The DoDIIS Conference Agenda is now up at the conference site, and it really looks to be a great one. The confernece will be great for technology leaders in government, technology providers from industry, and the mission-focused executive leadership who seeks to guide both. If you want to shape the future, come to the DoDIIS conference and see what secure enterprises with advanced analytical missions are up to.

I’ve pasted the full agenda below, but some key highlights include:

• An overview by DIA’s CIO and Director of DS, Mr. Grant Schneider.
• Insights into secure collaboration provided by Mr. John “Mike” McConnell, former Director of National Intelligence and a mentor to legions of us who have long revered him.
• An overview of the mission needs put on the DIA technology team, provided by the Director of DIA Lieutenant General Ron Burgess.
• Insights into the human element of the system provided by noted professor and thinker Robert Axelrod.
• Deep dives into successes in innovation and information sharing, “CIA Style” presented by champion innovator Mr. Geoffrey Fowler, Director and Managing Editor of the World Intelligence Review (WIRe).
• Many breakout sessions are scheduled, including a wide range of mission-focused topics and advanced technology deep dives. I personally plan on hitting the ones on Hadoop (of course, since “Big Data” is an issue we should all be accelerating into our enterprise). I’ll also attend the “Data Center for the Future” talk since DoDIIS planners are always at the forefront of datacenter design and I’m sure I’ll pick up some good tips there.  I also noticed a breakout on the “Egyptian Revolution and Twitter” that might be insightful.

I hope to run into about 2000 of my friends at the event. I’ll also be blogging a bit from there, as will Ryan Kamauff and Chris Barnes.  And look for us on Twitter as well. We are at: @bobgourley, @Ryan_Kamauff, @ChrisBarnesCP

And, consider this a pre-announcement: we are putting the finishing touches on a site meant to pull together our evals of DoDIIS technology and twitter feeds/etc during the event. Find it at http://dodiistech.com

For more details and to register see: http://www.ncsi.com/dodiis11/index.html

Here is the DoDIIS agenda:

Sunday 1 May

Evening reception/strategy sessions/networking.

Monday 2 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0830

Keynote Speaker

Mr. Grant M. Schneider Deputy Director for Information Management and Chief Information Officer, Defense Intelligence Agency

0830 – 0915

Secure Collaboration — Technology to Support the Mission

Mr. John “Mike” McConnell Executive Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton

0915 – 1000

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1000 – 1045

Keynote Speaker

Lieutenant General Ronald L. Burgess, Jr.Director, Defense Intelligence Agency

1100 – 1145

Vulnerabilities of Wetware Professor Robert Axelrod Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding, University of Michigan

1145 – 1300

Networking Break/Technology Exposition/Lunch

1300 – 1345

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1400 – 1445

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1445 – 1545

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1545 – 1630

Breakouts / Learning Labs

Tuesday 3 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0845

The Real Business Value of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value

Mr. Richard Hunter Vice President Distinguished Analyst, Gartner

0845 – 0930

Disruptive Innovation in Computing, and Mission Impact in the Next Decade

Mr. David McQueeney Vice President of Software Research, IBM

0930 – 1030

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1030 – 1115

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1130 – 1215

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1215 – 1330

Networking Break/Technology Exposition/Lunch

1330 – 1415

Potential for Two-Way Collaboration

Mr. Terry Kline Vice President and Chief Information Officer, General Motors

1415 – 1515

IC Executive Board: Integrating the Intelligence Mission through Technology

Moderator:
Mr. Al Tarasiuk Assistant Director of National Intelligence and Chief Information Officer, Intelligence Community

Panelists:
Mr. James Beagles Acting Director, Chief Information Officer, Department of Homeland Security

Mr. David DeVries Principal Director, Office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

Mr. Dean E. Hall Associate Executive Assistant Director and Deputy Chief Information Officer, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Mr. Kelly A. Miller Deputy Chief Information Officer, National Security Agency/Central Security Service

Mr. Paul E. Muench Deputy Chief Information Officer, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Mr. Grant M. Schneider Deputy Director for Information Management and Chief Information Officer, Defense Intelligence Agency

Mr. Neill Tipton Director, Information Sharing and Partner Engagement, Department of Defense

Ms. Jill Tummler Singer Chief Information Officer, National Reconnaissance Office

Ms. Jeanne C. Tisinger Chief Information Officer, Central Intelligence Agency

1515 – 1615

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1615 – 1700

Breakouts / Learning Labs

Wednesday 4 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0845

Unifying Intelligence Strategies — The Central, Critical Node to Achieving Integrated Intelligence

Mr. Robert Cardillo Deputy Director for Intelligence Integration, Office of the Director of National Intelligence

0845 – 0930

Innovation in Information Sharing — CIA Style

Mr. Geoffrey K. Fowler

Director and Managing Editor, World Intelligence Review (WIRe), Central Intelligence Agency

0930 – 1030

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1030 – 1130

Services Panel: Secure and Collaborative Intelligence to Support the Warfighter

Panel Moderator: Mr. James R. Martin Director, ISR Programs, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence)

Panel Members:

Mr. Robert “Bo” T. Martin Deputy Director, ISR Capabilities, U.S. Air Force

Mr. Gregory B. Palmertree Chief Technology Officer, Marine Corps Intelligence

Ms. Lynn Schnurr Senior Technical Advisor, Army Intelligence Chief Information Officer, Information Management, Deputy Chief of Staff, G2 Headquarters, Department of the Army

Mr. Jack Y. Gumtow Chief Information Officer, Office of Naval Intelligence

1130 – 1215

The Path to Secure and Agile Cloud Computing

Mr. Michael Capellas Chairman and CEO, VCE, The Virtual Computing Environment Company

1215 – 1315

Networking Break/Technology Exposition/Lunch

1315 – 1400

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1415 – 1500

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1500 – 1545

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1545 – 1630

Breakouts / Learning Labs

Thursday 5 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0845

NIST Cloud Computing Program: Useful Information for USG Cloud Adopters

Ms. Dawn Leaf Senior Advisor, National Institute of Standards and Technology Information Technology Laboratory and Senior Executive for Cloud Computing

0845 – 0930

Keynote Speaker

Mr. James Stout Senior Director, DoD Customer Executive, Avanade Federal Services

0930 – 0945

Networking Break

0945 – 1030

Intelligence Studies: What Academia Provides

Professor James Breckenridge Dean of the Walker School of Business and Chair of the Department of Intelligence Studies at Mercyhurst College

1030 – 1100

Related articles

• Technology Firms at the DoDIIS Worldwide (ctovision.com)
• 2011 DoDIIS Worldwide Conference (ctovision.com)
• DIA CIO Grant Schneider Highlights Cloud Computing (blogs.forbes.com)
• Government Eyeing Security Technology To Prevent Another Wikileaks (informationweek.com)
• Leaks a “Serious Problem” for Defense Intelligence (fas.org)

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The FBI Reading Room is a great source of information

I was recently treated to a demonstration of a mission-focused IT solution that made me proud of what technologists at FBI can do. What I saw was a best in class integration of search, discovery and analysis tools known as DIVS (Data Integration and Visualization System). DIVS includes a framework that allows multiple tools, COTS and GOTS, to interoperate in ways incredibly supportive of the most significant missions in the national security space.

For those that have had the pleasure of meeting the leaders of the IT team there at FBI, or for any who interact with the technological wizards of the FBI’s Science and Technology Branch, you are probably not surprised that they are fielding best in class solutions like these. The FBI attracts top class talent that knows how to field working enterprise solutions. I believe we will be reading about many more solutions like these coming out of the FBI in the near term.

Related articles

• FBI Recasts Sentinel As Model Of Agility (informationweek.com)

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The 2011 DoDIIS Worldwide Conference will be held 1-5 May 2011 at the COBO at Detroit Michigan. This is always an exciting event for technologists enthused about continued improvement of mission capabilities. The conference is focused on the mission of the US DoD intelligence enterprise, but the many topics tackled at the event are of interest to technologists from a wide range of enterprises.

For more see the official conference site at: http://www.ncsi.com/dodiis11/index.html

Here is some more info from the site:

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) announces the 2011 Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) Worldwide Conference!

Hosted annually by the DIA Directorate for Information Management (DS) and Chief Information Officer, DoDIIS Worldwide provides a unique opportunity for defense intelligence community members and industry peers to come together for knowledge sharing, training and discussion of current and future information technology (IT) challenges and requirements.

The conference’s 2011 theme, Secure and Collaborative Intelligence in Defense of the Nation, highlights the DIA Chief Information Officer’s commitment to developing and maintaining secure and reliable networks for Department of Defense personnel, services and information technology customers. Through partnerships and collaboration, the intelligence community facilitates the secure collection, analysis and presentation of actionable intelligence to warfighters and decision makers in a timely, comprehensive manner.

DoDIIS Worldwide Conference will attract more than 3,000 participants including 400+ exhibits from across the globe as well as expert speakers, interactive training sessions and daily networking opportunities.

We will be posting some additional context on the event in the coming days, and during DoDIIS will be blogging on some of the ongoing activities. We will also keep our twitter feed up at http://twitter.com/ctovision Please connect there and stay in touch.

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Opscode provides Infrastructure Automations as a hosted service

Jesse Robbins of Opscode and O’Reilly Radar provided lessons learned from his experiences in cloud computing and scaling.   Jesse was titled “Master of Disaster” with Amazon, responsible for Website Availability for every Amazon.com domain.  Today, he’s the CEO of Opscode, an infrastructure automation framework.  Jesse is also the co-chair of the Velocity Conference, which is a conference for large scale, high trafficked websites.  The lessons he has learned in availability, scalability, and elasticity are valuable to every IT manager with plans to moving operations into cloud based services.

Jesse focused on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  Since 1999, infrastructure has been completely revolutionized, to the point where we can deploy and re-deploy 10k Nodes in under 5 minutes.  This change has meant that infrastructure is easier to get, but harder to manage.  Instead of fighting to install a server, system administrators are battling managing thousands.  In today’s infrastructure, developers are crucial to Operations.  There are so many systems which need management, yet so few tools to aid administrators.

The big cloud providers (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) have all built their own tools.  These tools are completely locked down and are not shared with anyone.  All the other cloud operators are unprepared, poorly equipped and inexperienced to take the steps to enable cloud scale management.

Jesse offers a few tips of advice for cloud computing:

• Sysadmins need to say “Yes” – not no – and try to make needs happen
• Executives need to realize that cloud is not a magic unicorn, benefits come from efficiency not raw Capex, and that there are true cultural implications across board, lastly, executive buy-in is essential to success
• the secret of cloud computing is a huge configuration requirement on the start up
• if you are to cloud compute, you need to do it within the constraints of the cloud provider

Jesse noted an important shift in which developers are writing more operational code as opposed to waiting for system administrators.  There has been a melding of the operations and developer world.

Jesse touched on load provisioning, which is based on cutting down provisioning after a certain number of hits have passed.  Capacity planning is      important, so without properly configured capacity planning, your website (or cloud service) is at risk. Capacity planning requires math and planning and lots of hard work.

Lastly, Jesse introduced NoSQL, a new way to look at databases.  All databases use the CAP theorem, a mix of Consistency, Availability, and Partition management.  It is possible to focus on two, but always to the detriment of the third.  Databases and MySQL focus on consistency first and availability secondly.  However, Web applications need Availability most, and Partition Tolerance second.  NoSQL has many tools which tweak CAP differently, including CouchDB, Cassandra, Redis, and MongoDB.

Check out Opscode here, and Jesse @ O’Reilly Radar here.

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Google and LA will be the business case for other government entities

Randi Levin, CTO of the City of Los Angeles, John Zeberlein of CSC, and Deborah Hafford of Google Enterprise offered a wide open Q&A session into one of the nation’s first cloud computing service deployments for a local government, Los Angeles.  With roughly 30,000 email users moving from Novell Groupwise to Google Apps, this migration is not a simple process.

Ms Levin’s situation was such that the City of LA was in a total budget crisis.  They were tasked with providing continuity of services with about 30% fewer resources.  In addition, the Information Technology Agency (ITA), employed unionized workers, faced furloughs and were unable to pay for overtime.  These economical concerns meant a change was necessary.

From a technical standpoint, the ITA employed Novel GroupWise 7, but they had many issues.  Users were extremely unhappy with the email system, the calendaring, the sync requirements, and the lack of compatability with the iPhone.  Lastly, the ITA was unwilling to pay the $30M necessary to upgrade the current data-center due to its location (under 20 floors in earthquake land!!).  Ms Levin needed to move to the cloud, and move without a large upfront investment.

In their evaluation process, Ms Levin had many concerns; security, existing application integration, price, Public Records Acts/Secret Subpoenas, and more.  Through these criteria, the ITA selected Google Apps, implemented in partnership with CSC.  The ITA had no disaster recovery management plan, so a move to the cloud was essential (especially in earthquake ground zero).

The ITA is extremely happy with the features of their Google Apps deployment.  This includes increased mobility to their end-users, guaranteed up-times, and a huge amount of web storage.  The ITA also enjoys the anti-virus protection and security provided by Google.

In terms of adoption, Ms Levin is finding a great positive response from her customers.  Revisions are coming faster and sharper.  CSC is leading the training project, and finding the largest struggle is changing the culture and workflows to fit Google Apps.  Adaptation came fast to the techno-savvy, under 40 crowd, but there is a true age gap in ease of use and adoption.  Currently, they have transitioned 10,500 employees, and will hit 30k by the end of July.

The totality of the contract is $7.25M over five years, providing a savings of $5M, and an ROI of close to $20M.  I think that we should pay close attention to the City of LA and how the handle their Google Apps deployment into the future.  Google Apps will change the way that many firms do business (and business apps).  But Google might find their sweet spot to be in the public sector, due to the fully fleshed out offering for a smaller cost.  It can be deployed across small and large enterprises, maximizing cost savings and interoperability.

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Google AdWords is an effective and efficient way to advertise

Thalia Nierenberg and Eric Obenzinger of Google gave a very interesting talk on how to pull traffic to your site.  As Google is the largest search provider, they would certainly know how to get website traffic.  This session focused on AdWords and how it can help drive traffic.  Google AdWords can provide flexible and scalable rates to enable Government agencies advertising efforts.

Google AdWords – ads sold in auction form the maximum cost per click willing to be paid by the advertiser combined with the relevancy result.  AdWords has three key benefits; your message is extremely easy to change, you pay for only clicks delivered, and you gain reporting capabilities.  AdWords have been used by FEMA and ONDCP to deliver targeted results (especially location based results).

5 Steps to Setting Up and AdWords Campaign – Establish Success Metrics before setting up AdWords

1. Select Keywords – Google has Automated AdWords Keyword Tool, and Insights for Search to examine search trends
2. Account Structure – aligning campaign goals to spend efficiently
3. Target Effectively – Target Ads by Language and Location, Regional and Local Targeting – Sharpen your Focus, and Troubleshoot
4. Write Ad Text – Write useful and effective ad texts, reference keywords in ad text, tell audience what to do include multiple ad creatives.
5. Landing Page – Avoid general landing pages – link directly to information

Some Free Google Tools:

Identify consumer trends with Google Insights for Search.  Use AdPlanner to identity demographics of popular websites.  Google Analytics allows you to evaluate your campaign success, providing analytics nad reporting for your websites.

Utilizing Google AdWords is a cost-effective option for driving web traffic.  Especially for Government folks because nobody wants to have to crawl through that their websites.  So if you need help getting traffic, follow those simple steps ahead and get advertising!

Use rhomobile as your app framework!

Bob and I are very interested in Smartphone app development, specifically Android development.  Apps are being used across the world to enable work, play, and collaboration.  App development and sales is a huge economical force.  Governments are starting to use apps to make work easier – there are even military apps for the iPhone.  Basically what I am saying is if you don’t have an App, you are way behind.  Since I am one of those without my own app (sorry, not writing for BlackBerry) I thought this was the right place for me to be.

Adam Blum of rhomobile, an open mobile framework company, gave this talk.  It was an introduction to the general principles that drive compelling apps, as well examples of how bad user experiences are created.

Adam’s Best Practices:

• Avoid Typing - pick reasonable default settings, don’t have ANY setup process, and use information on device to pick up locations/people
• Be Context Sensitive – take users right to the data, no top level lists to select the right object type/function
• Leverage Device Capabilities – smartphones have senses, don’t do myopic web ports, use: GPS, mapping, PIM contacts and camera
• Synchronized Local Data – make it possible to use the app without connectivity, insure that user’s work on transactions is never lost, automatically cache frequently used data, generally requires some kind of sync framework
• Handle Varying Schemes – large enterprise apps rarely have fixed/”out of box” schema, need to handle varying built-in objects, plus handle inevitable changes to those schemes
• Support All Devices – Android and iPhone have great growth, but BlackBerry and WinMo have enterprise installed bases that aren’t going away, Symbian is still huge worldwide, Nokia/Intel Meego + Atom chip are very interesting, don’t forget WebOS!!
• Rapid Iterations – deliver small identifiable features frequently, use a toolset that enables rapid iteration
• Leverage Free Data Sources – rich informational apps are still rare, synchronized data apps even rarer, Data.gov is a hugely underexploited area

Adam even wrote a small app for us, one that was a “611″ incident reporting, controlling in Ruby (writing in HTML/CSS/Javascript) and exporting to iPhone and Android emulators.  Adam suggests using frameworks to help create apps, enabling easy porting to different operating systems.

For someone who is just days away from the HTC Evo 4G, I found this talk extremely interesting and helpful, as we try to develop our own in-house applications to enable efficiencies in our day to day operations.  If you’ve got the need to create an app, check out RhoMobile (here).

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make your own Drupal @ Drupal Gardens!

Kieran Lal of Acquia led a great talk (adventure) on the use of government Social Publishing and Drupal.  Kieran is the Drupal community adventure guide for Acquia, which provides commercial subscriptions for Drupal. He is a board member of the Drupal assocation, coordinates testing.drupal.org, and the Drupal security team. Recently he’s been involved in scaling Drupal.org, organized 900 attendee Drupalcon, and is driving the Drupal.org redesign.

Kieran was aided by a few government folks; Dennis Sutch and Tim Wood of the Department of Commerce who have stood up 3 sites so far with Drupal, Jason Hoekstra of the Department of Education, and Kirsten Burgard, Department of Veteran’s Affairs, who recently did URL shortening for federal government.

Dennis and Tim have been moving from Microsoft Word as their content publishing tool.  They saw the transparency mandate as a turning point to change the way they published content.  When looking around the network, they found Drupal, enjoyed it’s open API and the fact that it is based on PHP.  The DoC team first worked the opengov.gov website in less than 8 weeks.  They have also worked on Commerce.Gov redesign (check it out here).  They did their re-design in less than 8 weeks, and the website is great.  Drupal has provided flexibility to development teams, including quick posting and embedding capabilities (which they did not have with Microsoft Word).  They are able to download the stack to individual users, enabling a high degree of interoperability learning.  Drupal has a large amount of plug-ins that you can use, which DoC office of the CIO has used as a force multiplier – allowing their little shop to do more than previously possible.

Jason, Technology Solutions Advisor, had been looking for a new web-platform.  Looking to open internally and allow program offices to contribute content.  Currently in migration right now (80K pages!).  Ed.gov is currently running Drupal.  Jason is finding Drupal to be a swiss army knife – add-on modules are easy to find, without the need for custom development.  Drupal was used to post the National Education plan, and return comments quickly.  They are finding Drupal a great way to interact with the public, allowing them to see what’s going on and contribute.  data.ed.gov, about to launch June 1st, is going to open up the grant-making process and the data surrounding the grants.

Kirsten first created Go.Usa.Gov, a url shortener for the US Gov.  With the VA, Kirsten is beta-testing open-atrium.  Sharing information is a cultural shift for the VA, which is one of her biggest struggles.  The VA needed something that would be useful for multiple CIOs to collaborate online.  Created a Google Group of Government Drupalers.  They have been able to share leading practices amongst each other.  Kirsten foresees a government Drupal camp, culminating in a coding sprint in the near future.

I was already very interested in Drupal both because of its open source roots, and the capabilities that it enables on websites.  After this talk, I am sold on Drupal.  With my beta code, I plan to get into playing with drupalgardens (here). Drupal is an easy to manage website designer, complete with B2C capabilities, blogs, social networking, forums and more.  Drupal has a great community @ www.drupal.org, and is being used by multiple government agencies, (see here).  As Open Government Initiatives continue, I think Drupal will become a big player in the federal web design market.

Contact info:

Kieran Lal

Jason Hoekstra

Kirsten.Burgard2@va.gov

Dennis Sutch

Tim Wood

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If you have a few minutes I would really appreciate you checking out an application I wrote. The application automates some actions common to US Military staff planning by building a dynamic, interactive decision-matrix.   I’ll discuss the use case for the application and then end with links to the source code for the app (easily read, copied, downloaded) and link to the online version of the app.

First a disclaimer: This is really a simple thing. Since it takes advantage of the powerful capabilities of Adobe Flex it is under 200 lines of code and if I were a better programmer it would probably be a whole lot smaller. And, although I think this is laid out like many old style military decision matrix graphics, I’m not much of a designer. So if you have any advice/thoughts/tips for me on either design or coding (or anything else) I would really appreciate it.

The point of the app: Years of staff work and military doctrine development and service school training has produced an approach to modern military planning that involves course of action development, analysis and selection. Potential courses of action for a military campaign are produced by the staff based on inputs from the Commander and many other factors. The COAs that are nominated for consideration are all to be adequate, feasible and acceptable. But the commander must chose the optimal one. As a tool for selecting the optimal one, the staff will normally prepare a variant of the decision matrix. (for more on this joint planning process see Joint Pub 5.0 available online at: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/).

The application presented here enables a staff to evaluate COAs by criteria and instantaneously see which scores higher. It then allows the weightings of the criteria to be dynamically changed and the resulting impact on the decision is immediately shown.

To try the app see:

http://ctovision.com/flex/COA-Selection/main.html

The source code is available at:

http://ctovision.com/flex/COA-Selection/srcview/index.html

The app is also available for a download to your desktop (it runs as a desktop application in the Adobe AIR environment).

My eventual goal for this app: I’ll make it freely available to several of the open source frameworks in DoD and will host it for free for anyone who wants to use it for any purpose. But before doing that I sure would appreciate frank advice on how to make it better.

Other potential uses for the app: This process and the decision-matrix can be used to help focus your thought and enhance your judgment for a wide range of decisions.  Which house should you buy? Which job should you take? Where should you go for your vacation?

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.

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Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra discuss the Open Gov Initiative

One of the great resources for tracking trends in Open Government, Gov2.0 and related activities is GovFresh.com, a site I recommend all visit and bookmark and track.  GovFresh founder Luke Fretwell can be found on GovLoop, LinkedIn, Twitter.

Luke recently asked several folks who track the Gov2.0 scene for thoughts on the recent Reactions to the White House Open Government Directive.  The directive itself is well worth a read:

(Another great perspective is on the site of the Red Hat Government senior architect/CTO, Gunnar Hellekson, at his blog).

The comments on Luke’s site, including my comments, tend towards the very positive. This directive is a good thing and my gut tells me comments should be positive.

But we the citizenry also have plenty of reason to be cautious.  One reason to be cautious is the clear indication that OMB and the White House don’t seem to believe these ideas of openness belong to them.  In general, these are the people the citizens need to watch the closest.

I’ll highlight another caution by pointing out another lead I got from Luke’s govfresh site.  A clip of a little Gov2.0 humor brought to you by the Daily Show:

So that is just funny! But the caution I would like to make is underscored by this humor. TSA screwed up in a big way, by widely releasing information into the public domain that should have never been there.  The big part of their screw up had to do with people not understanding technology being allowed to make decisions (which is increasingly a no-no, folks that don’t understand how to work tools should not be able to use tools).  But I have to wonder if pressure to release before thinking or a bias towards openness first had anything to do with the release.

This is an area I hope Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra pay attention to.  Just like President Obama now owns the Afghanistan war, Vivek and Aneesh now bear responsibility for the smooth functioning of our government’s IT.  It is pretty clear now that both should focus more on ensuring 100% of the federal workforce, including contractors, are either qualified to operate our federal IT or are supervised prior to making decisions.

I should also point out that Vivek now owns 100%, responsibility for the protection of all federal networks against unauthorized use.  That is the topic for another post, but clearly, if Vivek is the senior IT guy in the federal space and are operating with the President’s authority in this area he is responsible for how our enterprise functions.  More on this topic later.

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