I just found word of this 25 August webinar on the Carahsoft website and wanted to share it. I plan on attending to get the latest on i2-based anti-fraud solutions.  i2 is widely known in our community as the gold standard for dynamic analysis of links and relationships for investigations. And they are known for working with others in the software stack (including working with great tools like Thetus and Endeca). So if you are sick of having glitzy tools rammed down your throat by aggressive sales forces who manipulate your bosses into buying both their software and their overpriced engineers (sorry for the mini-rant, but there is too much of that going on today), then arm yourself with some knowledge on this tool. Getting facts and seeing real solutions will help you push back when you are under assault by the super smarmy vendors who are better at making wild claims than they are delivering capability.

i2 has been innovating their approaches and changing what they can do. If you, like me, are in need of an update you may want to check this out.

Here is more from the Carahsoft site:

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A requirement I believe all should have for analytical frameworks: It should be as easy to get data and analysis out of the tool as it is to get data and analysis into the tool. Sounds simple, but the fact is we have to keep that requirement in mind when evaluating tools these days.  There are some very famous capabilities today that seek to lock organizations into their framework and their proprietary toolsets in ways that are not good for the mission but seem to be potentially lucrative for the tool provider.

Of course you also need your analytical frameworks to have high functionality and support the mission, and you need capabilities that do that in ways that respect your budget and do not take scores of contractors to maintain and operate.

Those are all reasons why I like the approach of Thetus Corporation’s Savanna 2.0 capability.

For a video evaluation of the Thetus Corporation’s Savanna Analytical Tool see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJyxDqBzZOY

And for more the following overview was first posted at http://dodiistech.com by RyanKamauff

Thetus Corporations’ Savanna provides excellent search, discovery and visualization tools for analysts.  Savanna uses tools such as Kapow to scrape websites and all-source data and then pushes them through MetaCarta (for geo-spatial analysis) and Janya (for real-language textual analysis).  This data is then sorted into a Savanna’s application – enabling real-time search.  Savanna is excellent when teamed with Endeca, the two make an incredible analytical capability focused on human centered search, discovery, analysis and results.  Savanna is so open it enables work with virtually any other tool. It is a sad fact that other companies design in non-interoperability to prevent you from moving your data out. Savanna makes it easy to get your results out to other tools.

Thetus gives the analyst a whiteboard with the opportunity to explore concepts, hypotheses and questions – while allowing them to link ideas as they see fit, and attach documents/files where they make sense. The documents in the repository are harvested by Kapow, go through MetaCarta and Janya for entity enrichment, but are re-rendered by Savanna to look like real pages instead of masses of text. This re-render process makes search and discovery on the pages even easier.

Savanna’s search function crawls through the document repository added, and uses socio-economic indicators to categorize.  Returned searches are delineated into likelihood of match, can be sorted with the date/time or can be sorted by geo-spatial data.  This allows analysts to take 1500 search returns and quickly narrow to 10-15 results – speeding analysis and decision making.

Check out Savanna at http://www.thetus.com

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Sign-up for Fraud Detection Solution Event with Carahsoft and i2

The work of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is important and, because of the need to protect our nation’s information sources and advantages over international terrorists, criminals and other malicious actors, is not discussed much in the open. But there are things you can learn about NCTC by review of reputable sources. The most important source is testimony of its leadership to Congress.  For example, see the statement of The Honorable Michael E. Leiter of 9 Feb 2011.  These guys have a very hard job to do and we have great leadership in place here to get it done.

Another good source on what they do is the website at NCTC.gov. The info they put there is intentionally designed to inform us on the threat and what the country is doing about it. It is all worth a review.

As a techie, one of the things I really appreciate about the unclassified NCTC site is the automated information discovery tool they provide for research into terrorism incidents. Unclassified information on terror attacks can help academic research, security studies and even research into counter terror technologies. To see how they provided it, visit the site for the Worldwide Incident Tracking System (WITS). This system provides statistical information in a searchable format focused on discovery of trends and relationships.

The WITS system is available at: https://wits.nctc.gov

Visiting that URL brings up a familiar “Endeca-like” interface into the incident data. This lets you navigate all reported incidents by multiple paths.  You can search, you can correlate, you can plot on maps with density clusters and heat maps, you can navigate through tag clouds and concept clouds, and you can continuously iterate in and learn from your research as you go.

I would like to see more government organizations presenting their information this way. A couple already are.  For example, the entire US Census is now available from this sort of interface.  But I’m proud to say NCTC was leading the way in getting info out to our citizens via this type of interactive interface.

Related articles

• US Census Bureau Launches New American FactFinder on Endeca (ctolabs.com)
• Holiday vigilance – Obama receives security briefing (politico.com)
• To Find Needles In Haystacks, US Gov’t Has Built Hundreds Of New Haystacks (techdirt.com)
• White House Convenes “Inter-Agency” Call on Holiday Threats (blogs.abcnews.com)
• No. 1 priority for US security: domestic terrorism, threat report says – Christian Science Monitor (news.google.com)
• Napolitano: Nation’s terror threat may be highest since 9/11 (cnn.com)

The Endeca Government Summit was yesterday.  The agenda included some fantastic presentations from customers who have used Endeca to address issues requiring incredible scale (billions of records) and incredible scope (including the need to discover meaning in data in milliseconds) and human-focused interfaces (including, in every solution I saw, an ability to enable humans to interact with data in ways that search never enables).

One of my personal/professional friends was on the agenda:  Howard Block of NuWave Solutions. Howard is a master of technology with computer science degrees but his real contributions to the community center around making technology work for humans.  The frameworks he has helped coordinate and implement and open widget approach he has helped the community field are all focused on users and their missions, and the success he has shown in Endeca deployments are just icing on the cake. It is great seeing great people succeed like this.  Howard briefed lessons learned from his company’s deployment of solutions to the law enforcement community, including scalable, low-cost solutions enabling discovery across multiple sources of information- all focused on mission needs.

Another fantastic speaker was Brigadier-General Kampman, Director -General, Defense Force Structure Review, Department of National Defence, Canada.  The very large scale solutions he fielded with Endeca and the ability of that solution to return results to humans in sub-millisecond time (and the ability for humans to interact with and discover results in the data) provide fantastic lessons for any seeking to solve data overload issues.

Another speaker of note was Mr. Chris Darby.  Chris is a highly regarded technology professional I have had the pleasure of learning from in the past.  His current position is as President and CEO of In-Q-Tel (the independent investment firm that identifies innovative technologies to support the missions of the CIA and the Intelligence Community).   The agenda for the conference said the following about Mr. Darby’s presentation:

“To say that every large government organization recognizes the importance of “connecting the dots” would not only be accurate – it would be an understatement. Faced with more than just text, these organizations need technologies that can help process all types of non-trivial data collection – including video, voice, and images – while overcoming issues ranging from deciphering multiple languages to dealing with “dirty data.” This information is necessary to many communities of interest, each of which has different needs and uses. Identifying technologies that can help extract meaningful, actionable insight is essential. His work with the Intelligence Community (IC) provides Mr. Darby with a unique viewpoint from which to assess the challenges and opportunities in the “connect the dots” landscape. He will provide insight into In-Q-Tel’s Connect the Dots initiative and discuss the importance of leveraging both established and emerging technologies for the effort.”

I found Chris’s presentation to be riveting, for many reasons.  One is the way he clearly articulates that calculations of “risk” in the commercial sector that end up driving many decisions in business are normally not going to translate to calculations of risk in the national security sector.  When the mission is knowing enemy intentions and stopping attacks before they occur, commercial risk models will not apply.  That dynamic has always existed in the community, but it is being highlighted even more in this period of transition to a world of more asymmetric threats.  Chris’s brief highlighted how the oft used phrase “connect the dots” can sometimes make people want to oversimplify, but really this is complex.  We are, in most cases, looking for patterns of life.  And we are doing it with incredible quantities of data.

Of the many things that must be done with “dots” (which is now a bit of a shorthand way of saying “data”), perhaps the hardest are the ability to assimilate and analyze.  This is a key contribution of Endeca.

We have written about Endeca at CTOlabs.com.  Find the write-up here: http://ctolabs.com/2010/10/endecas-mdex-engine/

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The DoDIIS Worldwide Conference will be held in Orlando Florida this year, at the Orlando World Center Marriott. I really like this conference.  It is filled with folks I like and centers around a hard enterprise mission that cries out for strong IT solutions.

The theme of this years conference is “Empowering Decision Advantage.”  The plenary speakers this year are GREAT! (as usual).  They include Grant Schneider, CIO for DIA, LTG Ron Burgess, Director of DIA, Sherrill Nicely, ODNI CIO, Pres Winter, Info Integration at ODNI, Major General John Custer of the Army Intelligence Center, and an incredible panel of all key IC CIOs.  This panel includes Grant Schneider, Al Tarasiuk (CIO CIA), Charles Barlow (CIO, NRO), Kelly Miller (CIO, NSA), Chad Fulgum (CIO FBI), Craig Kaucher (CIO DHS), Bobby Laurine, CIO NGA, Sherrill Nicely and Pres Winter.   This is going to be an awesome panel.  Really.

I’ve been asked to speak at a breakout session and am honored to do that.  The presentation I’ve been working on is an updated version of a briefing I used to track the future of IT.  This briefing considers five “Mega Trends” in the IT world and then talks about some specific technologies that hold high potential of changing the IT landscape.  I’ll be presenting Tuesday at 1500.  If you are a CTO or other enterprise technologist I would really appreciate seeing you there.

A key thing I really like about this conference is the expo floor.  I’ve been known to roam around in there for hours, going from one technology demo to the next.  This is where America’s greatest technologies are demonstrated.  Every major IT firm will be there, and so will every IT savvy integrator.  Every great application developer and every great mashup capability will be there.   Companies like Carahsoft, Endeca, Adobe, Symantec, Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, JackBe and many more will be there.  I can’t wait to catch up with all of them there.

For more on the conference please see:  http://ncsi.com.  NCSI always puts on a great event.

If you are going to be there and will be up on Twitter please drop me a note or connect to me on Twitter @bobgourley.  I’d like to track what you are putting out there.  I hope to be on twitter a bit myself there, but may be too excited to type.

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What do you think of when you hear the word Adobe?  Many folks immediately think of the open standard Portable Document Format (PDF) that was created by Adobe Systems for document exchange.   PDFs are everywhere and so is Adobe’s free PDF readers, so it is commonly the first thing that comes to mind.

But things have been changing fast in that company and the dramatic changes they kicked off in the digital publishing world in the 1990′s are being duplicated in the collaboration, content management and application development worlds.  This post provides a few opinions on those areas.

(NOTE:  As a disclaimer, I’d like you to know I really like Adobe and act as an adviser to them from time to time.  I’m proud of my bias towards them, but if you need to make decisions I encourage you to check them out yourself- which all good CTOs would do anyway!).

Collaboration:

• I’m not sure what the largest single collaborative environment is, but a contender must be Defense Connect Online.  DCO has about 150,000 registered users and does about 20 million meetings per month.  This system scales well.  DCO is based on Adobe’s flaship collaboration tool, Adobe Connect.  Connect works via your web browser.   It is built to leverage the Adobe Flash player that is probably already in every browser you have.   It provides well thought out web conferencsing, eLearning, web seminars, document sharing, application sharing, video and of course audio.   There are a couple varieties of Connect.  And, if you have a small firm like mine, there is an online version you can use for free at acrobat.com (see my previous post on “The New Acrobat.com vs The New Acrobat Connect“).
• By the way, this post was drafted using Connect’s collaborative capabilities, and I used Acrobat.com to ask some friends to check it out before going final.
• So, Adobe has built a collaborative tool that has been proven to meet the needs of the smallest and largest groups.

Content Management:

• Adobe continues to enhance Adobe Acrobat and many other capabilities related to content creation, development, dissemination and rights.  PDFs can now contain 3D renderings, videos and all sorts of other content.  The Army sends GeoPDF DVDs to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan already, and many advanced 3D modeling and mission rehearsal capabilities are provided right in PDFs now.  Flash and Flex can also be used in PDFs (see section below on Application Development).
• Adobe’s enterprise class content management and business process system is Adobe LiveCycle.  LiveCycle and PDF together have a comprehensive solution for solving many content deployment issues including security, accountability and need to share.  LiveCycle provides an end to end solution for creating, editing and sending info forward to others using defined policies where there can be confidence in the identity of senders, the authentication of the receiver, the authorization of their user, the logging/auditing of their activity, and the enablement of their offline use.
• LiveCycle enables workflow development and deployment that goes across boundaries in your organization, as well as to other organizations outside your firewall (customers, suppliers, clients, users, employees).   LiveCycle software is a server based solution that blends data capture, information assurance, document output, process management and content services to help create and deliver applications.
• Adobe also builds in enhanced document security for information sharing and content management. Imagine having information you provide to a customer and then when you want to remove that customers ability to read that info, for what ever reason, you do so. Or you give info to a customer or external partner and want to limit who else can see it. That can be done as well, which, although this sounds counter to information sharing guidance, actually will increase the amount of info that can be shared, since now there will be less fear of compromise.

Application Development:

• For years, Adobe has provided web developers with capabilities for rapidly developing and fielding applications to any user with a browser.  Flash has an incredibly low barrier to entry and low cost of deployment and low total cost of ownership.
• But Adobe now provides development solutions that are changing things in even more positive ways.  Adobe Air, for example, allows developers to use the same skills they learn in web development to field desktop applications.   It is a runtime environment that lets developers build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser in multiple operating systems. Adobe Flex is a free open source framework for enterprise applications that is based on the same application development and deployment principles as Air– Flex dramatically accelerates the ability to deploy applications in an enterprise (I have built Flex applications myself- it is really easy to work through examples and tutorials provided in the SDK).
• While on the topic of application development I should mention the fact that there is no such thing as perfect code. Even code you write might need to be updated or patched one day to deal with a new threat. So, even good code like those provided by Adobe needs a good management system in place to ensure it is well maintained and, when required, patched.

The “So-What” for CTOs:

• Adobe has adopted a philosophy of being able to work with every other capability in the IT stack. So if you are using Sharepoint or Oracle Fusion Middleware or Java or Endeca or whatever else, Adobe is likely going to work just fine.
• It is certainly ok to think of PDF when you think of Adobe.  It is a great, open format.  But think also of the other great enterprise-class capabilities they are providing.
• Stand by for change.  We IT folks are used to change.  But Adobe is helping kick off change that goes far beyond the IT department.  When users are empowered with capabilities like these they quickly learn that they can band together to serve the mission in ways that their bosses never predicted.  This can produce significant workflow changes.  User empowerment is coming, and once this revolution gets underway it will set off second order requirements we should be anticipating now:  like the need for always on five-nines comms to every device everywhere.  No one is going to want to be disconnected ever again.  Tolerance of IT department performance “issues” will become lower and lower and lower.
• Stand by for faster application development/deployment.  Imagine deploying applications in a third the time you used to.
• Get ready for new ways to empower decision-makers.  For example, consider using these content management systems to create dynamic dashboards for decision-makers.  A dashboard that auto-synchs with a server can provide decision-makers with always updated information.

Concluding Thoughts:

There are some big moves afoot in the enterprise IT world. Enterprises everywhere, including, the federal enterprise, are making pushes to be more open and transparent on items that should be open and more secure and protected on items that need to be kept private. These mega trends are important factors that will keep driving IT forward. Adobe seems well positioned to serve as these trends continue.

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On 21 April 2009 Intel corporation held an “Intelligent Processors” event which highlighted Intel’s next generation chip architecture and the industry leading companies who are incorporating this technology into their products.   The event, pulled together by Nigel Ballard of Intel, included demos by companies like Endeca, Cisco, Cray, Dell, HP, Oracle, VMware, Microsoft and Sun.  Nineteen hardware partners showed off Xeon 5500-based server products at this event.  Clearly Nigel is a man with convening authority.  When he calls, the big guns of the IT community come.

There were two other big draws at this event.  One was the Intel CTO, Justin Rattner.  I’ll be running a separate article on my interview of Justin shortly.  For now I’ll just say it was great having the new Nehalem Microarchitecture placed in context by a CTO of his stature.  He provided a keynote that underscored not only the technology of this smart server processor, but hit on the importance of innovating in a downturn.  His message was very clear and it is one I believe.  Now is the time to transform computing.

Eric Doyle, Intel’s enterprise Marketing Manager, provided a deeper dive into the power of real offerings based on the new chip, especially the Intel Xeon 5500 (I meant to ask Eric if he can shed some light on why the codename for this project was called Nahelem, since he said he lives in Oregon I wonder if he named it?).

The following are a few notes that combine things Justin Rattner and Eric Doyle said:

The Xeon 5500 based on the Nehalem project is  really the next era for computer chips, providing the biggest jump in productivity and efficiency since the Pentium Pro.    The Nehalem is hitting the market right now (you can get one for your house if you buy a MacPro).  The server based on the Nehalem is Xeon 5500.

The design of Nahalem is based on quad core design with two executable threads per core.  The design also provides an added degree of intelligence to how things are done on the chip.  Little processors on the chip oversee and manage the big processors in the chip and that concept allows for some very significant improvements to computing.  For example, energy efficiency is far more adaptable/configurable.  When you don’t need full processing power, less power is drawn.  New virtualization capabilities are also enabled with this approach.

The result is that the Xeon 5500 provides the largest jump in computer performance in Intel’s history.  In fact, this jump is the greatest performance leap in computer history.  This jump is not just because of more transistors on the chip, it is because of a very smart design involving more cores.

This chip also provides features that will enhance trustworthy computing.  I found this especially interesting and the whole discussion left me feeling far more upbeat about the future of IT.   I have no doubt security will still be a constant battle well into the future, but with this new design the ability to run cryptographic algorithms is sped up significantly.  This design enables a 40% improvement in OpenSSL performance and a 50% improvement in RSA2048, for example.  New capabilities will soon be enabled that leverage the chip’s management capabilities to attest to true endpoint state.  This will enable enhanced defenses against rootkits.

A few other bullets on Nehalem, from the Intel website:
Intel® microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, offers the latest in processor innovation, including:

• Dynamic scalability, managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces, and power for energy-efficient performance on-demand.
• Design and performance scalability for servers, workstations, notebooks, and desktops with support for 2-8+ cores and up to 16+ threads with Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology), and scalable cache sizes, system interconnects, and integrated memory controllers.
• Intelligent performance on-demand with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology taking advantage of the processor’s power and thermal headroom. This enables increased performance of both multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads.
• Increased performance on highly-threaded applications with Intel HT Technology, bringing high-performance applications into mainstream computing with 1-16+ threads optimized for new generation multi-core processor architecture.
• Scalable shared memory features memory distributed to each processor with integrated memory controllers and Intel QuickPath Technology high-speed point-to-point interconnects to unleash the performance of future versions of next-generation Intel® multi-core processors.
• Multi-level shared cache improves performance and efficiency by reducing latency to frequently used data.

What is the “so what” of all the above?  Upgrade your old servers now.  It will save energy, it will save space, it will reduce operating cost, it will increase security, and it will enable more advanced applications.

As for the many demos seen at this event, my favorite was the one presented by my friends at Endeca.  Endeca is one of the first companies fielding capabilities that can take maximum advantage of Nehalem.   The speed, scale and scope of the data they can parse and enable interaction with is incredible.  If you are considering an Endeca deployment, consider Xeon 5500.  Ask Endeca for the demo and you will see why.  It just makes total sense.

Soon I’ll post a few more thoughts based on my interview of Justin Rattner.  Say tuned and happy computing!

2008 was a year of rapid changes for Chief Technology Officers.  We should expect 2009 to move even faster.  Where will the biggest trends take us?  I offer some considerations below.  Please
look these over and give me your thoughts.   Push back if you have
disagreement.

First, my overall advice for CTOs in 2009… Just like the new thin interfaces you will be testing in your lab… be flexible. Now here are some more thoughts on what’s in store for CTO s in 2009:

• Here is a no-brainer: Increasingly CTOs will leverage social media to collaborate.  Things are moving so fast that we all like to network to seek help on big things and to get advanced warning on what is coming next.  More of us will be on Twitter, in Facebook, and writing blogs.  And this is a good thing.

• “Mashups” will still be very important as an enterprise objective in 2009 (and beyond).   And the company that will help accelerate them into the federal enterprise is JackBe.  They do things in a way that enterprise CTO s like.  They build in connections to governance, security, identity management.  And they play well with the entire ecosystem so you don’t have to rework all legacy just to use them.  Of course web2.0 will remain a key trend, but mashups takes web2.0 to a new, more mission-oriented level and for enterprise players the mission is what is important.

• An approach we will all learn to love and follow is “context accumulation”.   This very important term was coined by Jeff Jonas, and I think Jeff is going to have all of us moving out on that in the next 12 months.   If you agree, visit his blog and by all means help others understand why this is really the only way we humans stand a chance of surviving/thriving in the onslaught of data.

• Federal acquisition of IT will still be criticized for all the reasons it always has been.  But there will also be an acceleration of a dramatic positive change brought about because of open source software and a new appreciation that IT acquisition processes (RFI/RFP/FAR/DFAR based purchases) do not apply to software that is free.  Free software is not being bought, it is being used, for free.  The whole reason the FAR exists is to ensure when the taxpayer’s money gets spent it gets spent wisely.  When things are free the FAR has less applicability.  Services for open source are being bought and since that uses government money of course the taxpayers will continued to be served by the same FAR-type processes that are meant to ensure open competition, but that is not for free open source software, that is for services to configure and manage the software.

• Will this be the year of enterprise security?  We have been banking on that for a long long time.  We know the answers on how to make enterprises more secure.  There is a great recap of some of the most important components of security in the CSIS report. But there are many more things that can be done as well. My goal, as captured here, is to improve security by two orders of magnitude within the next 24 months.

• Netbooks, Thin Clients and Cloud Computing will accelerate throughout the technology landscape, especially inside the federal government.  These trends in both devices and the cloud components are directly related and are also benefiting from the global, unstoppable trend toward open computing (open software and open standards).  One to watch in this area:  Sun Microsystems.   But also track the dynamics of the netbooks providers.  Dell will get serious about netbooks, but Acer will continue to grow market share.

• A key accelerator of Cloud Computing has been the powerful technologies of virtualization, especially those of VMware.  Open source and other virtualization capabilities are coming fast too.  Trend to watch in 2009 is the arrival of higher order, more elagant capabilities to manage virtualizaiton accross large enterprises.  VMware and Opsware (HP) will continue to evolve to do this, but Appistry, Vizioncore, Xsigo and Sun (and others?) are coming fast.
• Increasingly leaders will recognize that concepts of operation that require humans to tag and create metadata are sub-optimized.  When busy people are tasked with burdensome tagging operations they too frequently become tempted to cut corners and rush the process.  Over time, meta data generated this way just becomes meta crap.  This growing recognition in the federal space will sweep in new technologies and new approaches to discovery of content.  One to watch to solve this issue:  Endeca, because of their approach to visualizing information and enabling human to computer iterative examination of data.

  

• Flexible computers will arrive in production this year for early adopters and many CTOs will use them in labs to assess applicability for massive deployment in the coming years.   These flexible computers are the ultimate thin clients.   Backends/servers/architectures developed for the cloud perfectly suit ultra thin, flexible computing devices. For more on this hot topic, start at the site of the Flexible Display Center at ASU.

• Collaboration will increasingly be seen as the means to link human brains together.   Collaboration tools that are stand alone stovepipes will be a thing of the past.  Users will collaborate using the entire technology environment:  voice, video, data, whiteboard, chat, application sharing, info discovery will increasingly be integrated into a single fabric.  Key players here:  Adobe, Microsoft and Cisco.

• In a big change for how money is moved in major enterprises, the CIO will be given responsibility for the energy budget.  This will encourage CIOs to modernize to conserve energy, since money saved from energy costs can be invested back in modern IT.  This will be a very virtuous cycle, that saves money for organizations, saves energy, and modernizes IT.

• In a stunning turn, IPv6 will be rapidly adopted, not by enterprises, but in homes.  The major home communications provider that delivers full IPv6 to home environments (and to cell phones) will have an incredible advantage over competitors and will dominate.  The many rich features of IPv6 delivered to consumers will finally push enterprises everywhere to move out on IPv6.

• In 2009, as in every year prior and for most into the future, there will continue to be bad people using technology to do bad things.  Enterprises will move to protect info, but bad guys will keep moving to get the data.   And the use of social networking tools by terrorists will likely grow.  This is not a foregone conclusion, but I’m not personally sure what can be done to mitigate the use of advanced technology by bad people, other than to say that we good people need to work together more to stop them, and my hope is that we can keep 2009 safe and secure.

Thoughts/comments/suggestions?  Please let me know what you think.

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Participants in this week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference, hosted by the ODNI’s ICES group and the CIA’s WIRe team, were treated to a shared experience that is hard to capture in a blog post.   So I won’t try.  But I will say this, we all had some great collaboration and coordination lessons and context, and we were able to participate in creating that ourselves because the conference organizers established a great ambiance and gave us access to wiki’s, blogs, twitters and WiFI that knitted that all together.  I really appreciated being there.

One lesson I’d like to note now was underscored by Fred Hassani.  Fred found a great way to make us all think about the variety of collaboration tools at our disposal.  In a musical analogy he underscored how hard it can be to make music with instruments that don’t traditionally play well together.  But in a sign that the spirit of the community is strong, we all saw how a cowbell can make really really great music if you put your heart into it.   And we the community of professionals can make use of any tools we are provided to collaborate, even if they are not our favorites.  We will always make due and will always overcome.   One way we will overcome is through mashups.  Just like in music you can mashup piano’s and cowbells, in IT you can mashup imagery data and SIGINT data and analytical data etc.

Which brings us to a great video that underscores this point– not from thte WIReICES conference, but from a group of spirited collaborators from SNL who many of us in the community look up to.

So please check this out and as you do please think of the IT tools in your enterprise.  I guess the point made for CTOs is that we need an enterprise that allows mashups of all tools and all data.  You never know when the maestro will call for more cowbell.

In 2002 congress passed the E-Government Act.  It mandated that the approximately 300 federal entities that can make rules expose those rules in a modernized way and also specified that regulations in draft will be exposed so comments can be solicited.

The government’s response: OMB and CIO’s from throughout the government established an eRulemaking solution that required extensive IT planning, engineering and the fielding of a new IT system.  The eRulemaking Initiative’s Federal Docket Management System (FDMS) was created to provide an online public docket and comment system which expands public access to read and comment on Federal Agency rulemaking. Although it is a centralized system, agencies were given an ability to manage content and workflow related to their own regulations. Scalable web-based solutions that enable users in government and also citizens to find and read proposed legislation and supporting documents was provided.

And they did this in a way that was way under budget and delivered on time.  And its functionality exceeded all expectations.  Which is GREAT!

As an IT professional, this is the really neat part that bears repeating.  This project, which is very complex and IT intensive, was delivered under budget and on time.  Additionally, its capabilities far
exceeded the expectations of everyone involved.

If you haven’t heard of FDMS, maybe it is because it was widely successful.  To frequently the only programs that make news are those that don’t deliver on expectations.  That means IT heros, like Pat Micielli of EPA who led this program, frequently don’t get the recognition they deserve for the great things they do.

I hope I’ve gotten your curiosity up a bit on what Pat accomplished. If you are a citizen of the US you should be very proud of this one.  So check out http://regulations.gov for a first hand look.  You will see a single interface into approximately 1.5 million documents.  Don’t worry, there is a way you can navigate through these without looking at each individual record.  Just dive in and give it a try.  Search for a term like “data center energy”and view the results or narrow them down by agency.  Or click on those in the range of comment period you are interested in.  which ever selection you pick, notice how all the other facets of the search change as you do.   See how you can guide through the results and how the results keep giving you options for refining results?  After you try it this way, can you imagine doing it any other way?

Government users are giving more access (there are nearly 4 million records accessible only by federal agency users on FDMS.gov).

Overall, as a CTO and an admirer of technologists at the large agencies, I enjoy pointing this out and really admire what these folks have done.   Great Job!  And as a citizen– Thanks!