully comprehend how far we’ve come with respect to the Internet in just twenty or so years, we can look back in time to another medium that drastically changed our lives - the Television. This medium, which pushed content to the user, was always in control of the content. The Television ‘decided’ what it told you and you had no way to interact with it. Not only that, you couldn’t easily take it with you. You usually viewed it from the comfort of your home, and frequently shared it with others. Jump forward from the 1950’s to 2011 and we find some very interesting statistics:

There are roughly 1,416,338,245 TVs worldwide.
At the time of writing this blog the US census estimates there are 6,957,575,011 smart phones in the world
Estimates show there will be approximately 1 billion smart phones in the world by the end of 2011
Twitter reports they track 144 million tweets per day versus 50 million tweets per day, one year ago, and as you know, Twitter is only 1 microblog of many in the world
Facebook reports it has roughly 750 million facebook users of which more than 250 million active users currently access facebook through their mobile devices.

It goes without saying the Internet has mobilized communication for large masses of people. The question is no longer are we an Internet based society, but rather where are will we go with it next?

People have moved from passive users of content where the information was pushed to them (e.g., TV and print) to an Internet-based consumer group that now interacts with the content, thus adding to what was initially published.

Internet behavioral and contextual technologies are beginning to provide real-time marketing information about users that content publisher's analytic systems process to decide what content or product they’ll provide next. People have been transformed into active, engaged users.

Instead of simply pushing content, site owners are pulling content from their users to improve their services and get a better understanding of their audience. Users today expect to be able to give their opinion and if you don’t give them a channel to do so, they’ll build their own in the form of a blog or forum. There are many advantages of this two-way communication or two-way feedback. Hopefully it will continue to lessen the gap between the digital native and the digital immigrant.

Why is this important?

For one, it is likely the digital natives will continue to have an ever-increasing impact on the workplace and how business gets done. The digital natives expect interactive, accessible technology, enhancements in big data, augmented reality, mobility applications, and capabilities that move beyond the mouse to gesture based interfaces. All of this will require new privacy and security models that support the dynamic systems (cloud) of the active engaged worker’s work/life experience.

I’d love to hear about examples of this kind of change that you currently see or foresee in the workplace.

References:

Mobility and the Trigger of Use

2011-07-26T13:27:00.000-04:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI find it interesting trying to understand the adoption triggers between technology capability and usage. This blog is dedicated to reflecting on work I did prior to and while developing NJVC’s mobility technology road map.

I remember a unified communication architecture I developed in 2004 for a telecommunications carrier based on technology that existed in 2001. In those days we called it “unified messaging.” In retrospect, I am reminded how much capability existed back then. So … why has it take so long for the Unified Communication Center to become mainstream in the mobility market? The simple answer is back in 2004, cellular networks in the United States were just beginning to upgrade to 1xRTT with a goal of GSM. Smart phones were not ubiquitous and location-based services were being developed. I can remember talking with a location-based services product team envisioning how these services would change mobility. Roll time forward, and we now have 4G, geospatial apps are common, improved standards and smart phones are so pervasive that we can use 2001 technology for UCC.

Mobility is disruption, and we can watch it happen. An economic battle exists; raging fueled by consumer desire over technology platforms. This “battle” will likely evolve with economic winners and losers, and will be shaped by innovation, standards and marketing. At the end of the day, this looks like another beta versus VHS tape battle happening, while DVDs and streaming video all enter the market at the same time. Companies will continue to attempt to predict what consumers will pay for services, and deliberate whether to bring them to market as standalone or packaged solutions.

While this is happening, consumers are finding novel ways to blend personal and business devices. For example, the Apple’s iPad, Google’s Android platform or Windows phone 7. This blend of use brings front and center intellectual property and security issues. What the market will bear in terms of cost and or reduced capability to mitigate these issues is a moving target.

It will be interesting to see how and at what velocity companies apply wireless technologies and mobile devices to best run, grow or transform consumer- or employee-facing business applications and processes.

This is going to be fun.

Examining the Homeland Security Impact of the Obama Administration’s Cyber Security Proposal

2011-06-29T08:47:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaLast Friday, June 24, I visited the Cannon House Office Building to listen to testimony presented during a hearing of the Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Cyber Security, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies. The hearing was entitled “Examining the Homeland Security Impact of the Obama Administration’s Cyber Security Proposal.” The membership of this committee is:

Subcommittee Chair Dan Langren (R-CA-3rd District)
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX-10th District)
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI-7th District)
Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA-7th District)
Rep. Billy Long (R-MO-7th District)
Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA-10th District)
Ranking Member, Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY-11th District)
Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA-37th District)
Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA-2nd District)
Rep. William Keating (D-MA-10th District)

I invite you to view Chairman Lungren’s opening remarks at the hearing.

I encourage you to read the transcripts of expert witness testimony and view Chairman Lungren as he questions the witnesses.

Larry Clinton, President, Internet Security Alliance, [full text of testimony]
Melissa Hathaway, President, Hathaway Global Strategies LLC, [full text of testimony]
Greg Shannon, Chief Scientist for Computer Emergency Readiness Team, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, [full text of testimony]
Leigh Williams, BITS President, The Financial Services Roundtable, [full text of testimony]
Chairman Lungren: questions the witnesses

Cyber security is a complex topic that impacts our government, business and the lives of citizens. Ensuring that we enact the best legislation possible is everyone’s civic responsibility. Ms. Hathaway pointed out in her testimony that there are more than 50 cyber security bills currently being considered by the 111th Congress. At the State level, legislatures also are focusing on cyber security: namely cyber stalking, cyber harassment and cyber bullying.

In my mind, education and ongoing dialogue are necessary to achieve the goal of enhanced cyber security at all levels and in all sectors. Achieving the right balance of public/private market incentives and legislation are the keys to ensure our cyber ecosystem continues to be healthy and protected.

DoDIIS 2011

2011-05-05T18:51:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaAs I was heading to DoDIIS 2001 in Detroit, I wondered what I might blog about after the show. This is my third blog in as many years about attending DoDIIS and I did not want to rehash what I had written in the past.

I did not imagine that last Sunday night while having a beverage with my fellow conference attendees we would hear on the news that Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, was dead. As I looked around the bar I saw people with tears in their eyes, shouting “hooah,” standing in silence, hugging and fist bumping. This historic event was a very personal moment of closure for all of us.

I will never forget that I was in Kansas City on Sept. 11, 2001, eating breakfast in a hotel restaurant with my coworkers watching TV and to my complete abject horror, watched the events play out showing the senseless deaths of many people—some of whom I knew personally. Since that terrible day I have met many more individuals who have shared their stories of how this senseless event impacted them.

To all those people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of justice, I humbly say, thank you.

As Sunday ended and Monday began with the DoDIIS kick-off keynote, the “normalcy” of this conference merged with the previous night’s event. For DIA, this particular conference was an opportunity to celebrate its 50th anniversary (the agency was formed in 1961) and my guess is DIA was happy with its “present.”

NJVC had a great showing at DoDIIS and the feedback of our demos—cloud, cyber, facility modernization and video telecommunications— was they were relevant and the participants were ready for them.

After attending DoDIIS, it is clear to me that NJVC and its partners have the solutions to help DIA and the DoDIIS community find and implement Grant Schneider’s DIA CIO and Director of DS top three challenges:

Governance
Leverage technology to lower the cost of information technology
Better understand how to collaborate to achieve mission results

I am optimistic!

National Defense Industrial Association Information Systems Summit II

2011-04-13T08:36:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaLast week I had the privilege of attending National Defense Industrial Association Information Systems Summit II sponsored by its C4ISR Division. The focus of the conference was on the usage of Agile development within the Department of Defense. After reviewing the attendee roster list, I believe NDIA did a good job in getting a good mix from government and industry to attend and share their knowledge. I was pleased to observe that many of the attendees were either involved in their agencies’/companies’ existing Agile projects, or were seeking more information because their agency/company is planning future Agile projects. The conference allowed for a meaningful dialogue where attendees were able to share their experiences and ask questions of the speakers and other fellow participants. Even though the tagline for the conference was “What’s All This Agile Stuff About, Anyway?,” the goal of the conference was to provide attendees with an understanding and accelerate the adoption of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development within DoD. My opinion is Agile is here.

To show how far Agile has come, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 within Section 804, Implementation of New Acquisition Process for Information Technology Systems, shown below supports Agile SCRUM:

“…(a) NEW ACQUISITION PROCESS REQUIRED.—The Secretary of Defense shall develop and implement a new acquisition process for information technology systems. The acquisition process developed and implemented pursuant to this subsection shall, to the extent determined appropriate by the Secretary—

(1) be based on the recommendations in chapter 6 of the March 2009 report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Department of Defense Policies and Procedures for the Acquisition of Information Technology; and

(2) be designed to include—
(A) early and continual involvement of the user;
(B) multiple, rapidly executed increments or releases of capability;
(C) early, successive prototyping to support an evolutionary approach; and
(D) a modular, open-systems approach.
(b) REPORT TO CONGRESS.—Not later than 270 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the Committees on Armed Services of the Senate and the House of Representatives a report on the new acquisition process developed pursuant to subsection (a). The report required by this subsection shall, at a minimum—
(1) describe the new acquisition process;
(2) provide an explanation for any decision by the Secretary
to deviate from the criteria established for such process in paragraphs (1) and (2) of subsection (a);
(3) provide a schedule for the implementation of the new acquisition process;
(4) identify the categories of information technology acquisitions to which such process will apply; and
(5) include the Secretary’s recommendations for any legislation that may be required to implement the new acquisition process…”

A mechanism that is gaining steam for managing Agile projects following Section 804 is AgileEVM1, which uses the capabilities of the Agile SCRUM framework to develop Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI). These indices develop an Earned Value (EV)—or a project management technique for measuring project performance and progress in an objective manner. The net is ability for business owners to understand the Earned Business Value of an Agile project. The approach between traditional EV and AgileEVM are different, but the important point is a dialogue now exists where Agile SCRUM teams can be compliant with DoD acquisition guidelines. The following two bullet points show some of the difference in collected metrics:

CPI

Traditional CPI = Budgeted Cost of Work Performed/ Actual Cost of Work Performed
AgileEVM CPI = (Baseline Cost per StoryPoint)/Actual Cost per StoryPoint

SPI

Traditional SPI = EV/ Planned Value
AgileEVM SPI = (Actual Velocity)/(Baseline Velocity)

From the time the Agile Manifesto was put on paper in 2001 so developers could provide their communal voice on how software should be developed, we are now hearing from the acquisition side of the house on how we can measure the value of their approach to software development.

RSA Conference 2011

2011-03-02T11:40:00.000-05:00

The RSA Conference 2011 has come and gone and I was proud to represent NJVC as a panelist and participant. At the Speakers’ Dinner, Art Coviello, RSA CEO, said some 20,000 security professionals gathered in San Francisco to hear keynotes, attend the vendor expo, meet with clients and network. When you think of that many people attending, in terms of the ingenuity present in one place, and invested dollars it’s staggering. It is my hope that one-day cyber netizens will have a global cathartic moment and say “enough is enough,” but in the meantime there is a lot of work to do to improve the security of data in a wide variety of environments.

Personal highlights from the week included participating in Internet Security Alliance's (ISAs) Project on Securing the Electronic Supply Chain. ISA is developing guidelines to ensure that regardless of where design, fabrication, pre-assembly, assembly, distribution, and maintenance companies, organizations and staff are located, they feel confident their intellectual property and products are secure and no malware is embedded in the hardware from design to fabrication. Following that theme was a requirement for secure cloud supply chain that was repeated multiple times during the conference.
A quick analysis of the tweets (#rsaccloud) relayed during “The Future of Security in the Era of Cloud Computing” live discussion with panelists Philippe Courtot, Qualys Chairman and CEO; Paul Saffo Technology Futurist and Stanford University Consulting Associate Professor; and Dave Cullinane eBay CISO, speaks to the RSA Conference community’s desire to further understand several aspects of the cloud:

Data leakage
Links to cloudage.org
Migration between cloud vendors
Organizations that should conduct penetration tests for a cloud vendor
Cloud impact on compliance costs

I was pleased that my panel, “Cyber Catastrophe in the Movies: Realistic Threat or Hollywood Hype?,” was well received by the audience. Using the movies as a mechanism to engage the audience on cyber worked well for a discussion on what is real and what is pure fantasy.

Each of the panels I participated and vendors I met brought me added knowledge in the area of cyber and I was appreciative of their time and knowledge. Friday ended with a keynote by former President Bill Clinton who discussed the need for security to the global stage and discussed its importance in allowing for innovation to fuel the U.S. economy.

Cyber Insurance

2011-01-27T14:49:00.000-05:00

Cyber insurance is a topic that was recently discussed in a number of events and venues that I participated. In response, I have decided to dedicate this blog to a primer. According to the Internet Security Alliance, cyber insurance is:

“[A]n insurance product used to protect businesses from Internet-based risks, and more generally from risks relating to information technology infrastructure and activities. Risks of this nature are typically excluded from traditional commercial general liability policies. Coverages provided by cyber-insurance policies may include first-party coverage against losses such as data destruction, extortion, theft, hacking, and denial of service attacks; liability coverage indemnifying companies for losses to others caused, for example, by errors and omissions, failure to safeguard data, or defamation; and other benefits including regular security audits, post-incident public relations and investigative expenses, and criminal reward funds. ”1

A healthy discussion is ongoing about how public and private partnerships can come together to create market incentives to stimulate the growth of a private cyber insurance industry. These partnership can both provide private economic incentives to spur greater cyber security efforts while also creating a private market mechanism that fosters adoption and compliance. If this topic is not on your radar today, it will likely be in the near future. As this topic gains more mainstream attention, the intent is there will be market incentives to encourage voluntary versus mandated adoption that leverage proven, successful security best practices, standards and technologies.

So what can you do? If you are starting from ground zero, having the discussion within your business on the merits for cyber insurance is a great first step, which will then lead to a discussion on risk and exposures to cyber exploits. Part of your risk discussion should include how your business stacks up against the benchmarks used for underwriting cyber insurance. As a guideline, the underwriting standard for cyber insurance is ISO/IEC 27001:2005, which is part of the ISO/IEC 27000 series of information security management systems. Obtaining an ISO/IEC 27001certification[2], like other ISO management system certifications, usually involves a three-stage audit process:

Stage 1 is a preliminary, informal review of the information system management system (ISMS)
Stage 2 is a more detailed and formal compliance audit, independently testing the ISMS against the requirements specified in ISO/IEC 27001.
Stage 3 involves follow-up reviews or audits to confirm that the organization remains in compliance with the standard.

The active side of an assessment is penetration testing—a method of evaluating the security of a computer system or network by simulating an attack from a malicious source, (e.g., hacker). Many forms of penetration testing exist. The Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual is a standard for professionals who conduct penetration testing. If you use credit cards in your business you may have to follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requirements for penetration testing.

Other places to look for additional information include:

The hard and sobering truth is you can take all the precautions listed above and still be compromised. The choice is whether or not your company is prepared to know what to do next.

Your company survived Y2K and likely has a plan for business continuity and disaster recovery. In the connected world of today, I suggest you have a cyber plan as well.

Security and Geotagging

2011-01-03T15:57:00.000-05:00

Image via WikipediaA great presentation that everyone should read is called, “Social Media Roundup Geotags and Location-Based Social Networking Applications, OPSEC and Protecting Unit Safety.” I recommend using your favorite search engine to find a copy. While the presentation is geared for military units, the information also is useful for business and personal life.

In a nutshell, if you have a device (e.g., phone or camera) capable of geotagging and you publish the information to a public website, the potential exists that you left a digital footprint of when and where you have been. Why? A geotagged photo contains geographic metadata about where you took the picture. geotagging can be fun and provides businesses with the capability for location-based awareness for commerce.

It is easy to take geotagged pictures with our mobile devices and cameras and place them on social websites. In fact, people take great pleasure in doing this.

However, with most technologies they can be used for good or bad, and placing the photos on a website may cause the poster to publicly offer information he or she did not know they were posting.

When you post a photo, it has attribution—that means who you are. A geotagged photo includes the following GPS metadata:

Latitude
Longitude
Time stamp

Together they tell something about what you did and when you did it.

Depending on the website and how you configured the security settings, you may allow someone who you did not intend view the locations of your travels. Based on this information, he or she can possibly conjecture where to find you at a particular time of day, as well as where you live and work.

So, what is the right thing to do?

First, knowing when to turn off the GPS function is key. Second, reach out to your family, friends and coworkers to be sure they are aware of the potential security issues and settings for geotagging photos on public websites. Third, define your risk tolerance if you publish geotagged photos and know when and how to control the GPS functionality on your device and the website you posted the photos.

MarkLogic’s Government Summit 2010

2010-12-02T08:52:00.000-05:00

Image via WikipediaOn Nov. 17, 2010, I attended MarkLogic’s Government Summit 2010 in Tysons Corner, VA. The summit’s theme focused on the challenges for solving unstructured data problems. This issue has been a problem front and center for organizations and technology leaders in the government as they look to connect the dots and provide more transparency in government and solve their hard data issues. The lineup of speakers was inspiring. In this blog I wanted to focus on the remarks of Colonel David W. Sutherland and Major John W. Copeland of the Office of the Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff, Warrior and Family Programs. Major Copeland and Colonel Sutherland wrote a white paper, Sea of Goodwill Matching the Donor to the Need By: Major Johne W. Copeland and Colod David Sutherland.

Getting information to solve everyday issues can be challenge to anyone. Whether its finding a doctor that understands your issues, finding a job, or getting information on a topic. This challenge does not exclude our warriors returning home from the battlefield. Right in front of us, exist unstructured data problems that when solved, can make a difference in the quality of life for our servicemen and servicewomen.

“Our men and women in uniform stand watch abroad and more are readying to deploy. To each and every one of them, and to the families who bear the quiet burden of their absence, Americans are united in sending one message: we honor your service, we are inspired by your sacrifice, and you have our unyielding support.”1

“And just as they must have the resources they need in war, we all have a responsibility to support them when they come home.”2

- President Barack Obama

As Colonel John Copeland pointed out in his keynote address,

“War is an obscene activity to engage in, but we do it because the alternatives for not participating are even more obscene.”

When the servicemen and servicewomen come home they want the same things that others have:

Education
Secure employment
Quality health care

And “to live a sustainable life in civilian society,” according to Colonel Copeland

This task can be challenging under normal circumstances, but it can be more challenging when a service member is a recovering wounded or ill or if his or her immediate family has to move forward because the warrior died in the line of duty.

When implementing solutions that connect the dots take a holistic view of the problem and how technology will remarkably improve it, whether it’s the fight against terrorism, education, health care, employment or <insert idea> the outcome of the effort should have a positive impact whether is improving the quality of life for a person or family or safety of a country.

1. Presidential Address to Joint Session of Congress. Feb. 24, 2009; www.whitehouse.gov
2. Presidential “State of the Union Address. Jan. 27, 2010 ”; www.whitehouse.gov /the-press- office/remarks-president-state-union-address /the_press_office/remarks-of-president-barack-obama-address-to-joint-session-of- congress/

20 Most Innovative Cyber Technologies (per SINET)

2010-11-15T17:17:00.000-05:00

I had the opportunity to attend the Security Innovation Network SINET Showcase on Oct. 26 – 27, 2010 . The show brought together what the SINET Board felt were the 20 most innovative Cyber Technology technologies based on 136 entries. Each of the 20 companies had 10 minutes on stage to explain their products’ value propositions to the audience. I think both the presenters and audience enjoyed the challenge of staying within the designed time limit. The showcase also included workshops and panel discussions, and I attempted to attend most of them. Some of the technologies presented were really exciting and I recommend you take a look at them.

GEOINT 2010

2010-11-15T16:06:00.000-05:00

Image via WikipediaA year has passed since writing my reflections on GEOINT 2009 Symposiums. Stu Shea, USGIF CEO and Chairman, opened this year’s event with the history of the symposium—from its inception and desire to make a difference.

The focus for this year’s GEOINT was “Geospatial Intelligence 3.0” and the keynotes speakers, sessions and vendors presented what this theme means to them.

Some things are constant. NJVC had a great booth with thought-provoking demos on cloud computing, cybersecurity dashboard, deployable printing and an all-in-one VTC unit, and my informal survey of attendees showed that NJVC had the best party on the GEOWalk Corporate Hospitality Night…but I might be a little biased. Like last year, Matt Langan who creates the “got geoint?” blog for USGIF continued discussions on the foundation’s social media strategy. I had this discussion with many people during the symposium and appreciate their time dedication to the mission and their insight. Hats off to Keith Masback and his team for putting on another great event— and if I have repeated myself from last year it’s for good reason!

General James E. Cartwright, USMC, Vice Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff said, “Agility happens at the edge”—which I am in agreement. From the developer’s lens, this is an agile SCRUM where the warfighter is the product owner who is prioritizing the backlog of capabilities delivered on a regular short cycles. From the warfighter’s perspective, it is the confidence that the doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel and facilities are in place to ensure he or she knows what is over the next hill—no matter what the hill is. Some background on Agile can be found in my prior blog, “Having an Agile Day.” Based on the operations tempo, development teams need to master the art of who needs to sit forward with the product owner and who can be virtual to deliver value and meet the ilities that represent the quality aspects of a system (e.g., reliability, scalability, availability, extensibility) against mission cost.

One of my takeaways from GEOINT is that the requirement for the multi-platform is here. Beyond virtualized hardware, operating systems and storage, there appears to be a real desire to fuse sensor data from multi-source platforms—whether it is for an all-source analyst or for one working within a specific INT (e.g., SIGINT, MASINT, HUMINT, GEOINT)—and increase exponentially automated knowledge-based exploitation so analytic problems don’t scale linearly with people. The link between the tactical and enterprise is the usage of open standards, which is the connective tissue for enterprise architecture. As we automate capabilities with a vision toward a dynamic user experience, the capability to improve discoverability globally with seamless coverage becomes the possible.

I’ll steal a line from Bob Gourley, Crucial Point LLC's CTO: “GEOINT makes me think.”

Gartner Symposium IT XPO 2010

2010-10-22T16:14:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaAs I was chatting with other attendees at the gate prior to our plane heading back to Dulles, VA, after attending the Gartner Symposium IT XPO 2010, I was asked about my impressions of the conference.

I enjoyed meeting CIOs from other industries and talking with them about their experiences if only for the possibility that I might see a solution to a problem from another lens. On the “small-world” front I was talking to Alain Cohen the President/CTO from OPNET and learned that a project I worked with the company in the mid-'90s was part of the inspiration for its ACE Analyst product. NJVC has a modeling and simulation capability, and I believe it is an important tool to ensure an infrastructure stays healthy from design through sustainment.

I was amazed how many iPads were being used by attendees at the conference—and it actualized John Chambers’s keynote concept of the borderless network. It is very likely that the majority of iPads at the conference were personally owned by the attendees, but were being used for work—I fit that category, as well. The blurring of devices we use in our lives will only make the role of the CIO more challenging. Mobility isn't coming soon: it’s here now and the product vendors ensure a product exists for every taste and price point. CIOs should start thinking about how mobility will impact their existing corporate policies.

Gartner had many sessions about cloud computing from different lenses. Even though the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a definition for cloud computing, much of the discussion was about what cloud is and when to use it. As a footnote, during the conference GSA awarded its infrastructure as a service contract. At NJVC, we believe cloud is an important service to provide to clients and we have stood up a practice group headed by Kevin Jackson and backed by great technical and delivery staff. We will have a cloud demo running at our booth (#375) at the GEOINT 2010 Symposium, Nov. 1 - 4, so stop by to see it and say “hi.”

Beyond cloud, mobility, video, social networks, business process management and, large data problems rounded out the areas at the Gartner Symposium that caught my attention. I enjoyed the emerging technology area in the IT Expo—and I plan on following up with several vendors that I met.

John Chambers, Cisco CEO, said something that resonated with me because it underlies the importance of business owners and IT staff being in concert if they plan to deliver outcomes. Chambers’s quote is:

“The language you speak to your customers needs to be the same language you speak to the technical staff.”

OSS Society Reception Saturday, October 3, 2010

2010-10-07T15:07:00.000-04:00

I attended The OSS Society reception Saturday, Oct.3, 2010, where Walter L. Mess received the Presentation of the Distinguished Service Award, Colonel Michael S. Warburton, USA, received the John K. Singlaub Award, and Ross Perot received the William J. Donovan Award. There is no doubt these men have lead remarkable careers and deserve the recognition.

At the dinner I was struck by the thought and later reflected that government agencies are “experiments” that change over time. The fact that members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) attended the event is a testament to the dynamic change the U.S. government has gone through in a very short timeframe to meet the current and future needs of this great nation. The OSS had a short life span that has left a large impact on both intelligence and military communities. Briefly stated, In 1942 the Coordinator of Information became the OSS. President Truman dismantled the OSS in 1945 with the close of World War II. Additional information can be found by going to the OSS Society's website: http://www.osssociety.org/. The OSS chose the spearhead as its symbol stemming from founder Major General Donovan’s vision for that office to be the tip of the spear. The OSS is the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operation Forces: Rangers, Force Recon, Delta Force, Green Berets and Navy Seals— to name a few.

What I took away from the evening is not only do IT solutions need to support our customers’ missions today and tomorrow, but they also need to be an enabler for these experiments to change if and when the world needs them to change.

“We were not afraid to make mistakes because we’re not afraid to try things that had not been tried before.”

“You can’t succeed without taking chances.”

- Major General William J. Donovan, OSS Founder

Cyber Conflict Studies Association (CCSA) Conference

2010-09-30T15:41:00.000-04:00

CCSA

On Sept. 21, 2010, I attended the Cyber Conflict Studies Association (CCSA) conference, “Furthering the field: A Comprehensive Program for Cyber Conflict Studies.” I have listed several cyber security stories that were published after the conference to make the point that cyber conflicts are real and a global issue:

27 September, Anti-piracy Lawyers’ Email Database Leaked After Hack
27 September, Zeus Botnets’ Vulnerability that Allows for Infiltration
25 September, Stuxnet Worm Infects Iran
24 September, New Azvhan Bot Family Revealed

At the conference I saw old friends and met some new ones. In my opinion, the event was successful because it got me to think and want to participate in developing solutions. There are two golden threads that I will pull through from the day.

First, took place during a keynote address given by Richard A. Clarke. I candidly admit that I enjoyed his presentation when he reflected on his 30 years in government service that included experience in arms control negotiation. The possibility of a cyber war is plausible and the rules that define it are being worked out in the courts and military doctrine. Will cyber war happen by itself or in combination of kinetic attack will depend on the military objective? Cyber warfare can be targeted to both combatants and noncombatants. Diplomats, military planners, law enforcement officials, civil authorities and, NGOs need to be proactive so it does not happen and be prepared when it does. When Mr. Clarke’s presentation is distilled into a few words, it is: even the hardest problems can be solved through dialogue and confidence-building activities, and I am optimistic that the cyber conflict can be addressed along that same route. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been addressed in this manner and so should the technologies and targets used for cyber conflicts.

The second point presented by several speakers was the idea of creating a “Manhattan Project” for cyber and some of the strategy aspects that would be required for such a program. The outcome of the Manhattan Project was usage of the atomic bomb in World War II that brought on the age of the Cold War. I'll paraphrase what Mr. Clarke said in his keynote, active defense creates crisis instability. What I would add to the discussion is the Atomic Energy Commission, which was set up by the Atomic Energy Act in 1946 to take over the functions and assets of the Manhattan Project. The AEC established civilian control over atomic development, and separated the development, production and control of atomic weapons from the military. The same should be considered if a Cyber Manhattan project created.

It is critical we create both offensive and defensive measures for cyber conflicts. At the same time, the nation’s leaders should be working just as diligently on creating deterrents, such as treaties, so we never end up in a scenario of crisis instability.

Gov 2.0 Summit

2010-09-10T16:54:00.000-04:00

Image by Kevin Steele via Flickr
I attended the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 7 – 8, 2010. This year’s theme was “Opening the Door to Innovation,” and attendees learned about the latest technology and its application and how to break down barriers to adoption. In this blog I will summarize what subject matter presented had an impact on me and made me think. One caveat: any speakers that I do not mention by name or organization are not because they did not influence me, but instead reflect my intention to write a short narrative.

The summit reinforces a trend I am I seeing writ large when I hear discussions about Web 2.0 and cloud. The summit is called Gov 2.0, but I believe it could have been equally called Civic 2.0 as a common theme existed: in providing cost effective and reliable IT solutions to customer requirements, they need to be, good “civic” IT solutions. Civic IT solutions can be measured by their portability across government platforms. The dimensions being used to measure this include openness to standards, security, privacy, number of locations deployed and cost. The conference brought together speakers from multiple organizations— civic commons, Code for America, and ushahidi, to name a few. The speakers shared their stories on how to leverage cognitive surplus and civic duty to develop IT solutions quickly and cost effectively. The consensus among speakers was all problems can be solved at a cost near zero dollars… if you have enough resources. Solutions can also be deployed for near zero dollars if the cloud environment is large enough. Kaggle is an example of a web site that provides a low-cost prize to solve complex problems.

What surprised me is not that challeng.gov exists, but it exists now. The use of prizes as mechanisms to award work in the federal government is an example of thinking outside the box and it will be interesting to see how popular it becomes. I see this as a “foot in the door” for gaming dynamics to become mainstream in IT and not just for gamers (e.g., Farmville, World of Warcraft (WoW)...)—there are many game dynamics that can be leveraged (e.g., the prize is the gaming dynamic of achievement). Communal Discovery is another gaming dynamic where an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a problem or a challenge—two examples are the DARPA balloon challenge and lolcats. The point is the approach does not discriminate whether the problems being solved is serious or not.

Question: Do you know how many game dynamics are documented?

Steve Herrod VMware Chief Technology Officer, spoke how cloud can be disruptive to existing cost models for IT deployments. He discussed VMWare’s VMForce, which is a platform as a service (PaaS.) VMForce, for example, would allow apps to migrate between salesforce.com and Google environments. If this was a government customer this capability would likely require operations and support (O&S) providers and users to think differently about asset management, tier 1 to 3 support, service level agreements and release strategies because apps are allowed to cloud burst (move between environments.) Users are unsympathetic when an app is not working even if it is in the clouds. Governing the movement of apps will be federal, state and local laws, as well as network topologies, depreciation of equipment and skills. While the cloud is a compelling idea/capability, IT will also be charged with providing incremental value to legacy infrastructures on fixed hardware. A key to making this work will be common IT processes for tier 1 to3 support across agencies in a real partnership between suppliers and buyers.

The Gov 2 Summit can best be summarized by comments made by Technorati Top 100 Blogger Kathy Sierra, “We don't need to make a killer app, we need to make a killer user,”

Thinking about policies

2010-08-09T19:00:00.000-04:00

Lately I have been talking to a variety of people on the topic of policy and while sitting on a plane heading to the West Coast, I thought I would capture some of my reflections on this topic.

Policy is one of those things that controls our lives in ways the average Joe does not give much thought. To make my point, have you read your employer's policies to see if they reflect your values? Policies dictate everything from what you can wear to work to what is required to take a day off from work. When done well, they represent common sense documented: the counter is they can be an obstacle to getting business done or a mission accomplished. During my professional career I have seen too often that way we develop policies has not changed much since the way they were created and managed in the Quattrocento (15th Century Age of Enlightenment).

Generally speaking, policies are written by well-meaning subject matter experts who want to do a good job, but have not been trained in the subtleties among a directive, policy, process, work instruction or operating procedure... The end products are typically compromises signed by leaders who believe their staff has met their intentions.

Once the ink is dry, we file and or store them digitally so they are discoverable. We might even include meta data and marvel at the wording that eloquently articulates a particular document’s intent. Everyone who participated then goes back to working on their next task and the knowledge why a specific artifact or policy was written goes away with them.

From that day forward I imagine there have been many beautiful sunrise and sunsets. Babies have been born and people have died. The circle of life goes on through changes of seasons. Think of all the first loves where time has stopped, if only for a moment, as the time when a policy is written until it is needed.

Let us say that you have been assigned a task that needs to be compliant to some directive, policy, process, work instruction or operating procedure, but you have questions because your needs or requirements are slightly different than what was written in the past. Here is the rub. It is unlikely you can find the authors, and even if you did, changing it in the time you need seems insurmountable. I speak from experience. Depending on your environment, you can ignore, change your scope, comply or take the charge to your task champion of the artifact (think Don Quixote.) The impacts for noncompliance can range from ignorance to violating law. You and others like you work to solve policy issues in basic isolation. On the other side, policy zealots would have you follow the words as if they were carved in stone and can never change.

Is there a better way? I think so…one that allows everyone to have their cake and eat it too. I call it a dynamic policy. What makes a policy dynamic? The policy must have in its meta data pedigree, lineage and the ability to add annotations that reflect specific changes needed to enable a task—and yes, this task needs to be linked. Policies must be under configuration control with the rich associated meta data. The value of this approach is transparency to everyone else using the artifact. The net effect is the merging of experience and intent. This is subtly different than what is typically done with waivers that, in practice, uniformly ignore the artifact and are only known to a small group. Dynamic policies allow all users through annotations to improve the artifact until a complete revision is necessary.

If you made the argument that this pattern could be applied to other data artifacts like entities, analysis or common libraries of code, I would be in complete agreement and I wonder why we do not use this approach more often.

In this age where we feel the need to diary everything and look for efficiencies, we need to be on the lookout for solutions that are not like a team of horses when we need a rocket.

I see desert and mountains out my window. I hope we land soon.

Service Desk and Mobile Device Thinking

2010-08-06T15:59:00.002-04:00

Image by nobihaya via Flickr

It will be interesting to see how the role of the service desk transforms in the next decade, and how much additional monitoring of users’ behavior, in addition to technology, will be implemented. In my mind, this transformation will go beyond accessing the emotions of someone calling in to the help desk.

The blog is a short exercise as to why I think this is the case.

The other day I downloaded a free app for my smart phone that allows a user to unlock or lock, and geospatially locate and contact a service representative for my car service. It was easy to download, did not require elaborate training and I was registered with my car service in less than 15 minutes. Could this combination of app and device be the disruptive “straw on the camel’s back” to get rid of the legacy car key? How soon will our mobility devices (formerly cell phones) become an alternative to a car or house key? This is one more “nail in the coffin” changing our cell phones from data devices to enabling devices. Imagine beaming a temporary car key to a parking attendant’s phone or service center tablet so he or she can operate your car while you are away. Leveraging this capability lets us push the technology boundary. What if another app existed that monitored your blood alcohol level from smart clothes and decided, based on drinking limits, whether you could start your car? We now have the making of a business application that insurance companies, concerned parents and businesses could find attractive.

Let’s build on this use case to say Company X provides leased cars to its employees. How would its corporate IT department monitor this capability? The business user does not care whether or not this is a cloud app or their phone is connected to a network, he or she wants it to work when needed, and the user would be concerned about how much of his or her private life is being “watched” by big brother.

If you think beyond the normal availability requirements, some interesting behavior requirements creep in that need to be considered.

Should the service center monitor the battery life, CPU utilization of employee phones to ensure users don’t run out of power or not have enough processing power to run their business apps?
Should the company monitor the car speed and locations of employees as an audit record?
Even if the user is not driving, should the service center system monitor his or her blood alcohol levels?
What type of business intelligence could be learned from mining this information against the business pipeline or health insurance costs?

Yes, the legal and privacy issues will be challenging and a double-edged sword will exist if you choose to do so or not, but I think this could make an exciting challenge with more interesting implications. To my knowledge, nanofiber and biosensor technology in fabrics are getting better every day, making these ideas more and more feasible.

Will technology be the “tail that wags the dog” in setting the accountability that companies will need to adopt? In this case, I believe the answer is when…not if.

Thinking about RFPs and movie scripts

2010-07-14T15:34:00.000-04:00

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If the federal government request for proposals (RFPs) were like movie scripts, they could make writing sections on L (Proposal Preparation Instructions and Other) & M (Evaluation Criteria) compliance more enjoyable to write and exciting for the source selection committee to read…with the hope that a “blockbuster” leads to a sequel. In the movie business, basically four common story lines exist:

“Boy Meets Girl/ Girl Meets Boy” (e.g., “When Harry met Sally,” “Gone with Wind”)
“Fish Out of Water” (e.g., “Zombieland,” “Edward Scissorhands”)
“Coming of Age” (e.g., “Animal House,” “The Graduate”)
“The Chosen One” (e.g., “Star Wars,” “The Right Stuff”

For fun, think about your favorites in each of these categories. This blog idea came to me after seeing the Reduced Shakespeare Company's “Completely Hollywood” (abridged) at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. I enjoyed the show, and being the techie, decided to apply the concept to work.

I don't think the “Boy Meets Girl…” storyline applies to RFPs, and if someone tried to use it, they would have a chance of going to the “slammer”—movie jargon for prison. The other story lines do have a chance at applicability, and in this competitive, flat budget era. I'll list some quick examples that illustrate different themes that script writers could help with:

When a customer says that they are looking for a change, that is “Fish Out of Water”
A company graduating from the 8(a) or other small business program, that is “Coming of Age”
Incumbents or companies that provide unique capabilities are “The Chosen One(s)”

To continue this analogy, Vendors use their products for ad placement, key personnel are the “stars” and past performance can set the stage for a good sequel.

A country may separate Hollywood California and Washington DC, physically, but when comparing movie scripts to RFPs for fun, they don’t seem that far away.

INSA CIA Officers Memorial Foundation Dinner on July 8

2010-07-09T13:24:00.000-04:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I had the pleasure of attending the Intelligence and National Security’s INSA CIA Officers Memorial Foundation Dinner on July 8. The foundation was established December 2001 with the mission to support the children and spouses of CIA officers who are killed in the line of duty or die as a result of accident, illness or other causes. The keynote speaker was comedic television and film actor Dan Akroyd, and band of all-star musicians led by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (of Steely Dan and the Dooby Brothers) provided the evening’s musical entertainment. It was a great event, and I hope the foundation met it financial goals to raise funds to support the families of fallen CIA offers.

The evening reminds me of a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt,

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.

I find it serendipitous that on July 8, 1776, a 2,000-pound copper-and-tin bell, now known as the “Liberty Bell,” rang out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, summoning citizens to the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Thinking about Clouds and VM Churn

2010-07-02T16:22:00.000-04:00

Image by Pat Dalton......... via Flickr

As the saying goes when it rains it pours.

The term cloud is pretty close to reaching the stratosphere of marketing hype that service-orientated architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 gained in the recent past. No doubt the economic promise for lowering computing costs enabled by clouds will drive many organizations to leverage cloud vendors’ capabilities much in the way that offshoring changed the landscape of support services work—with likely similar lessons learned. Offshoring describes the relocation by a company of a business process from one country to another. Offshoring typically involves an operational process, such as manufacturing, or a supporting process, such as accounting. I wonder how soon it will take until we see a hailstorm of articles recommending strategies where a company should store its corporate intellectual property (IP) based on the debates of offshoring. These issues include, but are not limited to:

Legal issues for IP and personal privacy information (PPI)
Level of service
Supply chain
Competitive concerns
Retraining concerns, as jobs change based on leveraging the cloud how will a company retrain its workforce

One of cyber criminals’ focuses is stealing corporate IP. The ability for a cloud vendor to ensure it is keeping up with security patches and configuration management best practices may make the difference between a jackpot for the bad guys and piece of mind for the vendor’s customers.

A strategy that recently caught my attention because of the way it changes the way we look at traditional deployment is “virtual machine (VM) churning.” Think of a VM as a container on a server that holds your operating system and applications as a software package. The concept behind VM churning is that a new VM replaces the existing one with a known gold copy over time t. The idea is that if a computer is attacked by malware, it will limit the malware’s capability to replicate itself across the enterprise. And VM churning can isolate infected VMs for forensic analysis and development of new malware signatures.

The concept is simple and elegant and I want to elaborate on its ramifications.

For discussion’s sake, let’s say we have an enterprise of 500 VMs and our VM churn policy is to replace one every three seconds with a gold copy: this translates to 600,000 new VMs per hour or a staggering 5.475 billion instances annually.

So here are some interesting questions for you to consider:

Is the system going to be more reliable or less?
What problems will go away? For example, if the system is only around for three seconds memory leak problems are less likely to be an issue.
What problems will a VM churn environment create?
How does a VM churn environment change your system’s triage procedures since the environment is constantly resetting itself?
How does VM churn change your testing strategy?
What is your internet protocol (IP) address strategy for VM churn?

And the list goes on and on …

Add to this picture constant data replication; network load balancing; information caching; Dev, Test and Prod environments; etc. … and the cloud is a very dynamic environment even when no one is using it. I don’t think of this environment as a big, white, puffy cloud, but rather a big, dark, storm cloud with all the potential to provide thunder, lighting, rain, hail and even snow.

Assuming this approach or some variant takes hold, any hope of manual intervention goes out the window and cloud vendors will heavily rely on their capability to do automatic provisioning.

So keep your hands and feet in at all times while riding the cloud roller coaster.

Martha Johnson at Potomac Officers Club Luncheon

2010-06-08T10:34:00.000-04:00

I went to hear Martha Johnson GSA Administrator, provide her thoughts at the Potomac Officers Club (POC) luncheon on June 2, 2010. I enjoyed her talk and wanted to share several points that resonated with me. GSA is an amazing organization in the size and scale of its mission to provide innovative solutions for its customers in support of their missions, and by so, doing foster an effective, sustainable and transparent government for the American people. Mrs. Johnson describes GSA as the “storefront” for the U.S government.

The first point, which is more a vision statement, is the idea of a zero environmental footprint for GSA products. This means that GSA will provide products that are both safe and green. The metaphor she used is zero environmental footprint is this is the Obama administration's moon shot. The moon shot was a galvanizing vision for the Kennedy administration.

The second point was a discussion on participation versus collaboration—the short analogy Ms. Johnson used was to contrast participation as popularity versus converging and focusing on an idea that is collaboration. The simplest way that I can describe the difference between participation and collaboration is as follows. Collaboration is to work together in a joint intellectual effort working together toward a common end. Participation is to take part where decisions are made based on mechanism such as popularity. Participating does create involvement, but if you want people to be involved in the decision, to take part in them then they need to collaborate. In her view, the U.S. government is about to embark on the next great collaboration exercise.

A video excerpt of her speech at the POC luncheon can be found at http://blog.executivebiz.com/tag/martha-johnson

DoDIIS Worldwide Conference 2010 Thoughts

2010-06-02T18:49:00.000-04:00

Another DoDIIS Worldwide Conference has come and passed. I enjoyed meeting with old and new friends and acquaintances. This year’s theme was Mission Powered Partnerships…Keeping our Customers One Step Ahead. The DoDIIS position is by continuing to increase information sharing through trusted alliances, the community it serves will be strategically poised to bring about true, all-source analysis and deliver timely, objective and actionable intelligence to senior decision makers and the war fighters. The plenary speakers followed the partnership theme from multiple perspectives and touched on people, processes and technology. NJVC presented at two breakout sessions: covering the challenges for cloud computing within the federal government environment and successful government contractor program partnership management based on our experience with our anchor customer. Both were well received—contact me if you want additional information about either presentation.

From the IT perspective, partnerships are about customer service. Customer service comes in all shapes and sizes to support the full spectrum of capabilities required by today’s warfighters, diplomatic community, law enforcement and, NGOs, working together to solve their mission requirements. Whether IT is enabling the application service provider/infrastructure service provider construct to transparently lower the cost of operations and sustainment, or providing solutions for information sharing, the challenges are ours to master. Failure is not an option.

The diversity of partnerships in the DoDIIS community is as diverse as ever. Whether it’s implementing an intra-agency MOU to foster sharing and reduce overlaps, or working with our coalition partners, the collection of agencies and governments have a common objective: win the global war on terrorism. To appreciate the magnitude of this challenge, as follows is the list of coalition partners from the CENTCOM Web site:

Albania
Armenia
Australia
Azerbaijan
Belgium
Bosnia/Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Canada
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Djibouti
Dominican Republic
Egypt
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Fiji
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Italy
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Moldova
Mongolia
Morocco
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Norway
Pakistan
Poland
Portugal
Republic of Korea
Romania
Russia
Singapore
Slovak Republic
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Thailand
Tonga
Turkey
Uganda
Ukraine
United Kingdom
Yemen

IT challenges are not bound by agencies or borders, and the DoDIIS Worldwide Conference did a good job to bring that reality front and center. As Lorraine Wilson, Information Sharing IPT Representative, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, said (paraphrased): “We are not building china to sit in a china cabinet. We need everyday plates.”

Wearing my CTO hat I think about how we are going to keep our customers one-step ahead. I resonated with the discussion that emerging technology comes from the global private sector and is available to our adversaries at the same time it is available to us. Adding to that our adversaries do not have to deal with our bureaucracy. The advantage goes to the faster implementer.

NJVC’s approach to providing agility is to be a process driven systems integrator that is technology agnostic and is driven by your mission.

Intelligence Communities Executive Forum (ICEF) thoughts

2010-05-21T11:42:00.000-04:00

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I attended the Intelligence Communities Executive Forum on the role of industry and commercial technologies in addressing the comprehensive national cyber security initiative on May 13, 2010. I appreciated and learned something new from all the panelists and moderators insights during the forum. I apologize in advance for any unintended omissions in this blog.

I agree with JC Technical Director Don Boian’s observation that volume, velocity and variety are the key Cyber factors that need to be addressed, along with network convergence.

Cyber Security is a global problem and the risk for network-based attacks is a continual concern. This fact was discussed at this conference and at other cyber conferences I have attended recently. There is no shortage of Cyber-related events documented on the Internet, CERT, press and security vendors, etc. to get your ire up and scare you. One major “so what:” In 2009 more than $120 million was lost due to on-line banking fraud:Cyber Security issues can affect everyone!

Another topic discussed at the conference is the evolving definition of the insider threat. Insider threats used to be considered employees gone rogue, but was expanded by the panel to include botnets. Botnet is the term for a collection of software agents that run autonomously and automatically. The term is most commonly associated with malicious software, but can also refer to a network of computers using distributed computing software, offered by companies such as Parabon. Dr. Steve Armentrout, Parabon CEO, provided his keen insight on this issue and discussed how his company’s Frontier platform can be used to leverage an organization’s processing power.

Supply chain threat is a common theme at Cyber-focused conferences and this conference was no exception—as its focus was on the highly connected global IT market, and the economic impact risk if disrupted. I like Tom Ridge’s comment on this topic:

"There is no such thing as a 'virtual' disruption of the supply chain. There is no such thing as a 'virtual' impact on the bottom line. Cyber Security touches everything—all sectors, all facets of our economy and everyone involved in it.”

From my view, supply chain has the same characteristics of network convergence—volume, velocity and variety—that will need to be addressed to ensure our supply chain is safe.

What I took away from the panel on Information Overload and Situational Awareness' commments is Cybersecurity is comprised of elements that need a comprehensive solution solved by "Team Cyber" made up of government, industry, and academia. Volume, velocity and variety provides the challenge and we need to find an integration strategy so owners, operators, defenders of our networks and producer of cyber products and services work together as team cyber to managed the risk at the our new steady state level.

I have fused thoughts from all the panels on the Cyber Security challenges within the government for ease of reading that include:

Demand dynamic network defense
Agile tipping and queuing
Attribution
Situational awareness for red, blue and white actors
Mitigation strategies
Virtual interfaces from source systems
Sharing of threats and counter measures
Replication of data is a risk
Getting to the right analysis on the right data at the right time
...

Supporting the needs above will change the role of the cyber analysis. I liken this evolution to what is happening in the financial industry today to support high-frequency-trading (HFT). HFT refers to the buying and selling of stocks at extremely fast speeds with the help of powerful computers. Using complex algorithms, these computers can scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously, execute millions of orders a second and alter strategies in a matter of milliseconds.[1] In the United States, high-frequency trading firms represent 2.0 percent of the approximately 20,000 firms operating today, but account for 73.0 percent of all equity trading volume.[2]. Time will tell if this will be part of the roadmap for Cybercommand.

What makes me feel optimistic that we will get the upper hand on cyber security is that behind the forum discussions is hard work being done by cyber professionals that is making a difference.

EastWest Institute's First Worldwide Cyber Security Summit Thoughts

2010-05-10T15:09:00.000-04:00

I attended EastWest Institute’s First Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas Texas May 3 – 5, 2010, where more than four hundred individuals from 30-plus countries attended the summit to discuss the issues of cyber security. The summit’s purpose is to create international awareness about the growing threats surrounding cyber security and facilitate group discussion among the representatives of the “Cyber 40” -- the countries that make up the G20 and next twenty most important cyber countries -- on the focus areas that include; information and communication technologies (ICT), finance, essential government services, media, transportation, energy and national security.

I have attempted to summarize the work of the dedicated professionals who attended the conference and apologize in advance for any unintended omissions in this blog. I have included duplicates to show that each of these focus areas have common areas of concern that the groups felt need to be addressed:

•    ICT
     o    Mobility security
     o    Cyber security transparency and the development of cyber centers that are modeled on agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
     o    global undersea communications cable infrastructure (GUCCI)
     o    International priority frameworks for communications issues
•    Finance
     o    Education for what is a multi-faceted problem
     o    Ability to deconstruct Cybersecurity into more concrete areas on concern
     o    Significant failure of the Internet at both logical and physical
     o    Federated identity for people and objects
     o    Think globally. Act locally.
•    Essential Government Services
     o    Capability to provide food and water on a global construct and understand the interrelationship of non-government organizations (NGOs), eGovernment and military operations
     o    Countries need to work with each other with common trust and look toward solutions like wired-gov.net can be used as foundational architecture on a global platform
    o    Standards are critical
    o    Global memorandums of understanding should be place prior to events
    o    Continued education and development of a common lexicon
    o    Understanding that both public, government and military run across the same communication lines
    o    Global backup to the Internet for netizens in case of catastrophic failure
•    Media
    o    Our critical infrastructure is our children – “What a great thought!”
    o    Children must be safe in cyberspace
    o    All nations adopt legal minimal protection for children in cyberspace
    o    Leverage education and standards
    o    Usable privacy setting for Internet tools
•    Transportation
    o    Critical infrastructure commerce and safety
    o    Impacts of disruption for self-service commerce via the Internet
    o    Critical control systems for rail, aviation, etc.
    o    Passport for cyberspace: we have them in the physical world
    o    Global debate on whether or not a license should be required to access the Internet much like a license is required to drive a car
•    Energy
    o    Embedded malware into critical infrastructure that could destabilize governments is not desired
    o    Resilient strategies for international cooperation
    o    Ability to reach international key decision maker so a détente can be reach for critical infrastructure targets (analogy: nuclear weapons)
•    National Security
    o    Development of rules of engagement and rules of the road for cyber. Today there are rules of the road for the domains of space, air and maritime
    o    Development cyber conflict policy and global lexicon of terms
    o    Harmonize legal requirements on a global scale to define cyber crime
    o    Create cyber transparency for information sharing to minimize conflict escalation
    o    Change the economics of national security so the incentives lean toward good actors and the disincentives toward bad actors
     o    Risks associated to the undersea cable

Cyber security is a global topic that impacts and does not discriminate whether you are a digital native or a digital immigrant. Cyber security is an overloaded term -- I like Scott Charney’s (Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group) decomposition of cyber security into the areas of: cyber crime, cyber warfare, cyber terrorism, and cyber espionage activities. Each of these areas that have there own legal, political, and ethical issues that need to be addressed so they may be resolved. To make the point: Cyber crime focuses on developing chain-of-evidence prosecution and the challenges that might be required to extradite perpetrators when the crime originates from a different country than the victim. Cyber warfare that is part of the militaries' arsenal that can be used to attack, break down, and disrupt communications and the flow of information of an adversary. Cyber terrorism is the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Cyber espionage is the act or practice of obtaining secrets without the permission of the holder of the information from individuals, companies and governments for personal, economic, political or military advantage.

Adding to Scott Charney’s decomposition on cyber security is cyber repression -- another facet presented by panel member Henning Wegener. Cyber repression occurs when governments use technology to monitor, censor and persecute individuals and/ or organizations with the objective to limit freedom of expression and access to information. At all levels it is important to find the balance to allow freedom of speech and access to information while filtering information that is considered immoral and violates law.

Making this issue even more complicated is the fact that a perpetrator may be involved in multiple areas that make up cyber security. Solutions to this global issue will require investments education, legal, diplomatic and cost-effective technical innovations that work on the global stage.

In the next few years cloud computing and mobile broadband will become more common due to the economics benefits it present to companies and users. Your data will be stored in the cloud and will be moved about by the Internet Service Providers based on operation costs as you access the Internet from wireless devices. We have a generation of users made up of a continuum of users from kids to the elderly that are embracing Web 2.0 and are building Internet shadows (aka digital fingerprints) in ways that has never been done before in history of mankind (e.g., twitter, blogs, Googledocs, LinkedIn, flikr, wikis, digg, WoW, facebook…). The effect of this digital transformation cyber vetting by employers and organizations is becoming a standard operating procedure. I anticipate that policies, laws and societal morays will move along another continuum as we define the difference between vetting, profiling and repression.

The Internet is not completely the "Wild West," but at the same time, the protections that we have through laws and policies are not adequate by consensus. We need to be diligent, focused and engaged about ensuring policies and laws protect both the digital natives and digital immigrants so they are not exploited.

If there aren’t already enough problems in the world cyber security is a real issue that everyone should believe is his or her responsibility to get better educated on and work to eliminate.

Process helps critical thinking

2010-04-30T12:57:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

The other night I was watching a movie about the life of the artist Jackson Pollock called “Pollock”. I am a fan of his work and IMHO, is worth adding to your bucket list to see one of his paintings in person. The movie has a scene where Pollock has moved to the Hamptons, sits in fields and paints for the next two years before he comes up with his disruptive approach to dripping paint on canvasses set on the floor. If Pollock had been startup today funded by Peggy Guggenheim’s venture capital firm he likely would have burned through all his cash while in stealth mode— lucky for us he wasn’t.   There is a quote that goes something like this…an art critic asks an artist,

“How long did it take for you to paint this painting?” The artist replies, “My whole life.”  

The analogy above is that deep critical thinking takes time. Or does it?   The speed of change required for companies today is amazing. I’ll list some of the dimensions that impact IT. IT to be creative solutions at faster paces and lower costs. Results are measured not just in quarters; in some industries results are measured on an hourly basis. Development cycle times pushed to three-month increments made up of two-week sprints. Startups look to be profitable in 12 months. Cyber problems arrive as zero-day events and require solutions immediately. A Zero day virus is a previously unknown computer virus or other malware for which specific antivirus software signatures are not yet available    

NJVC provides operations and sustainment (O&S) support for enterprises and, unlike Jackson Pollock, we are not a one-man show. NJVC is a partnership/team of users, customers and providers. The magic that ties the partnership together is process. As our tag line says, “We are driven by your mission.” NJVC’s playbook has us:  ·

Following processes diligently 
Measuring and reporting processes against key performance indicators
Constantly looking to improve people, process and technology creates the road to excellent execution
Working within cost and service level agreements

Disciplined process in an O&S environment also does something very interesting: it speeds up critical thinking. It does so in the way that agile development ensures that what is worked on has the greatest value to the product owner whether its a break fix or proactive solution to an issue that has not occured yet. Even better   disciplined process in an O&S environment work regardless of the underlying framework whether or not you use ITIL, COBIT, ISO, eTOM...

What makes this point exciting is that it critical thinking is needed and attainable throughout the IT life cycle, but the rules are same. It takes discipline.

Hadoop and GPUs

2010-04-19T17:35:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

It all started when I read an article on graphics processing unit network cards on engadget. GPUs have the capability to parallelize processing on a computer (PC or server). A variety of applications are being written, from enhancing full motion video to cracking passwords. One approach for programmers is NVIDIA’s compute unified device architecture. CUDA is a parallel computing architecture that works like a digital signal processor (DSP) or a specialized microprocessor with an optimized architecture for the fast operational needs of digital signal processing. GPU cards run from $99 - $399 and can provide huge performance improvements. The industry buzz around GPU is the ability to build a supercomputer for a fraction of the cost.

After reading these articles I thought how would this approach improve hadoop’s mapreduce? In the implementation of hadoop that uses a distribute file system, hdfs store datasets across many computers (nodes), collectively referred to as a “cluster.” Mapreduce is a framework for processing large datasets using nodes and is made up of:

Input – Dataset that you want to find identify features
Map – Maps the key based on the feature
Shuffle – Sort (pay the price to move the data around the network)
Reduce – List the pairs with the same key
Output – Aggregated list from the Reduce

Projects like Stanford’s mapreduce framework on graphics processors (MARs) had the very clever idea of treating the multi-processors on a computer (GPU) and treat it like a cluster to parallelize the mapreduce functions on the GPU, but have not expanded it across multiple nodes. Taking projects like MARs and expanding them it would be pretty exciting to have processing with servers connected via network fabric and at the server level, the GPU is clustering the CPU and memory.

For those of you who might ask about the network latency of the shuffle, there is another group of smart folks who have created novel interconnect strategies, like DCell versus star or tree schemas. Solutions like DCell interconnect nodes to nodes recursively and optimize the location of the map and shuffle phases to enhance mapreduce performance. My point is not to say that one way or the other is better, but there are many areas that can be optimized in distributed processing architectures. For example another trade space exists between discuss solid-state drive versus spinning disk and the discussion for optimization could be explored component by component.

If we step back from this problem, a pattern forms that I believe is worth stating the obvious:

The market is constantly improving the capabilities where data processing takes place at the network, server, storage, CPU and memory.

As we master the ability to make this orchestration transparent, there is much work to be done on how this will change the way we look at system design and distributed operations.

The future is now at various levels of maturity where operations will monitor power, cooling and the reliability of a problem and “automagically” orchestrate the components of class of service based on accounting or rating rules to process the problem across a portfolio of sensors, network fabrics, storage fabrics, desktop and servers?

In order to make this approach transparent it will require creation and updating of many pieces/parts to make this complex orchestration a sustainable reality.

I hope the payoff is "when a question is submitted to the system", what you get back is, "The answer."

Technology Roadmap's - What Why How and To-do

2010-04-08T10:26:00.002-04:00

As a continuation to my blog on, "Technology Roadmap Thoughts,"I wanted to continue the discussion of what you can do to predict where technology is heading. Looking at technology from the perspective of “what,” “why,” “how” and “to-do” allows for a relatively simple break down of the areas. Hopefully you will find value in this diagram for your business or organization:

The bullets below will give you some a quick insight into using this diagram:

• What

Know what your architectures are. Technology does not exist in a vacuum and will have to be work within your environment.
Understand the technological challenges against business/mission requirements. Technology at its best enables outcomes.
Have a pulse on the trends in your industry, as well as adjacent markets. This could give you company a competitive edge.
Understanding where your human capital plan is heading is critical. What are your demographics or globalization requirements? Think about how Baby Boomers and Generation X and Y will interact with the technology.

• Why

Technology is an enabler. Knowing your customer drivers will assist in focusing on meaningful technology insertions.
What is your industry direction? For example, is your industry trending toward consolidation or federation?
What is your company’s or agency’s competitive strategy? How easy is it supported by your industry’s direction?
What is the market cap of your industry? This provides the foundation of why it makes business sense to invest in a technology area.

• How

There is a huge difference between slide-ware engineering and deployment. How do you plan to implement your technology evolution? Will your users expect it to be gentle or disruptive?
The great equalizer is your budget plans. I am a big fan of agile development. Knowing your long-term affordability and sustainment costs will help you pick technology that your company or agency can afford, while supporting customer outcomes.
Technology alternatives are critical. We are all driven by bias, ego, time, what we know and what we don’t know. Keep an open mind and when you take one technology direction over another, understand and be able to defend why.

• To-do: The last step is building your technology roadmap action plan.

Analyze the information you collected.
Innovate. This will set you apart from your competitors.
Readiness level. At what point is the technology ready for your industry’s production system? Is this a mission-critical technology or one that puts capability over reliability?
Budget. Knowing what you can afford in IR&D, transition, training and support will govern and hone your capability to innovate.

The Internet is full of informative articles to help you build your technology roadmap. Consultants also are available to assist in this development. The more you can synthesize the required information and make it specific to your industry and your company’s or agency’s strategic plan, the more likely you will be in control of your future and the implementation of innovative technologies to keep you at the front of the pack. If you are looking for a “secret sauce,” it comes down to planning, discipline, diligence, measuring results and keeping up the effort over the long term.

Technology Roadmap Thoughts

2010-03-31T10:18:00.000-04:00

Charles Darwin via last.fm

One of my responsibilities at NJVC as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is overseeing the development of our Service Offering Technology Roadmaps. It is fascinating when you work with smart engineers to see what strategic predictions they believe will make a difference for our customers. Like many companies in our space, we will continually review, prioritize and reprioritize our list it to keep NJVC both relevant and ready to solve our customers ever-changing requirements.

When I mentally step back and look at the amount of technology changes coming down the pike across our portfolio of services during the next two to five years, I am astonished at the possibilies. In this blog entry I am not going to try to predict what technologies will become sticky or disruptive. In future blogs, however, I will be pick different technology areas and explore each of them in a focused way. I want to paint a broad landscape of what the technology canvass looks like from my lens. If you ever wonder how much change can happen in a short amount of time, think back two to five years ago. Was VOIP or social media mainstream in your organization? Did your company have a blog site? Were you thinking about SaaS or cloud computing? In 2005, Amazon first launched its Web service capability on utility computing. In 2006, Window’s Vista was deployed and the iPhone was launched in 2007.

Shift really does happen quickly and if someone writes about 2010 in 2015, they will likely have no problems creating new examples. There are many good companies staffed with smart employees who believe their products and services are strategic. The question is: Are there any predictors that a Chief Information Officer (CIO) or businessperson can use to navigate in this sea of change? Technology is global and technology is influencing:

Entertainment
Design
Business
Science & Medicine
Defense
Global Issues
Policy
Security and Privacy
Maturing of your digital fingerprint
Logistics
Culture
Number of years people having been using technology
Trends in demographics in the workforce
MORE!

Regardless of what it is influencing, technology needs to address channel distribution and go through the lifecycle of being developed and marketed so it has the right price and is able to gain market share. Technology also may displace another established one, and possibly reach the nirvana for technology that is becoming ubiquitous.

So what can you do? In the words of Charles Darwin, “Its not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the more intelligent, but the most responsive to change.” this translates to building agile business processes, organization, manufacturing, logistics and, importantly, technology practices that allow your business to leverage innovation better and faster than your competitors.

5 Questions about Managed Services

2010-03-25T10:31:00.000-04:00

Image by jisc_infonet via Flickr

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about Managed Services and developed five questions that I believe are useful for agencies or companies looking to outsource capabilities. I hope that the questions below can help guide you on your journey to transition to a managed service. These questions are simple, but the answers crystallize an understanding of your enterprise so you can explain the benefits and risks to a broad audience of stakeholders and help your agency or business make the best decision about using Managed Services. The five questions I would have you consider are:

Question 1
What is core to your business?
This is important because knowing what is core will help you guide what functions could be outsourced.

Question 2
Define success for the service you plan to outsource.
You need to develop a vision on investment, total cost of ownership or cost avoidance. Successful outsourcing has the best chance to succeed when expectations are shared between the outsource consumer and supplier.

Question 3
Do you have a partnership relationship with your managed service provider?
Managed Services is a commitment to make your agency or business work faster and be more cost effective. This is accomplished best when a partnership exists with your Managed Service Provider.

Question 4
Can you succinctly describe the transition of people, technology and business processes from where you are to where you want to be with your Managed Service Provider? Look for a Managed Service Provider that can work with you to create a transition plan that matches your requirements to minimize the risks and stress to your people, technology, processes that support your business or mission. Key will be your ability to work your Managed Service Provider to create and implement a communications plan before, during and after the service transition to ensure that you have a successful transition.

Question 5
Have you defined the skills required to manage an outsourced service?
The benefit of having a Managed Service is to change the roles and responsibilities that exist in your agency or company. Developing a role to communicate between the Managed Service Provider and the company when there are issues or when things are going well will be key to the success of this new way of doing business.

It might be a challenge to define what your business core is, but this is critical to understanding what you could potentially outsource. There is no right path to follow, as every agency or company is different and many variables exist concerning the current state of your IT environment.

Yahoo's proposal for hadoop security with Kerberos reviewed

2010-02-02T11:15:00.003-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

The IT industry is constantly remaking itself in new and novel ways by reinventing its past. I read Hadoop’s Hadoop Security Design, Owen O’Malley, Kan Zhang, Sanjay Radia, Ram Marti, and Christopher Harrell
Yahoo! {owen,kan,sradia,rmari,cnh}@yahoo-inc.com
October 2009 from the smart folks at Yahoo! that incorporates Kerberos (private key – something known/shared) into Hadoop’s distributed file systems (HDFS) and or MapReduce cluster. This is a good thing, but from my lens it's reflective of a prior implementation made by IBM’s Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) Distributed File System. The big difference that I perceive is the abstraction of complexity advanced by a decade of IT enhancements. I still remember seeing Kourberos code blocks in DCE-friendly code that were very complicated to write/modify that took a “better-than-average” bear developer to maintain. This time, it looks like the benefits of classes and code abstraction will allow for a broader group of developers to write secure code. In my blog entry, “Cloud Computing Revisited,” I reminisce more about DCE.

If the past is a reflection of the future, then we will likely revisit RFC 68.4 that integrated the key distribution center for Kerberos with PKI X.509, but this time it I believe it will be implemented in a service-orientated architecture implementation paradigm that can leverage all the OASIS standards like SAML and XACML.

The “So what?” is a vision where the enterprise has pervasive data encryption at rest with role-based and or attribute-based access control across all platforms.

Sense Networks

2010-01-21T19:07:00.000-05:00

Image by earthhopper via Flickr

I was reading an article by Richard Mangus titled, “Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009,” published on December 8, 2009. I am intrigued by sense networks and the capability to conduct predictive analytics using cell phone GPS. I want to cite one of the sense networks principals I like:

“People should receive a meaningful benefit in exchange for sharing data Meaningful benefits include compelling applications to help manage life better, or personalized services based on anonymous learning from ‘users like me.’ People should be able to enjoy the benefits of these services simply in exchange for their data.”

The usage of real-time visual heat maps to generate nightclub hot spots that are then linked to Yelp and Google is both cool and novel. I wonder how long it will take for these capabilities to become viral and are used in demonstrations, rallies and crisis events. In the case of Haiti's earthquake imagine heat maps showing peoples locations across the Web in real time, and integrating features of a Trapster that shows where first responders are located in context to an event. On the Web and via their cell phones, the world could see a events played out in real-time with video and micro-blog commentary focused on helping those in need.

The scale of the number of cell phones out there is amazing. According to Wikipedia, the International Telecommunication Union estimated that mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide would reach approximately 4.6 billion by the end of 2009. According to the World Bank’s world development indicators, there were 6,692,030,277 people on the planet in 2008. Discounting the timeframes used for collecting the data; this means that there are roughly enough phones for 69 percent of the world’s population. Let’s say for discussion that the percentage is between 34 percent and 69 percent—it is still amazing. The diagram below shows the distribution of phones by geography. The darker colors indicate the areas with larger numbers of cell phone users.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Haiti who are dealing with the earthquake that hit January 12, 2012. According to Wikipedia, the Haitians owned 2.4 million cell phones (as of May 2007) or a 30 percent coverage rate with a project population of 9,035,536 (according to a CIA fact book). I wonder if using capabilities like heat maps from sense networks could have helped officials in obtaining situational awareness of where their populations are distributed and where people are moving to after the disaster until the cell phone batteries run out of power because their power grids are offline.

It is ironic that technology that helps us day to day is fragile during times of crisis.

Data Management Maturity Modeling

2009-12-31T08:56:00.000-05:00

I am working on revamping an approach for modeling data management maturity that is based on SEI CMM's key process areas (KPA) areas. This approach can assist any enterprise for assessing the maturity of their data management activities. The approach measures the dimensions as shown below:

Data management
Data usage
Data administration
Decision making
Data operations
Data development

What occurred to me today is the integration of another approach that I have used to assess systems called Rapid Portfolio Methodology (RPM). RPM is a holistic engineering approach to compare existing systems in an enterprise based on the following lanes:

•    Project management lane
•    Business lane
•    Data lane
•    Technical lane

RPM provides a set of reports that compares the surveyed system based on life cycle costs, technical value and business value in an apples to apples way. The methodology can be done relatively quickly and provides a consistent low cost way to represent the As-Is of a company’s systems assets.

By combining the 2 approaches together the goal is IT can build defensible business cases on the expected business values for improving data management writ large and or at a department level.

It has been my observation that to often the two are not linked together. Hopefully next year I will provide a case study of the benefits for this approach.

Wishing my readers a Happy New Year,

Paul

Entity Resolution and Insight

2009-12-10T12:13:00.000-05:00

Image by naughty architect via Flickr

This blog is a reflection of a discussion I had with Jeff Jonas and Ann Huang of NJVC over dinner talking about entity resolution.

Words help us to communicate, and the focus of this blog is to point out my assertion about another benefit of the tipping point for entity collapsing described in Jeff Jonas’s blog.

This blog reflects my current thinking on how a user’s insight and data observations are interrelated. The basis for my thinking comes from my view on how a user has an epiphany that changes their worldview. Another way to put it is when a person changes his or her understanding (perception of reality in the present moment) based on some information that strengthens, weakens or alters his or her initial argument or assertion.

I don’t believe computers can have insight, but I do believe they can calculate a thought. Below is my argument contrasting “insight” and “thought:”

Thought

Two average adults and a computer are tasked with answering the question 2 + 2 = X, there is a high likelihood the answer of 4 would be the answer because it is pre-known and the answer is time independent or is always 4.

Insight

Two average adults and a computer are tasked with answering the following question: Three people are on the subway (an elderly person, a late-term pregnant woman and a child), and there is only one seat available.. Who gets the seat? There is a reasonable chance that an answer could be generated, but who gets the seat could be different based on the rules of the computer and the perspective of the adults answering the question. As we add more information (e.g., observations) about the use case the answer can change. It is likely you have formed your own answer so I’ll add some various assertions.

Would any of this additional information change your answer? The elderly man is carrying oxygen tank, the late-term pregnant woman looks flush or the child has leg braces.

The key point is the answer is not pre-known and can’t be predicted until the event happens.

Lets take another simple example about entity resolution around names. Database 1 made up of 100,000 entries has a record, “Robert Smith of 123 Coconut Lane, Miami, Florida”. Database 2 with 10,000,000 entries has a record, “Bob Smith of 123 Coconut Lane.” Database 3 made up of 25,000,000 entries has a record, “Robert Smith with a car that has a 2009 Chevy Camero with vehicle Id (VIN) of 1M8GDM9AXKP042788.” Database 4 with 2,100,000 entries has a record, “VIN is registered in Miami to address 123 Coconut Lane, Miami FL 33165.”

Lets ask hypothetical questions that build on complexity:

Entity resolve all persons in Database 1 and Database 2. I would assert the answer is “pre-known” since there is either a match or not a match regardless of the computational complexity required to match the records.
Will Robert Smith see the Transformers movie? (A major character from the movie is a transforming Chevy Camero). Depending on your worldview about the data, the predicted answer could be different until the event happens. The point that I am trying to make is some questions are hard if not impossible to based on the available data.
Will Robert Smith speed today on the Dolphin Expressway going home from work? The answer to this question is not pre-known and falls into probability based on past behaviors and the likelihood statistics around Camero drivers and drivers in general that use the Dolphin Expressway.
Should Robert Smith get a ticket for speeding even if a traffic officer does not observe him? This is a policy question much like that about traffic cameras and based on social beliefs can be different.
Do we position a traffic officer on Robert Smith’s work route? This is a policy question that adds a tinge of profiling and privacy. The point of this question is to show how policy can influence technology.

Let’s take question #5 and create an environment of rich information sharing that is in the realm of doable:

We are going to entity resolve that Robert Smith’s auto insurance company has done the analysis on what type of driver he is.
Information about Robert Smith’s work and home addresses.
The Chevy dealership shows he wears out tires quicker than normal.
His, car computer show his gas mileage usage (he has a lead foot).
The traffic ticket system keeps records of his speeding tickets.

The output of this query feeds a model that the local authority’s logistics system could use to say where traffic officers should be placed to monitor and ticket likely speeders.

In my mind, the difference between question 5 and question 6 is the richness of the entity resolution allowed the question to move from worldview (belief systems) to a probability. The diagram below attempts to show what I have stated:

My current view is computer systems are not equipped to answer worldview questions that require beliefs, but are more than capable of answering statistical and pre-known answers at a scale and performance that is no less than amazing.

This leads me to my last point. It is the data that defines what type of questions can be answered and the precision of the answer is predicated on understanding the pedigree and confidence of the data. The underlying logic of computers is binary and is based on state logic that is a 0 or a 1 and, generally speaking, binary can’t do 1.33.

The “so what” as it relates to information sharing is that as the state of the art for entity resolution improves, technologists need to help users/analysts/stakeholders understand where the answer fits in the continuum of pre-known, probabilistic and worldview.

INSA Leadership Dinner Reflections on Cyber Security

2009-11-15T07:02:00.022-05:00

I had the pleasure of being invited by Lisa Marcus from Mark Logic to attend INSA’s leadership dinner on 2 November 2009. Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), was supposed to be the speaker, but was unable to attend. Jim Lewis, Director of The Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Chris Ingliss, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, provided the evening’s presentation instead. At the dinner, INSA provided everyone with a copy of the cyber white paper on Addressing Cyber Security through Public-Private Partnership: An Analysis of Existing Models. A few days after the evening’s presentations and reading the paper, I am left with the curiosity to explore two concepts presented about cyber security. One concept was a comparison that an association could be made between the behaviors of cyber security and the rules, experiences and policies that has been used around governing arms (e.g., weapons) dealing or the arms race. The other concept presented that evening was around the idea that there are protected borders or boundaries related to the online world of the Internet that are aligned to U.S. borders. Understanding these topics and their implications regarding law, policy and privacy are keys for the development of a unified set of national and cyber global policies.

Let’s start with borders for cyber protection in the virtual world. In order to understand borders I am using the following definition as a framework: U.S. boundaries include the continental United States, all the variations of territories (e.g., incorporated unorganized, unincorporated organized, commonwealth status, unincorporated unorganized), military bases and our Embassies that are in physical locations beyond the continental United States. (CONUS). My understanding is that a U.S. user in a foreign country that uses his or her company’s virtual private network (VPN) to access data is somewhat in the United States, but falls under restrictions such as International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). To keep it simple I’ll describe the virtual world in two layers– physical and logical. Probably million miles of fiber and copper wire exist at the physical level.—or thousands of routers, switches, servers, operating systems, storage devices, software applications, satellites, antennas and their frequency spectrum that allow for users to interconnect globally, owned by private business and governments that care for the configuration, design, security and maintenance of the physical environment and logical environments. A layer on top of the physical topology is the logical topology that governs access to IP addresses/DNS names and/or phone numbers that define end points of the logical network—whether it is your cell phone, wire line, utility, private Intranet or the public Internet access point. These internetworked networks allow for a global set of users to make phone calls, manufacture products, monitor machines, do financial transactions of all types and go online every day. In some ways I think of the boundaries of the virtual network as akin to airspace versus land ownership. A simplistic example is an aircraft flying between two U.S. destinations. The routing of the aircraft can enter Canadian airspace because of flow and or air safety conditions and is allowed because of air traffic policy just as two networked computer in the United States have the possibility of their packets being routed through a Canadian physical environment. Here are some more permutations: a non-U.S. aircraft can pass through U.S. airspace on its way to Canada, a non-U.S. end device can be routed through U.S. networks as it’s trying to connect to a Canadian end device, and any non-U.S. end device can connect to a U.S. end device and vice versa. Any national policy developed to protect U.S. cyber borders needs to account for all these conditions and probably other permutations that I have not listed. To say the least, if it’s not complicated there are many details to understand. A national policy whether federal, state and/or municipal would need to be clear about how military, police (federal or state) and private industry can serve to protect National security’s, business interests’ and individuals’ rights while lawfully respecting privacy and property domain and a whole bunch of regulations. The INSA paper proposes modeling public-private partnership (P3) as a way to deal with this complexity.

The second area of the evening’s presentation that I want to explore is the comparison of cyber to arms. One military strategy used to protect U.S. interests is our military strength that was fueled by the Cold War. In the Cold War era, mutual annihilation from nuclear weapons was the deterrent from everyone blowing each other up, thank goodness. A turning point in world history was the global realization that occurred when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Are the Super Powers prepared and capable to implement the equivalent of a cyber Hiroshima or cyber Nagasaki in order to create stasis? Taking the Hiroshima example that would be the equivalent of taking 4.7 square miles (12 km2) square miles of a high-value target area and nullifying its existing virtual capability forever. This scenario includes the computers and mobile appliances of men, woman, children, business, hospitals, local government, utilities, police, etc…At a different end of the spectrum of the nuclear threats are the non-state actors, organizations and terrorist cells that use asymmetrical tactics to move their positions (e.g., ideology, tribal, crime, etc…) forward. Their tactics include using fear and terror by lethally striking at combatants and non-combatants. The implementation of their terror may or may not use electronic technology, but the effects are the same. A national cyber policy needs to be sweeping to account for many different types of actors and their tactics and techniques.

For purposes of this blog I will illustrate a National Cyber Policy as a pyramid likened to a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where cyber rights and privacy are at the top and cyber defense and cyber warfare are at the bottom. Our goal should be to focus on the upper layers versus having to spend time at the basics.

As I reflect about the dinner topics and my diagram used to organize my thoughts, I am struck at the complexity that will be required to create a set of national policies and regulations, let alone an agency, that can articulate a clear set of messages that is easily understood and can be communicated to a myriad of stakeholders (private, public and government) participants. What’s at stake every day we delay? Cyber armies, cyber mercenaries, cyber hackers, cyber thieves and other cyber ne’er do wells preying on the virtual community.

As cyber technology advances to protect digital immigrants and digital natives in all their personal and professional roles, will be important to mature cyber diplomacy used to govern cyber behaviors of nations and state actors?

On the heels of cyber diplomacy is a world where the common man and woman are beginning to think about their digital footprints, we need to think about national cyber estimates just as we think about the impacts of agriculture or a country’s manufacturing capability. This is more than shift happens http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/ computer scientists are being created in non-U.S. countries for the purpose of information defense, information warfare, hacking, etc. Just as we have digital footprints, we need to understand their digital footprints. I remember back in 1993 when Johns Hopkins University offered a class in understanding how computer viruses worked and provided a lab exercise to create a virus. On the Web today are the training and tools to become a hacker. Will public policy have students learn this way or will public schools, corporations and universities seek out brilliant young minds and give them focused at a young age like we do with athletes?

This is a complex topic and I'll leave how thoughts on how cyber does not live alone and can be combined with kinetic warfare to make even more challenging.

Thanks Lisa, I enjoyed the dinner as it filled my stomach and my mind.

Having an agile day

2009-10-30T13:03:00.000-04:00

Image by Kerry Buckley via Flickr

First I love the agile joke that goes like this,
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, "Hey, why don't we open a restaurant?" The pig looks back at the chicken and says, "Good idea, what do you want to call it?" The chicken thinks about it and says, "Why don't we call it 'Ham and Eggs'?" "I don't think so," says the pig, "I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved."

Back in ~2002 I got turned on to extreme programming (XP) development that is one of the agile methodologies. I first used it on a program that was having issues delivering code on time, with low defect and had a large back log of change requests (CRs)/ discrepancy report (DRs)... Initially it was the idea of pair programming that looked like it would help to improve code quality, but it was the overall framework that paid dividends. Both the development team, management and the customer got into a good dialogue that led to better estimating of capabilities between each release.   Long story short it really helped.

I have been around XP, SCRUM and Feature Driven Design (FDD) and like aspects of all of them. They are not a panacea nor is using them an excuse for sloppy documentation, the opposite is the case. To do agile well requires a discipline team.

Agile is based on a manifesto for software development http://agilemanifesto.org/.

I like bringing the principles into my day. I have marked up some of the principles to show how universal they are :

•    Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful ~~software~~ ill in the blank>
•    Work~~ing software~~ is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
•    ~~Working software is the principal measure of progress~~
•    Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
•    Close, daily cooperation between Customers’s ~~business people~~ and Provider’s ~~developers~~
•    Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication ~~(co-location)~~
•    Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
•    Continuous attention to ~~technical~~ excellence ~~and good design~~
•    Simplicity
•    Self-organizing teams
•    Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

For fun the next time you are in a meeting ask your self who are the pigs and chickens? Said another way, how much skin does each person in the meeting have in the game. The litmus test is pigs have their bacon on the line. There is a place for both and one is not better than the other, but knowing who is who is helpful. What is the perspective of topic (e.g., User Story)? Is it from the customer’s view or the providers? If there are a number of problems that need to be racked and stacked? Use the point system of the Fibonacci sequence to impress your friends and rank problems. The sequence is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... 1 being easy and 21 being really hard.

Most important in my book, at the end what usable product that is being delivered?

I hope that you have an agile day to.

GEOINT 2009 Reflections

2009-10-22T11:43:00.000-04:00

Another GeoInt has passed. As I sit on a United CRJ 700 aimed East, I leave San Antonio very upbeat with the knowledge that NJVC and its partners (old and new) had the opportunity to talk, raise a glass together, and break bread about new and novel ways we will work together to provide adaptive, agile, and cost effective solutions.

My assessment is that NJVC had a great event and I would like to give thanks to all the NJVC team that helped to make it happen.

One evening I was talking to Matt Langan who creates got geoint for USGIF and he was explaining to me about his Friday’s Food for Thought blogs. It’s a great idea and I told him that I would use his idea in my next blog. This is where I’ll step out my typical blog and I will write about my experience versus my normal technology focused blogs.

I like GEOINT. When I step back and ask why from a macro lens view it is a convergence of participants who care about GeoInt. Over the week it is a happening focused on a great mission. Hats off to Keith Masback and his team for putting on another great event. This year I had the opportunity to talk with many intelligent dedicated professionals that care about GeoInt and how it enables their customer’s to address their mission and business challenges. It is energizing when you meet a person who has a passion for their solutions.

My comment on the sessions is that they reflect a point in time and if I were on a trail I would see them as hash marks for navigation. A white hash mark on a tree is just as important as blue hash mark on a tree. The difference is how to use them to get to your destination.

I had the good fortune to meet Skunk Baxter and it was great to meet someone who had a balanced perspective of how fortunate we are to be Americans. For those that are born here it is a winning lottery ticket. It’s cool to know that I listened to his records as a kid and he works in my profession. You can be what ever you want to be and that is what makes America great and I hope he achieves his goal of being a poet warrior.

It would go without saying that all the events were great, but I am biased to say that the NJVC party at the Cowboy's Dancehall rocked with professional bull riders (PBR) gave an awesome show.

Playing at the Allder Golf Classic event is a worthy cause and the weather was perfect.

While I was at the BAE’s party at Howl at the Moon I tweeted the event. Jerry Rhoads who could not attend tweeted back requesting we have the dueling piano guys play Don McLean’s American Pie. Jerry it was a big hit and great suggestion. The power of technology when used for good continues to delight me.

What strike me comical is how many people I met in San Antonio whose offices are within 5 miles of mine, but it takes a once a year trek to meet. I am hopeful that as USGIF's got geoint evolves we as a community can leverage social networks and get together based on self-interests and mission problems locally and virtually versus popping on a plane. I like the idea that GeoInt event happens all year versus once a year. I am taking a personal action to get better at reaching out.

If you were there and we did not get a chance to meet or see NJVC's cloud demo feel free to contact me. Heck even if you weren’t there the offer is open.

Corporate IT Needs to be diligent

2009-09-28T10:57:00.001-04:00

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I had the pleasure of running into Albert Lulushi who is an old friend and a CIO at one of L3’s divisions. We spent time catching up on old times as well as sharing our challenges past and present when it comes to providing IT services to our companies. It appears that some of our problems are universal. Issues like Blackberry phone bills, users wanting admin rights to their desktops, providing a solution to remote users...

At NJVC we follow a service delivery model just like what we provide to our customers scaled to support our budget and polices. Our IT team does a great job of keeping our company secure; lowering costs each year and improving service.

Companies richest resources are their people who are becoming more entrenched in using pervasive computing technologies in their personal lives. These include email, mobile apps, Flickr, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, blogs, Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, Bing, on-line games, etc. These technologies are redefining the way we communicate and the expectation of what is personal and work related. Add to this the digital divide. Corporate IT needs to support both digital natives and digital immigrants. There are many competent workers who have not embraced being digital natives. IT needs to support the continuum.

Corporate IT administrators face a daunting challenge to manage the usage of web 2.0 on the Internet or Intranets. The benefits of connectivity and social networks cannot be denied based on the Internet’s success. Unfortunately web 2.0 has the potential to open operations security (OPSEC) leaks. This includes exploiting; identities, creativity information, information quality, safety, data spillage, digital piracy, privacy, and information overload to name a few issues. On the open Internet it is difficult to moderate events. Standards for security are still maturing that allow for a variety of cyber attacks to be implemented with varying degrees of success that include: Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF), Cross Gadget Request Forgery (CGRF), Phishing, Insufficient Anti-Automation defenses to stop an attacker from automating attacks. User needs to review the end use license agreements (EULA) and website user agreement & privacy policy to ensure they understand what they are signing up to and how this relates to their corporate technology policies.

I have never subscribed to the practice of security through obscurity. Add to this the fact that I know a range of smart people who have been victims to cyber assaults makes cyber defense an issue that has to be dealt with head on.

Training, risk management, following IT best practices and diligence are key to a good offense.

Keep safe.

References
http://www.digitalnative.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.secure-enterprise20.org/node/38

Thoughts for Countering Analytic Bias

2009-09-08T19:52:00.021-04:00

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Dan Doney showed me a a very good presentation on countering analytic bias. One of the points the presentation made is on the usage of recommendation engines as a mechanism to assist in overcoming bias and group think. Current technologies focused around search that include;

Key word
Tags (folksonomies)
Concepts (ontologies)
Popularity

The challenge with the list above is the notion that users are figuratively chained to the bias of what they know versus what they don’t know (e.g., novel) assuming it is relevant to their question. The challenge with relevance is that it is not static and is subject to change based on context.

While this area of focus is of great importance to improving the foundation of analytic tradecraft there is much that can be incorporated into other areas that include: service centers, management, trade space development….)

Information Retrieval and Recommendation models rely on the same 3 basic steps:

Model the information space (create index)
Model the user’s need
Rank the matches (information value estimation)

If we focus on the user’s need then the question we need to ask beyond categorization of a users role is the how to identify information that creates insight. One of the reasons that experts in a domain area are more interested in novel information than other information dimensions is because novel (fresh, new) can be a trigger to insight.

As we look to model user’s need we need to provide tools that help to differentiate between facts finding and insight.

Here is a fictitious example;

Problem:

User calls help desk because they forgot their password,
Tier 1 help desk admin: uses key word search on terms: password reset Standard Operating Procedure (SOP),
Key word search engine returns 3 pages of hits with password reset SOP at the top of the list
Tier 1 admin follows password reset SOP to finish help desk request - happy user
…

Insight

Users who have not logged onto their system in 20 or greater days have 60% probability of forgetting their password
Proposed improvement: For users with mobile devices send email with password best IT best practices email to users who have not logged onto the system in 10 days…

The simple example above shows bias can be bound by answering the question presented versus addressing root causes and being proactive to reduce the need for password resets.

The question is how do we get computers to identify insight?
What programming could have provided the same root cause analysis?

My belief is there are 2 areas that developing new solutions will help.

Visualization
Self aware data

Today users are chained to their monitor paradigm that primarily presents information in 2D. Large data sets provide information overload. There are products coming onto the market focusing on enabling spiritual machines that will allow for users to partition key word, recommendations and tags/concepts beyond the limits of the screen. I have been thinking about this for a while and hope to demo my use case in the near future so stay tuned.

The second is the maturation of self-aware data. While I was visiting Appistry and talking to their team this idea jelled in my head. One of the benefits of Web 2.0 has been the development of mashups using AJAX within the web browser. At it core AJAX is middleware for browsers. There is no denying the power that Mashups have done a great job in allowing developers to create rich web interfaces for users. With the advent of clouds I believe we will see the equivalent of mashups move to the data layer.

The use case would be something like this. As data is changed, read, updated and/or deleted (CRUD) the data will go enrich itself by key words, tags, concepts, popularity, and recommendations both in near-real time and retrospectively. When a system actor (e.g., user or computer) queries the system via a rich api the data should come back and say how about these other elements.

At the data end of the data center has much greater bandwidth and processing power. It seems plausible to me as we move to the cloud and take advantage of global file structures, distributed data bases, and parallel processing the ability to link data at the storage layer becomes easier. This will create huge metadata indexes that will need to be managed, but that is for another blog.

As we move toward making spiritual machines a reality NJVC will be working on developing innovations in both visualization and self aware data.

ITIL and losing weight

2009-08-02T19:34:00.013-04:00

I am very proud of the work NJVC does in ITIL and Service Management and have been thinking about blogging about it for a while. The idea for this blog came to me awhile back and I thought when I reached losing ~25 lbs would be a good time to publish. The idea behind this blog was to show how an activity could be used as a metaphor to understand why ITIL is a critical to making an operations environment more efficient.

My personal business case is to be healthy. The implementation has been to modify my diet and exercise more all at a low cost with an implementation that I can sustain. The end goal is to achieve my target weight and sustain it. In my case I can’t fire myself and get a new body so the constraint was working with my capabilities

My market analysis was to look in the mirror to validate that I needed to diet and get more exercise.

Key point: Never under estimate the power of common sense!
Key point: Asking for help from an expert will save you time and money!

An ITIL best practice is to start simple. Putting in all sorts of metrics at the beginning that I could not support is not the way to go. The key is continued improvement as you master one metric add another. The objective is to add metrics that support your business case. More is not necessarily better. Building on success is better than documenting failures. As I said I couldn’t fire myself and get another body so I need to work with what I have.

The tipping point is when an activity goes from new or novel to part of the daily routine and your monitoring progress.

Key point: There is no free lunch; it takes time management and discipline for success.

Like any business, I just could not stop what I am doing and focus all my attention on getting into shape. There are competing priorities that have to be managed and ITIL provided a framework that helps with the old adage; Practice makes perfect.

There are 5 key volumes of ITIL v3. Wikipedia or Pink Elephant are great places to learn more about ITIL or give us a call at NJVC. I have transcribed them below:

1. Service Strategy: As the center and origin point of the ITIL Service Lifecycle, the Service Strategy volume provides guidance on clarification and prioritization of service provider investments in services. More generally, Service Strategy focuses on helping IT organizations improve and develop over the long term. In both cases, Service Strategy relies largely upon a market-driven approach. Key topics covered include service value definition, business case development, service assets, market analysis, and service provider types. Processes covered include service portfolio management, demand management, and IT financial management.

2. Service Design: The ITIL Service Design volume provides good practice guidance on the design of IT services, processes, and other aspects of the service management effort. Significantly, design within ITIL is understood to encompass all elements relevant to technology service delivery, rather than focusing solely on design of the technology itself. As such, Service Design addresses how a planned service solution interacts with the larger business and technical environments, service management systems required to support the service, processes which interacts with the service, technology, and architecture required to support the service, and the supply chain required to support the planned service. Within ITIL, design work for an IT service is aggregated into a single Service Design Package (SDP). Service Design Packages, along with other information about services, are managed within the service catalog. Processes covered in this volume include service level management, availability management, capacity management, IT service continuity management, information security management, supplier management, and service catalog management.

3. Service Transition: Service transition relates to the delivery of services required by the business into live/operational use, and often encompasses the "project" side of IT rather than "BAU" (Business As Usual). This area also covers topics such as managing changes to the "BAU" environment. Topics include Service Asset and Configuration Management, Transition Planning and Support, Release and deployment management, Change Management, Knowledge Management, as well as the key roles of staff engaging in Service Transition.

4. Service Operation: Best practice for achieving the delivery of agreed levels of services both to end-users and the customers (where "customers" refer to those individuals who pay for the service and negotiate the SLAs). Service Operations is the part of the lifecycle where the services and value is actually directly delivered. Also the monitoring of problems and balance between service reliability and cost etc are considered. Topics include balancing conflicting goals (e.g. reliability versus cost etc), Event management, incident management, problem management, request fulfillment, access management, service desk. The functions include technical management, application management, operations management and Service Desk as well as, responsibilities for staff engaging in Service Operation.

5. Continual Service Improvement (CSI): Aligning and realigning IT services to changing business needs (because standstill implies decline).

The goal of Continual Service Improvement is to align and realign IT Services to changing business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to the IT services that support the Business Processes. The perspective of CSI on improvement is the business perspective of service quality, even though CSI aims to improve process effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness of the IT processes through the whole lifecycle. To manage improvement, CSI should clearly define what should be controlled and measured.

CSI needs to be treated just like any other service practice. There needs to be upfront planning, training and awareness, ongoing scheduling, roles created, ownership assigned, and activities identified to be successful. CSI must be planned and scheduled as process with defined activities, inputs, outputs, roles and reporting.

This is not to say that ITIL is the only framework. There are other frameworks (e.g., COBIT, CMMI, eTOM, and ISO) that should be considered as you look to developing an environment of Service Excellence.

As NJVC’s tag line says, “Driven by your mission.”

Requirements Days 2009 - Ft. Huachuca

2009-07-27T08:08:00.013-04:00

Image by alohateam via Flickr

At DoDIIS 2009 in Orlando Florida Major General John Custer's keynote address included an invitation to the attendees to come to hear the emerging requirements from United States Army Intelligence Center (USAIC), at Ft. Huachuca’s 2009 Requirements Days. The purpose of the conference was to provide a broad audience the opportunity to hear USAIC’s requirements and allow the attendees to provide conceptual and nontraditional solutions to USAIC in areas of interest.

Army’s objective Operations tempo is to identify new requirements; develop new capabilities; train the soldiers to operate and maintain the capability; and deliver onto the battlefield with Doctrine Organization Training Materiel Leadership Personnel (DOTLMPF) as fast as possible.

USAIC is looking for cutting edge ideas and emerging capabilities to help solve the challenges faced by the Army in an increasingly complex operational environment. The priorities and concerns are focused on enabling warfighters to efficiently dominate the battlefield.

In the words of Major General John Custer,

"You are either an agent for positive change or an insidious element of inertia!!!"

Spiritual Machines revisited - Wearable Displays

2009-07-19T21:52:00.015-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

In a previous blog I wrote about spiritual machines that included the following bullet point:

Eyeglasses that beam images onto the users' retinas to produce virtual reality will be developed. They will also come with speakers or headphone attachments that will complete the experience with sounds. These eyeglasses will become a new medium for advertising as advertising will be wirelessly transmitted to them as one walks by various business establishments.

As I was doing my regular technology research I came across a company called Microvision that was awarded $3.2 Million Contract by U.S. Air Force to Advance Development of Lightweight, See-Through Color Eyewear Display.

Based on the investments in this technology I have developed some use cases that I would like to explore.

An enabler for this technology is pico projection. We would like to determine the usability of pico projectors integrated with our blackberries so employees can give presentations without having to carry their laptops.
Pursue developing a use case to integrate our Blackberries with wearable displays so our Tier 1 technicians can roam around our facilities seeing staff do their work and enhance our customer service by being seen. During the day we can send trouble tickets to them – they can go to person’s office/cube or resolve the ticket remotely. I would like to see if the display would allow technicians look up, view FAQs and other service desk activities.
For staff giving presentation provide the capability for personal teleprompters
Provide customer resource management information about contacts during meetings

Hopefully we will be able to get a chance to work through these use cases and provide business value.

In the words of Yogi Berra, The difference between theory and practice is. In practice its different.

Data Center Modeling Thoughts

2009-07-17T19:59:00.013-04:00

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The need for more robust and greener data centers within the Federal Government continues to grow. Because of the long lead-time agencies need to make decisions about their future capacity needs with the belief they won’t exceed their existing data centers footprints capabilities today. We have passed the 10-year mark for many data centers and their power; space and HVAC requirements continue to grow without abatement. This is independent of outside forces that include growth of communities that are taxing power grids. In order for decision makers to make the best decisions possible they will need to capture and conceptualize the data in a way that clearly shows the trade space of options.

An approach to data center analysis allows the data center capabilities to be characterized and projected by four key process indicators (KPIs) shown in the bullets below. These KPIs provide foundational data for decision makers to model outcomes as they make long term and short term investment strategies in support of their data center facilities. The dimensions that comprise the KPIs include:

Modeling Systems

Compute demand
User base
Usage curves
Transaction profiles
Usage patterns
License costs

Modeling Facilities

Plant costs
Cooling costs
Energy usage
Support costs

Modeling Hardware

Energy profiles
Reliability
Capacity
Performance
Maintenance costs
Load

Modeling Human Capital

Labor costs
Skills
Training

This framework approach uses four model projections:

Analytical: Calculable and empirically verifiable through formulaic models
Structured: Uniform and machine describable structures
Workflow: Representations that describe or prescribe a process, often generate outputs (alerts, nested processes…) using procedural modeling
Conceptual: Showing relationships and inference of entity within a network model

These models can be projected against the data center’s performance, capacity, energy and personnel requirements. With a robust pedigree and lineage meta data model users can understand the impacts of changes over time. For example the assumptions made today will likely not be the same in the future. In addition the model will likely change as a greater understanding of the environment is modeled. Having a system that can show when and what changed is invaluable. This enhances testing what if scenarios driven from changing technology, business/ mission needs, funding and, environmental considerations.

Additional analytic power can be added by incorporating “beliefs or bias” to the model. This adds a more sophisticated understanding of the environment as models are projected. These dimensions could include behaviors of contracts (cost to market, cost to run and duration), regulations, policies, and desired service level objectives (SLOs) and service level agreements (SLAs).

I believe this approach can be a valuable tool in the Operations Executives toolbox.

Please contact me if you are interested in further information.

Customer Satisfaction

2009-07-17T08:51:00.015-04:00

I was spending time with Chris Arroyo one of our key Customer Satisfaction Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) at NJVC and he motivated me to write this blog.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction is a core to who we are. Key process indicators (KPIs) are a key part of the NJVC's secret sauce for providing best of class services. Whether it’s running an enterprise service desk, media generation or providing an IT service. In this blog I will highlight the three dimensions of customer satisfaction that enable quality. They are:

• Services
• Processes
• Relationships

The goal of Services is to meet and or exceed expectations. This is the soft side of Customer Satisfaction because it is subjective to what the customer believes they should have. The challenge for both parties is communicate what the expectations are. This works best when the service provider and service consumer work as a partnership.

Quality of Processes is different from Services in that the objective here is to meet and or exceed defined service level agreements (SLAs). This is an iterative process that both parties need to work together so that over time the SLA are refined as well as the upstream and downstream business processes so that the measurements collected and analyzed are key to understanding the sensitivities of business and or mission capability.

Quality of Relationships provides the mechanism for increasing customer service awareness both internally and externally. Continuous training and development accompanied by a solid customer relationship management (CRM) system that includes a knowledge base that focuses on the customers business and mission are a foundation to accomplish this KPI. Have a culture that provides constant communications is keystone to success.

Once the three components of Customer Satisfaction are in place the keystone to success is metrics collection and using Business Intelligence (BI) to continually analyze results to look for areas of improvement.

Thoughts on Content Security

2009-07-13T11:04:00.032-04:00

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Edward Merrill, President and CEO, Granite Gate Corporation said, “Our enemies are not building up massive resources for an attack; they are attacking in millions of small ways every day”.   I will use his insiteful statement as a launching off point for this blog on content security? This is a complex problem. There are at least 6 fundamental building blocks that we need to solve together in a scalable and maintainable way to address content security that include,

1. A scalable Identity system
2. Standards framework that integrate software tool vendors
3. Security classification policies
4. Search engines that support multiple types of data
5. Reference implementations
6. Ease of use

For systems that support information requiring access control it goes without saying that if the information system can't identify who a user/system actor is then the system will have challenges applying an access control mechanism whether it is role or attribute based...

Users cover a range of role types and are faced with a range of information options from overabundance of data to sparse information that they need to assess and act on. Regardless of how sophisticated the system implementation is our grey matter makes assumptions about where the data/ information comes from, why it was added, who has used it, and how it has changed. This is called the Pedigree and Lineage of the data/ information. Pedigree and Lineage is crucial in order to understand the derivation of information and its state across the dimension of time. Assimilating all this information allows users discriminate the fit of data in their decision processes including all the biases human beings brings to bear. The challenge faced in implementation is how do we get systems to process like our grey matter. The current technology strategy is to use metadata and or tagging the data. Depending on when the system was built the concept of meta data and tagging abstraction may or may not have been a priority of the developers. Even if it was a priority the standards they followed run the range from proprietary to an actual standard making it difficult to normalize Pedigree and Lineage across a corpus of data.

In our ever-shrinking world, global networking is bringing us closer together in both time and diversity. Take a look at Security classification on Wikipedia to see this issue from a global perspective. Risk is a different perspective. Understanding the policies, tribal morays, public law… for disclosure and access is not a trivial activity and is being made more difficult as we enable the capability to share more information. The long pole in the tent for defining risk is ease of use. If we don’t define the risk via security and quality markings in the context of Pedigree and Lineage then you can only act on the data/ information with the precision provided.

The challenge we face is what is good enough? This is an exciting topic that I believe the keystone to solving is a solid framework for defining Pedigree and Lineage.

Cloud Anti-patterns

2009-06-30T20:52:00.006-04:00

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I had my head in the clouds this week, not in the existentialist view that would have me bring out my dog-eared copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, but as a technology problem. I am curious that as more clouds get deployed, what will the cloud anti-patterns be?

For those that don’t follow anti-patterns. An anti-pattern is a design pattern that appears obvious but is ineffective or far from optimal in practice. In general there must be at least two key elements present to formally distinguish an actual anti-pattern from a simple bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea and it has been documented at least 3 times.

Anti-patterns have refactored solution(s) that are clearly documented, proven in actual practice and repeatable.

The first cloud anti-pattern that I’ll nominate is the Golden Hammer. The concept known as the law of the instrument, Maslow's hammer, or a golden hammer is an over-reliance on a familiar tool; as Abraham Maslow said in 1962, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.

I am optimistic that cloud computing will provide dynamically scalable virtualized resources as a service over the Internet and Intranet incorporating infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS)

Remember anti-patterns as you look to the clouds or find a company with experience to help you.

Technology frames context of thought

2009-06-22T22:48:00.062-04:00

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As we design new systems or use existing ones we should reflect on how does the information we receive from technology impact our cognitive processes versus provide information.

This thought started with my sitting and listening to my son practice piano. He was learning the Barber of Seville, but at that moment in time was more interested in hanging out with his buddies. While he was practicing I remembered the cartoon Rabbit of Seville and with a couple of key word search terms "youtube bugs bunny barber of Seville" the search engine returned the cartoon Rabbit of Seville on youtube. After watching the video together he changed his perspective on the song from practice drudgery to fun. During this event the technology results (e.g., Yahoo, MS Media player, youtube...) assisted our cognitive processes that had the effect of modifying our initial thought about the song and piano practice to fun experience that resulted in a better practice session. This could be measured in focus and quality of playing.

Lets expand this idea from an intimate encounter between two people to a global social network event happening now. I'll pick the events in Iran' election not to be political, but based scale and the amount of analysis being done on the technology surrounding this event. This is a large complex event that has global participants where the outcome is still playing out. Is technology (e.g., news, Twitter, Flickr, RSS, Facebook ...) changing our cognitive views of the events happening in the example of Iran's elections or is it just information? The speed and diversity of point of view from hundreds of cell phones tweeting, sending pictures and video appeared to create a movement. My hypothesis is the movement was caused by a shift in cognitive thought assisted by the technology.

My intent is not to contrast a positive or negative aspects of the examples, but to make the point that technology has the potential to help us have new thoughts versus information overload and can work on both small and large social network events. We should look at our application systems to understand how and when this occurs. Having said that people don't need technology to make decisions or have new thoughts and having technology does not always make for better decisions.

The heuristic pattern that I see between these two events is technology assisted in framing our emotional barometer as we received information allowing for cognitive insight to occur.

NJVC's ISO 9001-2008

2009-06-22T13:19:00.007-04:00

On June 2, 2009 NJVC’s Media/Print Generation group received its ISO 9001-2008 certification for Quality Management. We are excited that the certification shows what we knew.

Oak Ridge National Labs Visit

2009-06-19T08:08:00.010-04:00

I am writing this blog on my plane trip back to Washington DC after visiting Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) in Knoxville Tennessee. NJVC appreciates the time and hospitality that the ORNL staff showed us during our visit.

If you ever get a chance to visit ORNL it is hard not to be struck by the history of the birth place of the Manhattan project that led to the development of the atomic bomb. The X-10 reactor structure stands as a monument to the importance of science as a tool in democracy and the choices that policy and military leaders must make on how to use scientific advancements. The mission for nuclear nonproliferation continues to be relevant and important to the world.

ORNL today is more than just the birth place of the atomic bomb. Seeing models produced from super computers named Kraken and Jaguar for the advancement of science focusing on areas that include neutron science, renewable energy sources, nanotechnologies, biology systems and, high performance computing is a great mission. Scientific tools like the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Spallation Neutron Source allow scientists from all over the world come to conduct basic research at these facilities that will benefit the scientific, business, and industrial communities. Applications like LandScan, sensorpedia and Verde are taking the power of supercomputer modeling and web 2.0 to solve hard problems.

The fusion of government, state, universities and private business makes for an exciting place to do research and development (R&D).

I look forward to my next trip back to ORNL and working with my new friends.

Super Computers

2009-06-11T08:30:00.007-04:00

Image by Pargon via Flickr

I had the opportunity to get an update from Cray the supercomputing company. The future in this area is adaptive supercomputing where the hardware can leverage the underlying technologies (e.g., scalar, vector and multi-threading). This will drive compiler and computer language companies to develop smarter compilers that will optimize software code to the hardware architecture available.

On the research front DARPA has their HPCS program that is focusing creating a new generation of high productivity computing systems. This research will hopefully create the next generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for the national security and industrial user communities. These systems must have the following attributes:

Performance: Improve the computational efficiency and reduce the execution time of critical national security applications.
Programmability: Reduce cost and time of developing HPCS applications.
Portability: Insulate HPCS application software from system specifics.
Robustness: Improve reliability and reduce vulnerability to intentional attacks.

If the vision of HPCS is to High productivity computer systems that are optimized for users, not for benchmarks then at what point does super become common?

Virtual Clouds

2009-06-10T06:28:00.021-04:00

Image via CrunchBase

I attended a seminar from Force 3 when the Nats played the Cincinatti Reds to hear about EMC, VMware and Cisco's joint venture called VCE. EMC described what they termed "private" cloud computing. On Youtube you can find a key note address during VMWorld.

VCE is bringing the capabilities that were established on mainframes (e.g., LPARS and IBM's Parallel Sysplex) to any device whether its a PC, server, blade center or mobile device. The cool part is EMC and its partners are integrating their tools like SMARTs, RSA security, replications capabilities... to provide greater control over the environment following ITIL best practices.

One of the capabilities I like is the idea of the system shutting down processors that are not being used to save on power consumption. In a large data center Green IT for sustainable development is a worthy goal. Hopefully software vendors will be able to adapt their licensing strategies so companies can take advantage of paying for what they use.

At NJVC we are constantly looking at how well we can apply new approaches to our internal Corporate IT as well as our external customers. I am a big believer in, "eating your own dog food." In a previous blog called Virtualization value we have found that virtualizing applications and storage is helping us save on hardware and support costs as well as helping us implement our business continuity plan. These same approaches are providing similar value to our customers.

The bottom line is understand your requirements and based on the size of your environment use capabilities that support them best. If you need help let us know.

USGIF- GEOGala

2009-06-07T07:16:00.006-04:00

I attended the USGIF GeoGala on June 5, 2009. NJVC is a proud USGIF sponsor for this event and Tech Days.

The GEOGala is a black-tie dinner event that was held at the Hyatt Regency Reston in Reston, VA. Events like this provide an opportunity to meet government and industry friends that we don't get to see during the work weeks.

One the evenings memorable events was the video by Penn State's Public Broadcasting on the GeoSpatial Revolution. Their simple point is GeoSpatial has become common and its worth reflecting on how this achievement has become such an everyday activity.

Keith Masback and his team did another great job of putting together another fun filled evening.

Observance of Memorial Day

2009-05-25T07:41:00.005-04:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As you reflect on Memorial Day remember Freedom is not free.

In observance of this day here is a prayer by By Rev. Dick Kozelka (ret)
First Congregational Church of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN.

Eternal God,
Creator of years, of centuries,
Lord of whatever is beyond time,
Maker of all species and master of all history --
How shall we speak to you
from our smallness and inconsequence?
Except that you have called us to worship you
in spirit and in truth;
You have dignified us with loves and loyalties;
You have lifted us up with your lovingkindnesses.
Therefore we are bold to come before you without groveling
[though we sometimes feel that low]
and without fear
[though we are often anxious].
We sing with spirit and pray with courage
because you have dignified us;
You have redeemed us from the aimlessness
of things' going meaninglessly well.
God, lift the hearts of those
for whom this holiday is not just diversion,
but painful memory and continued deprivation.
Bless those whose dear ones have died
needlessly, wastefully [as it seems]
in accident or misadventure.
We remember with compassion those who have died
serving their countries
in the futility of combat.
There is none of us but must come to bereavement and separation,
when all the answers we are offered
fail the question death asks of each of us.
We believe that you will provide for us
as others have been provided with the fulfillment of
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

The White House Commission on Remembrance is an independent government agency, established by Congress, whose missions include:

Promoting the spirit of unity and remembrance through observance of The National Moment of Remembrance at 3 PM local time on Memorial Day
Ensuring the nation remembers the sacrifices of America's fallen from the Revolutionary War to the present;
Recognizing those who have served and those who continue to serve our great nation and reminding all Americans of our common heritage.

Using Clouds for fast loading of triples

2009-05-23T08:36:00.010-04:00

Image by kasei via Flickr

The guys at BigData have run some really exciting benchmarks by loading 5 billion triples loaded in just under 10 hours for an average throughput of 135k triples per second. They say that their maximum throughput was just above 210k triples per second. 1 billion triples was reached in an astonishing 78 minutes. With these types of benchmarks the practicality of using rdf triple stores for large data problems keeps getting brighter.

Spiritual Machines

2009-05-22T10:51:00.029-04:00

Image by Erik Charlton via Flickr

While at 2009 DoDIIS Worldwide Major General John M. Custer Commanding General, United States Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca gave a thought provoking presentation at the second day's plenary session. I enjoy listening to him because his points cause me to reflect on whether or not I am providing the greatest value to the end users whether they are warfighters, policy makers or non-military users.

To make his point about what Spiritual Machines could mean to the warfighter he showed a Pattie Mae's video of technology called the Sixth Sense. The context for viewing this site was to gain insight into the concept of the Spiritual Machines. The idea being that technology will enhance our cultural and linguistic capabilities. From this video you could imagine soldiers using the technology to amplify the world around them as the sensors gather information around the soldier and help him/her process the environment better. You can view it at the TED website. If you are not a regular visitor to TED, I recommend it as I have been viewing it prior to my mention here. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds.

Since the blog is entitled Spiritual Machines I thought it made sense to me to look at the technology trends for 2010 to see what was predicted. The list below is from The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology that is the 2005 update of Raymond Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. The list says:

Computers become smaller and increasingly integrated into everyday life.
More and more computer devices will be used as miniature web servers, and more will have their resources pooled for computation.
High-quality broadband Internet access will become available almost everywhere.
Eyeglasses that beam images onto the users' retinas to produce virtual reality will be developed. They will also come with speakers or headphone attachments that will complete the experience with sounds. These eyeglasses will become a new medium for advertising as advertising will be wirelessly transmitted to them as one walks by various business establishments.
The VR glasses will also have built-in computers featuring "virtual assistant" programs that can help the user with various daily tasks. (see Augmented Reality)
Virtual assistants would be capable of multiple functions. One useful function would be real-time language translation in which words spoken in a foreign language would be translated into text that would appear as subtitles to a user wearing the glasses.
Cell phones will be built into clothing and will be able to project sounds directly into the ears of their users.
Advertisements will utilize a new technology whereby two ultrasonic beams can be targeted to intersect at a specific point, delivering a localized sound message that only a single person can hear. This was demonstrated in the films Minority Report and Back to the Future 2.

Notice within the list a grouping around visual and auditory sensory heightening and based on today’s technology all seem reasonable. Visual and auditory sensory are one aspect. Advancements in nanotechnology that promise nanomachine delivery of medicines like insulin to diabetics or medical care to soldiers on the battlefield could make a powerful advancement to the soldier of the future.

An important question that this raises is what is the impact by exploiting the counter side of Spiritual Machines?

It is on this point I think we will discover a new field in Cyber defense called Cyber Psychology of Human Interface Design. I am a firm believer that our thoughts create our reality. I like the saying, if it wasn't for this thought I would be having a different reality. With the concern of Cyber in the world regardless of the instigators, I wonder will the next generation Cyber viruses be focused on behavior shaping? Case and point, try to pull a teenager's attention away from an interactive computer game.

As we move into the future of Spiritual Machines we need to understand both the positive and negative aspects of technology.

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