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2008 AFCEA Meritorious Service to the Intelligence Community Award

AFCEA International, a non-profit membership association serving the military, government, industry and academia as an ethical forum for advancing professional knowledge and relationships in the fields of communication, IT, intelligence and global security, awarded Crucial Point LLC CTO and founder Bob Gourley with their 2008 Meritorious Service Award.

Citation follows:

2008 AFCEA Meritorious Service to the Intelligence Community Award

Mr. Bob Gourley

CTO, Crucial Point LLC

Mr. Bob Gourley is the CTO and founder of Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and acceleration firm, and is the lead blogger at ctovision.com. Gourley is a former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

While in this position he was recognized by InfoWorld as one of the top 25 CTOs in the globe.  Gourley is a strong advocate for user-focused and open source software. His contributions to the Google Gadget community have placed him on Google’s list of the top 200 gadget programmers in the world.  He holds three masters degrees including a Master of Science degree in scientific and technical intelligence from Naval Postgraduate School, a Master of Science degree in military science from USMC University, and a Master of Science degree in computer science from James Madison University.  Gourley has published over 40 articles and has won National Defense University’s Sun Tsu award for information warfare and the US Naval Institute’s Colin Powell Essay contest.

He is a founding member of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association and sits on that organization’s board. He is also on the board of directors several other non-profit and for-profit enterprises, and serves on several government advisory boards.

via AFCEA.

We are really honored when we make the award lists. Some of note include:

Is Your CTO Making You Stupid?

Nicholas Carr writes in ways that makes people think.  I really enjoyed reading his latest in the Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This article covers some rather significant trends that IT is pushing into the global social fabric.  The changes he talks about are disturbing.  They are infecting people like a fast spreading disease.

There is a chance you are suffering some of these symptoms yourself, so by all means read the article.

Or if your attention span is going, here is how Nicholas Carr describes the symptoms :

” Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. ”

I hope you dive deep into the Carr article for more details, but if you have the disease yourself you might not.  So here is a gist of key points:

  • Google and others have made research simple and fast and easy.
  • Almost all data can come into your head via your browser.
  • People read fewer (or no) books.
  • People are loosing the ability to read and retain info from long articles.
  • The Internet, through your browser, is the medium of choice.  Newspapers and print are on the out.  TV is heading out fast.
  • We also write through the web, and that is changing the way we think.
  • We too frequently are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the world.

What do we do with this cautionary info?  One immediate think all of us should do is remember to carve out time in the day, every day, to read, write and think.

But if you are an enterprise technologist you should also consider what this means for you and your organization.  Some ideas:

  • The systems you are designing, developing and fielding to your workforce may serve your workforce better if their interfaces are more intuitive and less textual.  People will want to interface with enterprise systems they way they interface with the Internet (present your applications through browsers and summarize results and seek rapid human feedback on what they like or don’t like about the results).
  • To the greatest extent possible, build systems that present fast results.
  • And present information in ways that let humans interact with it.
  • And present information in ways that ensure the humans are in charge of the process and in charge of assessing the relevance of results.
  • Don’t stop innovating.
  • Stay on the net yourself so you can track where it is going.
  • Get engaged in social media (if you are not already).  That means Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter (especially Twitter– it really changes your mind).
  • Translate those many lessons into the enterprise technology you field.

If you can do that and if you can stay focused on the mission all your users will thank you, and in many ways I think you will be helping make your organization smarter.  If you don’t do that then the odds are great that you will just be part of the noise.   You may even be contributing to making your organization stupid.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on that topic?

More items of interest from CTOvision

The greatest new technologies (and great drama too!)

I like technology and I like drama.   These are two of the greatest of human creations.  And they can be even more interesting when combined.

There has been some real drama in the West Coast tech scene the past few weeks, heating up to a boil in the last few days, and about to come to a head tomorrow.

The story is this:

  • Two great expos for high tech startups are the DEMO conference and the TechCrunch50.

  • DEMOfall08 will be in San Diego.   According to their website, Chris Shipley has been around the globe gathering info on the best new technologies and has brought them into one place for this conference.  72 new digital technology products from 11 countries will be introduced.  A record crowd of over 800 have registered already.   This looks like an awesome conference and I can’t wait to read about the
    presentations and study the companies.  I’m sure I’ll find candidates for my own list of top disruptive technologies from what I read from this conference. For more info see:   http://demo.com

  • TechCrunch50 is Sep 8-10 in San Francisco.   It has a goal of bringing the best start-ups and launching them in front influential VC, corporations and the press.  Many companies also give demos.  It seems to be about twice the size as the Demo conference, about 1700 attendees are expected.   Between the two conferences this appears to be the one with more VC and big company attendance, but I am only basing that on a review of the website.   The website, by the way, shows an incredible panel of experts.  These are really the greats in the community.  Experts judging at TechCrunch include Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Dan Farber, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Tim O’Reilly, and Robert Scoble, to name a few.   Here too, I’m sure I’ll find companies that need to be on my early warning screen of disruptive IT.   For more on TechCrunch, see:  http://techcrunch50.com

So now you see the drama?  How could these two great conferences end up being held at exactly the same time?

The way this started, as far as I can tell, was captured in an April blog post from Henry Blodgete.  He said, I quote:

Now that TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis have scheduled their TechCrunch50 start-up celebration conference at the same time as IDG’s DEMO start-up celebration conference, the allegations are flying:
Who moved whose conference to kill who.
Who ripped off who.
Who’s screwing who.
Who’s greedy, mercenary, abusive…
Etc.

The drama really heated up a few weeks ago when the long running tension was written about by the New York Times.   An article by Brad Stone put it this way:

Demo, a 17-year-old conference franchise owned by the technology
publisher IDG, has served as the springboard for hit products like the
Palm Pilot and the TiVo digital video recorder. In San Diego during the
second week of September, 70 start-ups will pay $18,500 each to make a
six-minute presentation to a crowd of investors, journalists and
others. To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of
the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model
amounts to “payola.”

From that article, leaders and associates of both Demo and TechCrunch began exchanging heated posts and interviews.

Here is one from Michael Arrington titled “Everyone Needs To Calm Down”  Mr. Arrington asks folks to chill, but calls the Demo conference unethical.   I guess I like the way he says what he thinks.  But I
don’t think his post will calm anything down!

Here is one from Chris Shipley who says she has had it with the shoddy reporting, invective and arrogance that has attended most of the commentary.  The following are some quotes from her post at: http://guidewiregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/shoddy-reporting-invective-and-arrogance-yeah-i-want-some-of-that/

QUOTE:

When in a twitter I bemoaned the lack of original reporting (only one reporter (cnet) and exactly zero bloggers writing this week about this silly DEMO v TechCrunch episode actually contacted me), the infamous blogger Robert Scoble suggested that if I’d blog my opinion, he’d link to it. Does that mean that a perspective only exists or matters if it’s expressed in a blog post? Or that Robert’s just moving too fast to do any investigation outside his narrow medium?

Scoble’s not the only guy living in the rarefied air of the echo-chamber. Sarah Lacy, who works for the much-respected Businessweek.com, conducted a five-minute video interview with TC50’s
Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, during which the two leveled the usual slander. Did Lacy fire one tough question at the two? Did this journalist call me or the DEMO organization to get a response to serious accusations? Um, the answer to that would be “no.”

In fact, a few weeks ago, when Mike Arrington wrote an assumption-based and error-filled story that demanded an apology from the DEMO organization for a comment that was clearly not made by or on behalf of anyone at DEMO, Lacy picked up the story and wrote with righteous indignation that slander was the highest insult that could be leveled against a journalist. Did she call me or DEMO before posting her story? Again no.

UNQUOTE

So, what’s my take on all that?

It is my intent to follow, from afar, both conferences, and review all I can read out of both.  I’ll make my own assessments on which hot new technologies are of interest to me, and I’ll try hard to help my
associates, friends and readers know my opinion by updating my blog here.  Stay tuned to my list of disruptive IT:

And I’ll also keep tracking the drama.

CIA IT Leaders Are World Class IT Leaders

Tarasiuk_mainbar_120x80 Federal IT leaders have it tough. In general, they face hard challenges, are constantly getting their budgets cut, they must comply with tough security guidelines, and must support a workforce who think everything should work like it does in rich corporate environments or in computer security lax homes. And they must support and serve some of the hardest missions on earth.

I appreciate most all the IT leaders I have met in the federal IT space. But a select few rise above all others. Folks like Bobby Laurine, Prescott Winter, Bob Flores, and Al Tarasiuk.

One of those, Al Tarasiuk, was the subject of an article in CIO magazine today. See it at http://www.cio.com/article/print/441116

Here is a little bit of what that article says:

Tarasiuk has, so far, opened up the 61-year-old insular spy agency to
the concept of more efficient and effective information sharing by
using Web 2.0 technologies, such as the CIA’s Wikipedia-like Intellipedia
that’s used across the U.S. intelligence community. Another sign of
change is a grassroots, Web-based collaboration among Russian
intelligence experts at several U.S. agencies, which enables analysts
to securely share their insights, analysis and information on breaking
news on Russia.

Tarasiuk has instituted a new IT governance team that has—for the first
time—the highest level of management support at the agency. His team
has also moved completely to agile project management methodologies,
virtualized 1,000 servers that are projected to save $18 million in
2008, and empowered frontline CIA employees to ask for, decide on and
employ new IT tools.

In 2007, Tarasiuk’s team was finally able to the replace the CIA’s main
information-handling system, which was severely outdated and lacked the
basic functionalities found in 1990s-era e-mail systems, with a more
modern and user-friendly system called Trident.

In the process, Tarasiuk has tried to revitalize IT’s image within CIA
to match what’s necessary today, “to be seen an as enabler of mission
and not just a technology shop that’s delivering a desktop,” he says.

One thing I know from first-hand experience is that Al is a model of a CIO all enterprise technologists could/should learn from.

Related Reading:

Former CIA Officer Richards J. Heuer

What the CIA is up to, with CTO, Gus Hunt

Admiral Stavridis: Think, Read, Write and Publish, and Blog Too

Admiral Stavridis: Think, Read, Write and Publish, and Blog Too

James_G._Stavridis
In a previous post I mentioned the AFCEA/JFCOM Joint Warfighting Conference.  I’ve e-mailed friends and associates more detailed thoughts on the significance of the conference.  If you would like my views drop me a note and I’d be glad to share.

During the conference there were several very important messages for CTOs, including a few controversial points I’m still trying to think about how to diplomatically blog a bout.  One topic I’d like to discuss now is encouragement from Admiral Stavridis, the four star USN commander of U.S. Southern Command.  He strongly supports and encourages leaders to publish, and I think that is a message all CTOs should listen to.

A good summation of his call to publish is on the Signal Scape blog at:

Adm. Stavridis: Think, Read, Write and Publish

Here is a quote from that entry:

“Adm. James G. Stavridis, USN, commander, U.S. Southern Command, stepped away from the traditional IT conference speech after lunch today by talking about the need for everyone to think, read, write and publish. While it may be necessary during the 21st century to launch Tomahawk missiles, Adm. Stavridis proposed that it will be just as important for members of the military to launch some ideas.

Citing a number of military and government leaders who started their careers by being published in specialized journals such as Proceedings, Adm. Stavridis encouraged everyone in the audience to follow their lead. He also pointed out that many of those who created concepts such as maritime strategy made it a point to read, write and be published.”

He went on to say that govies should:  “Get out there in the blogs. I’ll see you in the blogosphere,” he stated. He also emphasized that writing doesn’t have to be long articles. Anyone can start by writing a short response in a blog. “Start small and think big.”

I am really glad to see people who think like Admiral Stavridis make it to the top of our military.  I published for much of my career and was very lucky to have bosses that allowed and encouraged that.  I have to thank Admiral Wilson, for example, for encouraging me to publish “Time For a Joint Ship” in US Naval Institute Proceedings (Jan 1994).  I remember others at the time telling me they frowned on folks who wrote.  One senior O-6 who would later be promoted to General told me “If you have time to write an article you must not be doing your job.”  Wilson was great topcover.    That article allowed me to interact with several on advanced joint topics.   A couple years later and article on “Intuitive Intelligence” in Defense Intelligence Journal (Fall 1997) generated a dialog with several senior intelligence professionals in OSD and also resulted in an unexpected phonecall from then Director of Naval Intelligence Admiral Jacoby.  I followed that with articles on history and Information Warfare that I directly credit with landing me one of the greatest opportunities to contribute in my career (at JTF-CND), so I really appreciate the encouragement and support for writing through the years.

Now everyone in the government has a guy like Admiral Stavridis lending his support to them, and he is supportive of folks interacting in new media like blogs.  Although I have never met him in person, I know he must be a GREAT leader.  We need more like him.

Related Reading

Technology and Leadership Lessons From Admiral Archie Clemins

SCADA and ME: A Book For Children and Management

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CIA IT Leaders Are World Class IT Leaders

 

Clayton Christensen, Disruptive Innovations and Enterprise IT

Clay Today I got to meet one of the most influential thinkers/speakers/writers in the globe today– Clayton Christensen.  He spoke to a small group of technologists (CIOs and CTOs) at the Cisco IT executive forum, and held us all spell-bound by his fascinating (but sometimes dismal) projections based on his understanding of some major market forces.

Although I recognize most of the thoughts he presented from his books and articles, it was good having his personal context.  It may help some of those concepts to sink it a bit more, and will help me as I try to maintain an eye on the horizon for the next technology disruptions.

One thing I realized right away is that I have been using the terms he coined a little bit differently than he does.  I hope that is just a matter of perspective and not a misuse of the concepts he articulates so well.

Read more from Clayton’s Book: The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

As an enterprise CTO, I always viewed a disruptive technology or disruptive innovation as something that would change my life whether I wanted it to or not.  It is a dramatic improvement that forces changes to plans because it improves the ability of the enterprise to do something, perhaps by an order of magnitude.  Opsware is the perfect example.  It causes many enterprises to change their plans as soon as they see how powerful it can be.  Endeca or Adobe Connect or VMware or Sun Ray thin clients are also good examples.  In a different way, enterprise-wide VOIP and DVTC and modern identity management schemes are also disruptive to enterprise IT.

I know the way Dr. Christensen uses the term is far more significant and important to the business world, and we should all understand the forces at play in his use of the concept.  In his context, a disruptive innovation is a product that overturns the status quo in a market. I guess Opsware, VMware, Endeca and others I track did that in the market, but I’m trying to look at disruption from the
vantage point of an enterprise IT professional who needs to prepare to the greatest extent possible to have enterprise plans/budgets/strategies changed by dramatically better technology.

With those thoughts in mind, please see my previous post on the topic of IT disruptivity, And please take a quick look at my list of my views of the companies we should all be watching for their potential for positive disruption in the IT enterprise. I have been talking to several CTO friends about an update to this list and would appreciate a wider swath of views on it before I do so.

ITIL for CTOs

ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a set of tips, techniques, processes and concepts for managing an IT enterprise.  ITIL focuses on infrastructure, application development and operations. ITIL is without a doubt the most widely accepted approach to enterprise management.  It provides a full set of best practices.

I’ve come to believe that all CTOs should learn ITIL.  I don’t believe ITIL holds all the answers for enterprises, but it has many useful models and many best practices that can be of enormous benefit, so enterprise class CTOs will increasingly find a familiarity with ITIL comes in handy.  For CTOs in vendors, integrators or startups, you will be interacting with enterprise technologists and should understand the power of ITIL as well.

ITIL came out of the UK and the name ITIL remains a registered trademark of the UK’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC), so I should tip my hat to them.  The OGC and the many other contributors to the ITIL have done enterprises everywhere a great service and they deserve our thanks.

The reference library of ITIL is provided in five core texts:

  1. Service Strategy
  2. Service Design
  3. Service Transition
  4. Service Operation
  5. Continual Service Improvement

Benefits of ITIL, asserted on the ITIL site, include:

  • reduced costs
  • improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
  • improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
  • standards and guidance
  • improved productivity
  • improved use of skills and experience
  • improved delivery of third party services through the
    specification of ITIL or ISO 20000 as the standard for service delivery
    in services procurements.

The following info on the books of ITIL v3 is condensed from Wikipedia’s entry on ITIL:

Service Strategy

Service strategy encompasses a framework to build best practice in developing a long term strategy. Topics include: general strategy, competition and market space, service provider types, service management as a strategic asset, organization design and development, key process activities, financial management, service portfolio management, demand management, and key roles and responsibilities of
staff engaging in service strategy.

Service Design

The design of IT services conforming to best practice, and including design of architecture, processes, policies, documentation, and allow for future business requirements. This also encompasses topics such as Service Design Package (SDP), Service catalog management, Service Level management, designing for capacity management, IT service continuity, Information Security, supplier management, and key roles and responsibilities for staff engaging in service design

Service Transition

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

Service Operation

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

The above is just a short introduction.  For more info, I recommend the booklet The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps, by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford.  The book is a very fast read and will leave you with enough of an understanding of the power of ITIL to let you decide how fast to move your organization into implementing it.

Looking for other research topics? Browse our reports directory here. Would you like to task us with research on these or other topics? As A CTOlabs Pro subscriber you may use our “Ask The CTO” section and let us know what we can do for you.
Related Reading:

OLPC: The Future Is Changing Again

There have been several recent announcements by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project worth note.  OLPC is a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab with the goal of providing one laptop for every child on the planet.  So far they have delivered about 500,000 systems.   That’s huge by any standard.

The first new announcement is that project leaders have now announced that Microsoft windows will run on the devices.  The laptops will have a duel boot mode so Linux will also be an OS.  The decision adds cost to the laptop, but not much.   More memory is required to run two OSs, and Microsoft is charging $3 per CPU in licensing fees.

The second recent announcement is a new design.   The current design is a smart, futuristic looking device that looks great and provides great functionality in a form factor that can take a beating.

The next version, due in 2010, is a smaller model that has dual touch screens and no keyboard.

This will give great flexibility to the device, since one touch screen can act as a keyboard when needed or act as a page in a book when needed or be used in several other ways by applications yet to be created.   The new version will reportedly only consume a watt of power.

All this is interesting and intellectually stimulating.  These trends are also important for enterprise CTOs to track.  One is the continuing  and accelerating trend of “consumers first” when it comes to IT development.  Increasingly developers are focusing on consumers and that is having an impact on the IT developed for big enterprises.   That trend has been underway for a long long time (evidence the 3.3 billion cell phone accounts active in Nov 2007, or the huge success of Facebook).   Hot technologies like the iPhone and OLPC are accelerating this trend, and, although as an optimist and technologist I am really excited about that trend, it certainly makes life harder for CTOs.

Another critically important point for CTOs to think through is the cyber threat environment and how it is changing with the rapid, widespread adoption of very low cost very powerful computers.

A bit more on that is in my previous post at:

https://ctovision.com/2007/10/good-and-evil-in-the-future-of-cyberspace/

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