CTOvision.com » Great CTOs

Army IT Agency: An exemplar of enterprise IT transformation

BobGourley — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:14:44 +0000

Don Adcock is the executive director of the Information Technology Agency (ITA) of the US Army. The ITA is the executive agent for many OSD IT functions in the DC area and is a group which must operate a highly functioning IT enterprise at a very high level of availability.

Don recently conducted an interview on Fed News Radio where he provided some insights into how the Army ITA is addressing its challenges and how their business model is changing. If you are an enterprise technologist in any enterprise, federal or not, large or small, I would recommend you listen to Don’s interview. To me it hits on several items any CIO, CTO or other IT leader should track.

I’m not talking about the specific business model. Although that is important as well. I’m talking about the power of vision and the power of being able to articulate that vision in a clear, compelling way. These are classic leadership qualities good to see in any field, but incredibly important in IT.

As for the ITA, Don took over there in March 2010 and now leads the group in its mission. They provide a reliable, secure, cost-efficient IT services to the DoD community inside the national capital region (the beltway). They deliver a comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities. ITA supports the Pentagon and many other facilities in the area. They are the “single agency manager” for this function. Don has the tough job of having to serve a broad community of stakeholders, including reps from every service and agency in the DC area. They provide storage, COOP, telecommunications, telephone services, e-mail, networks, messaging, backup, desktops, engineering systems development and design, Information Assurance, and of course O&M on all that.

Right now ITA is in the middle of a transformation. They are changing it from a functionally organized business model to an enterprise model to align more with service delivery. Over the next 6 months Don’s goals are to ensure this transition is complete and then develop a program to continue to optimize.

You can find out more about Don and the ITA at:

http://www.oaa.army.mil

And listen to the Fed News Radio interview at:

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=42&sid=1550881

And for those with an ability to contribute to the ITA mission, please consider attending the ITA industry day of 15 June 2010. For more on that see:

https://secureapp2.hqda.pentagon.mil/dtsw_cms/customcf/ita/

FBI CIO Chad Fulgham: Delivering Real Capability

BobGourley — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:54:39 +0000

The FBI has some critically important missions. They have always been sent to address the big crimes, the hard challenges that required the most advanced training and skills. And they have always had roles in counter espionage and counter terror (with both those roles growing in the last several years). They have long been active in making the world a much much safer place.

Consider some of the topics in the weekly top news stories release of 14 May:

They helped catch a Dutch bank in a scheme where they bank tried to defraud the US of over $500M.
They rolled up another big mortgage fraud scheme.
They provided warning to citizens on new seedy phone fraud tricks
Vast drug operations were shut down in upstate NY
A fraud scheme involving financing of independent movies was uncovered and the perp busted.
Several Texas murderers were brought to justice
Hate crimes were investigated and arrests made
Art theft conspiracy was investiaged and arrests made.

These are just highlights from one week. Far far more is being done by the FBI. These guys really help protect us. And they help protect our kids. And it goes without saying that there is so much trouble in the country we need more help like this.

But this is a blog that tries to focus on technology and a key point I want to make is that the job of the CIO at the FBI is to help the mission. If a CIO does a good job, the mission is supported. If a CIO does an incredible job, the mission is not just supported, but mission accomplishment is aided and more bad guys get caught and more crime gets deterred and so on and so on.

I have known for quite a while that Chad Fulgham is one of those world-class CIOs that is doing wonders for the mission at FBI (see his bio here). I’m glad to see more discussion of his accomplishments in the press.

For a good recap of some of his work see: FBI CIO Unveils Next-Gen IT Strategy

This Information Week article captures some of the agency-wide upgrades underway at the FBI, including:

An upgrade of network infrastructure, including replacing their old ATM/Frame Relay network with new Cisco-based IP systems that use Multiprotocol Lable Switching (this is called the FBI’s Next Gen network, it provides the backbone for FBI UNet, FBINet and SCION, and reaches over 800 FBI locations). This Next Gen Network provides 45 times mroe capacity over the old one.

A deployment of the latest Microsoft Office-based PC environments that provide dramatically enhanced capabilities including more collaboration tools, to all agents and employees. This includes PC based voice and video and chat and other productivity apps.

Testing of new capabilities in the FBI case-management system, Sentinel.

Providing more awareness of capabilities to the entire FBI workforce

Enhancing the security and performance of the entire system by use of advanced identity management and infrastructure management tools including Oracle’s Identity Manager, Cisco’s NAC, and a suite of HP tools.

There are so many positive things going on at FBI’s CIO office. There is a great team in place there with a tremendous mix of seasoned professional IT experts, FBI agents and world class industry leading technologists like Chad. I think we are all better off because of the efforts underway there.

Larry Ellison on the Sun-Oracle Close, January 27, 2010

BobGourley — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:38:29 +0000

The clip below is Larry Ellison giving some context on the Oracle Acquisition of Sun. His mantra: complete, integrated, focused on business value for customers.

I have more context and opinions coming in a follow-on post.

Discussion with Justin Rattner of Intel

BobGourley — Sat, 02 May 2009 11:04:50 +0000

This post is a follow-on to my previous report on the 21 April 2009 Xeon 5500 kickoff event hosted by Intel corporation (see: Intel’s New Chip ). My previous post talked about the new “Intelligent Processors” being fielded by Intel. With this post I want to provide a bit more information on a key presenter there, Justin Rattner.

You can find background on Justin from two credible sources, his official bio at Intel and a Wikipedia entry on him.

It turns out Justin works for a pretty cool company. While talking with Justin and Nigel Ballard (Intel’s Federal Marketing Manager) I mentioned that I run a blog focused on technologists and they invited me to attend a small session with members of the press (this is another great reason to run a blog, you can elbow your way into all sorts of places!).

Some of what I learned from this session with Justin follow:

The new Nehalem chip may very likely change the security game. We got hints of that at the presentation earlier in the day when he talked about the enhanced ability to support encryption on the chip. When we were able to ask follow-on questions he underscored something that many of us in the profession have come to realize—encryption is just one of many capabilities that must be brought to bear against the threat. The best approach is a defense in depth approach.

As part of a defense in depth approach, the new management capabilities of Nehalem provides an ability to watch what is going on in the processor. Little chips on the processor watch the big chips on the processor. That enables review of the code that is executing.

When fully taken advantage of, this capability will significantly mitigate the ability of bad guys or malicious code to install and run root kits, for example. No anti-virus capability can detect a well masked rootkit. None of the OS guys can do this. It must be done on the chipset. The management module on the new Nehalem chip can provide that ability. It can scan memory and watch processes and compare against known valid code and take action. In Justin’s words: “It has become painfully obvious that none of the current defenses are adequate.” A stand alone management system that can command other processor components is a fundamental solution that will change the game.

I asked Justin one of my favorite questions about Moore’s law. We all know no mere mortal should ever try to predict its death, but it is time to predict its loss of relevance, I believe. Afterall, the performance statistics provided by Justin in his opening session showed dramatic, exponential performance enhancements that are far greater than the Moore’s law driven increase in number of transistors on a chip over time. So I asked Justin to comment. I asked, if Intel is blowing past the performance predictions of Moore’s law, isn’t Moore’s law less relevant? Shouldn’t some sort of “Core’s Law” be cited instead, where the number of cores double every two years? Isn’t that a better predictor of performance?

Justin’s comment: Intel has now realized that Moore’s law is no longer about performance. Moore’s law is remarkable in terms of predicting the number of transistors, but the number of transistors it takes to increase performance count has grown geometrically. In general, a 2x increase in performance might require a 4x increase in transistors. Smarter design is required. Smarter design, like multi-core and multi-thread gives dramatic increase in performance and many other benefits as well, including an ability to manage thermal and power budget on the chip, or adding virtualization support on the chip. Doing things like this requires transistors, but it also enhances overall performance.

I asked Justin about the internal tensions between people who are both consumers of tech and high tech workers. As consumers they are receiving more and more capabilities, from handhelds to desktops to cloud services. Then they go to work and as enterprise workers they are served with sub standard IT. He knows this tension well and knows it is occurring everywhere, but sees big gains being made in servers available to enterprises and believes now is the moment to upgrade to provide increase enterprise capability to workers. He believes in establishing private clouds, but also realistically knows public clouds will be with us forever.

I asked Justin about the handheld market. There are over 3.3 billion active cell phone subscriber accounts, for example, and only 1.2 billion PCs. Justin was clear in this: Intel recognizes this market and is coming. Expect their continued pursuit of a wide range of consumer products, building on success of their Atom chip and netbooks. Look for Intel moving faster into embedded computing. Opportunities are expected to “explode” in digital signage, automobiles, healthcare, and personal ecommerce.

I asked about Twitter. It is in use by many folks at Intel, and there are internal collaborative tools and social media inside the corporation. It seemed clear that they are not designing chips by 140 character Twitter micro-blog bursts, but they are enhancing internal coordination and cooperation. And that is good for all of us IT users.

Overall I found Justin to be a world class tech leader and I felt honored to be in the same room with a person who is changing the world in such a huge way. Thanks Justin for the time.

A CTO’s views on the new Fed CTO

BobGourley — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:05:03 +0000

I’m very pleased with the pick of Aneesh Chopra as the Federal Government’s CTO. I wish I could add more context than that, and was thinking of a quick biographical sketch of Aneesh and some ideas on why this is great news. Then I read Tim O’Reilly’s post at OReilly Radar, and frankly I just totally agree with everything Tim said. Please check out his post at:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/aneesh-chopra-great-federal-cto.html

Here is an excerpt that particularly resonated with me:

“Chopra has been focused for the past three years on the specific technology challenges of government. Industry experience does little to prepare you for the additional complexities of working within the bounds of government policy, competing constituencies, budgets that often contain legislative mandates, regulations that may no longer be relevant but are still in force, and many other unique constraints. In his three year tenure as Secretary for Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Chopra has demonstrated that he has these skills. In fact, last year, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers ranked Virginia #1 in technology management.”

To me that points to the number one quality you want in a CTO. A CTO must get results. A CTO in any large organization has a tough time getting things done, so when you find someone who has gotten results the way Aneesh Chopra has you have found a real champion.

I used to call Vivek Kundra “the Alpha CTO” because of his open collaboration with other CTOs and the leadership by example he gave all of us during his time as CTO of DC. But now what do I do? Vivek is still a great guy who will get results, but now there is another great guy who will get results who has the title CTO. Anyway, it is good to see Aneesh Chopra in place and I know all of us CTOs wish him well.

Vivek Kundra: Still the Alpha CTO and now the First Fed CIO

BobGourley — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:17:48 +0000

Today’s news on Vivek Kundra’s role in the federal space made me think of another CTO, Yuvi Kochar. Yuvi, the CTO of the Washington Post, is a great connector of CTOs who leads the informal collective of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable. Although I had heard Vivek speak a time or two, the first really deep interactions I had with Vivek were through Yuvi’s work in service to the tech community and I much appreciate that.

For a quick update on Vivek from a CTO perspective see:

Vivek Kundra: The Alpha CTO - My interview of Vivek

Federal Government Technology Directions and the Fed CTO – A pointer to tech work of the transition team.

Vivek Kundra: Democratizing Data and Putting it in the Public Domain – Some comments on Apps for Democracy.

The Technology Implications of the Obama Win - Megatrends, including some driven by Vivek.

So, congrats Vivek. Your country wishes you well and we all appreciate your service. We look forward to a more widespread use of your models and methods and look forward to more delivery of services to our citizens.

A Blog I Like: Haft of the Spear

BobGourley — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:18:19 +0000

Michael Tanji brings a perspective forged in years of intelligence work and a successful stint protecting information in the financial sector. He is a well published author who focuses on national security issues and is also a thought leader in the computer security domain.

At Haft of the Spear he writes primarily about technology related/enabled national security issues, which includes a heavy dose of information warfare.

Read HOTS at: http://haftofthespear.com/

Next week I write about Nicholas Carr and his Rough Type blog.

A Blog I Like: Devost.net

BobGourley — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:04:35 +0000

Matt Devost has been a thought leader in information technology, cyber warfare, counter terrorism and security training for over a decade. He has built successful companies, taught warriors security, helped protect industry and taught (and still teaches) information warfare at Georgetown university.

Through history great thoughts have come from leaders who work at the intersection of multiple domains of practice and Matt continues to demonstrate his thought leadership at is blog. As proof let me mention his winning of NDU’s Sun Tzu infrormation warfare essay contest in 1996. The article he co-authored titled “Information Terrorism: Can You Trust Your Toaster?” remains a classic thought piece that should be read by every IT professional and military strategist today.

Read that article and Matt’s more recent thoughts at: http://blog.devost.net/

Next week I write about Mike Tanji and Haft of the Speer.

A Blog I Like: ShepherdsPi

BobGourley — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:49:37 +0000

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technologies in Governments, Lewis Shepherd, publishes a blog on technologies relevant to enterprises big and small.

Lewis writes about tools, techniques and concepts in ways that bring home the real utility of advanced technologies. Recent posts have been on word-clouds and other ways of visualizing information, semantic constructs, flexible devices and of course recent developments from the tech industry.

Lewis’s blog should be on any technologist reading list and I consider him a “must follow” connection on twitter.

You can read Lewis and find his twitter account at: http://shepherdspi.com/

Next week I write about Matt Devost at: http://blog.devost.net/

Vint Cerf of Google and Bob Gourley of CTOvision.com on CIO Talk Radio

BobGourley — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:25:14 +0000

On Wednesday 28 Jan 2009 at 10am Eastern I’ll be on CIO Talk Radio with one of the stars of the global technology community, Vint Cerf.

The topic we will be discussing is cloud computing and the next technology revolution in the US. Vint is fantastically qualified to discuss this topic, and I’m honored to be sharing a microphone with him and look forward to learning from the interaction. Every time I get the pleasure of interacting with Vint it ends up influencing me. I hope to capture some of our interaction for future blog posts here at ctovision.com

Vint’s bio is incredible and I learn something every time I read it. I’ve pasted it below.

But first more on CIO Talk Radio. CIO Talk Radio is an Internet radio talk show, broadcasted live every Wednesday at 9:00 AM Central/ 10:00 AM Eastern, about how technology has changed and is changing the way we live our lives as well as do business. Guests are business leaders, subject matter experts, and thought leader who are responsible for shaping the way we use technology. Visit the site at: http://ciotalkradio.com and click on LIVE BROADCAST to listen. A popup window will open and if you have Windows Media Player installed, in 10 – 15 seconds, you will listen to the live radio. In case of issues you may also open broadcasting station websites. Call 866.472.5790 to ask questions during the live broadcast.

Now for that incredibly interesting bio:

Vint Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google

Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

Cerf is the former senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology.

Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M. Turing award in 2004 (sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”) for their work on the Internet protocols. In November 2005, President George Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize.

Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.

During his tenure from 1976-1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data and security technologies.

Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007. Cerf also served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992-1995 and in 1999 served a term as chairman of the Board. In addition, Cerf is honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new Internet protocol. Cerf served as a member of the U.S. Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2001 and serves on several national, state and industry committees focused on cyber-security. Cerf sits on the Board of Directors for the Endowment for Excellence in Education, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advisory Committee and the Board of the Avanex Corporation. He also serves as 1st Vice President and Treasurer of the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation. Cerf is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the Annenberg Center for Communications at USC and the National Academy of Engineering.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet. These include the Marconi Fellowship, Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the Prince of Asturias award for science and technology, the National Medal of Science from Tunisia, the St. Cyril and St. Methodius Order (Grand Cross) of Bulgaria, the Alexander Graham Bell Award presented by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, the NEC Computer and Communications Prize, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, the ACM Software and Systems Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Computer and Communications Industries Association Industry Legend Award, installation in the Inventors Hall of Fame, the Yuri Rubinsky Web Award, the Kilby Award, the Rotary Club International Paul P. Harris Medal, the Joseph Priestley Award from Dickinson College, the Yankee Group/Interop/Network World Lifetime Achievement Award, the George R. Stibitz Award, the Werner Wolter Award, the Andrew Saks Engineering Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Leadership Award, the J.D. Edwards Leadership Award for Collaboration, World Institute on Disability Annual award and the Library of Congress Bicentennial Living Legend medal. Cerf was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006.

CTOvision.com » Great CTOs

Army IT Agency: An exemplar of enterprise IT transformation

You may also like -

FBI CIO Chad Fulgham: Delivering Real Capability

You may also like -

Larry Ellison on the Sun-Oracle Close, January 27, 2010

You may also like -

Discussion with Justin Rattner of Intel

A CTO’s views on the new Fed CTO

You may also like -

Vivek Kundra: Still the Alpha CTO and now the First Fed CIO

Vivek Kundra: The Alpha CTO - My interview of Vivek

Federal Government Technology Directions and the Fed CTO – A pointer to tech work of the transition team.

Vivek Kundra: Democratizing Data and Putting it in the Public Domain – Some comments on Apps for Democracy.

The Technology Implications of the Obama Win - Megatrends, including some driven by Vivek.

You may also like -

A Blog I Like: Haft of the Spear

You may also like -

A Blog I Like: Devost.net

You may also like -

A Blog I Like: ShepherdsPi

You may also like -

Vint Cerf of Google and Bob Gourley of CTOvision.com on CIO Talk Radio

You may also like -