Showing posts with label Deconflict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deconflict. Show all posts

October 12, 2012

Cloud $ Confusion

It seems like never before has a technology platform brought so much confusion as the Cloud.


No, I am not talking about the definition of cloud (which dogged many for quite some time), but the cost-savings or the elusiveness of them related to cloud computing.

On one hand, we have the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, which estimated that 25% of the Federal IT Budget of $80 billion could move to the cloud and NextGov (Sept 2012) reported that the Federal CIO told a senate panel in May 2011 that with Cloud, the government would save a minimum of $5 billion annually.

Next we have bombastic estimates of cost savings from the likes of the MeriTalk Cloud Computing Exchange that estimates about $5.5 billion in savings so far annually (7% of the Federal IT budget) and that this could grow to $12 billion (or 15% of the IT budget) within 3 years, as quoted in an article in Forbes (April 2012) or as much as $16.6 billion annually as quoted in the NextGov article--more than triple the estimated savings that even OMB put out.

On the other hand, we have a raft of recent articles questioning the ability to get to these savings, federal managers and the private sector's belief in them, and even the ability to accurately calculate and report on them.

- Federal Computer Week (1 Feb 2012)--"Federal managers doubt cloud computing's cost-savings claims" and that "most respondents were also not sold on the promises of cloud computing as a long-term money saver."

  - Federal Times (8 October 2012)--"Is the cloud overhyped? predicted savings hard to verify" and a table included show projected cloud-saving goals of only about $16 million per year across 9 Federal agencies.

  - CIO Magazine (15 March 2012)--"Despite Predictions to the Contrary, Exchange Holds Off Gmail in D.C." cites how with a pilot of 300 users, they found Gmail didn't even pass the "as good or better" test.

- ComputerWorld (7 September 2012)--"GM to hire 10,000 IT pros as it 'insources' work" so majority of work is done by GM employees and enables the business.

Aside from the cost-savings and mission satisfaction with cloud services, there is still the issue of security, where according to the article in Forbes from this year, still "A majority of IT managers, 85%, say they are worried about the security implications of moving to their operations to the cloud," with most applications being moved being things like collaboration and conferencing tools, email, and administrative applications--this is not primarily the high value mission-driven systems of the organization.

Evidently, there continues to be a huge disconnect being the hype and the reality of cloud computing.


One thing is for sure--it's time to stop making up cost-saving numbers to score points inside one's agency or outside.

One way to promote more accurate reporting is to require documentation substantiating the cost-savings by showing the before and after costs, and oh yeah including the migration costs too and all the planning that goes into it. 

Another more drastic way is to take the claimed savings back to the Treasury and the taxpayer.

Only with accurate reporting and transparency can we make good business decisions about what the real cost-benefits are of moving to the cloud and therefore, what actually should be moved there. 

While there is an intuitiveness that we will reduce costs and achieve efficiencies by using shared services, leveraging service providers with core IT expertise, and by paying for only what we use, we still need to know the accurate numbers and risks to gauge the true net benefits of cloud. 

It's either know what you are actually getting or just go with what sounds good and try to pull out a cookie--how would you proceed? 

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

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November 2, 2011

First Stop Saying First


First came "Cloud First" in the 25 Point Implementation Plan To Reform Federal IT Management (9 December 2010).

Then came "Sharing First" and "Future First" in the "vision for information technology" (25 October 2011).

According to Federal Times (31 October 2011), there are many more 'firsts' to come-- with a "set of principles like 'XML First,' 'Web Services First' 'Virtualize First,' and other 'firsts' that will inform how we develop our government's systems. "

At this point in this blog, I can't even remember all the 'firsts' I just jotted down, so my question is at what point does assigning 'firsts' become 'second' to managing our tremendous IT asset base for the government?

Some more firsts just to be first in starting this "list of firsts":


"G-d First"

"Country First"

"Democracy First"

"Freedom First"

"Human Rights First"

"Capitalism First"

"Equality First"

"Justice First"

"Fairness First"

"Family First"

"Charity First"

"Caring First"

"Giving First"

"Love First"

"Health First"

"Mission First"

"People First"

"Insource First"

"Outsource First"

"Integrity First"

"Ethics First"

"Truth First"

"Communication First"

"Leadership First"

"Innovation First"

"Passion First"

"Security First"

"Safety First"

"Reliability First"

"Agility First"

"Adaptability First"

"Sustainability First"

"Planning First"

"Governance First"

"Execution First

"Project Management First"

"Performance Measurement First"

"Best Practices First"

"Learning and Growth First"

"Sharing First"

"Collaboration First"

"Transparency First"

"Interoperability First"

"Reusability First"

"Reputation First"

"Simplicity First"

"Requirements First"

"Effectiveness First"

"Efficiency First"

"Data First"

"Quality First"

"Customer First"

"Service First"

"Standards First"

"Cost-savings First"

"Business Process Reengineering First"

"Critical Thinking First"

"Jobs First"

"Women and Children First"


Essentially, there are a lot of 'firsts' in life and the challenge is in prioritizing and deconflicting these.


So with all due respect first, now let's get back to the business of government and technology. ;-)


(Source Photo: here)


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June 5, 2008

The Visionary and Enterprise Architecture

In User-centric EA, we develop a vision or target state for the organization. However, there are a number of paradoxes in developing an EA vision/target, which makes this goals quite challenging indeed.

In the book, The Visionary’s Handbook by Wacker and Taylor, the authors identify the paradoxes of developing a vision for the enterprise; here are some interesting ones to ponder:

  1. Proving the vision—“The closer your vision gets to provable ‘truth,’ the more you are simply describing the present in the future tense.”
  2. Competing today, yet planning for tomorrow—“By its very nature, the future destablizes the present. By its very natures, the present resists the future. To survive you need duality [i.e. living in two tenses, the present and the future], but people and companies by their very nature tend to resisting living in two tenses.” “You have to compete in the future dimension without destabilizing the competition [i.e. your ability to compete] in the present and without subverting the core values that have sustained your business in the past.”
  3. Bigger needs to be smaller—“The bigger you are, the smaller you need to be….great size is great power, but great size is also stasis.”
  4. The future is unpredictable—“Nothing will turn out exactly as it is supposed to…yet if you fail to act, you will cease to exist in any meaningful professional or business sense.”

So how does one develop a viable target architecture?

The key would seem to be in deconflicting past, present, and future. The past cannot be a hindrance to future change and transformation—the past must remain the past; lessons learned are welcome and desirable, but the options for the future should be open to innovation and hard work. The resistance of the present (to the future) must be mitigated by continuous communications and marketing; we must bring people along and provide leadership. The future is unknown, but trends and probabilities are possible for setting a way ahead; of course, the target needs to remain adaptable to changing conditions.

Certainly, any target architecture we develop is open to becoming a "target" for those who wish to take pot shots. But in an ever changing world and fierce global competition, we cannot sit idle. The architecture must lead the way for incremental and transformative change for the organization, all the while course correcting based on the evolving baseline and market conditions. EA is as much an art as it is a science, and the paradoxes of vision and planning need to be managed carefully.


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