A Turning Point for the Government Cloud

Los Angeles is moving to the cloud, according to Public CIO Magazine March 2010, and “they are the first government of its scale to chose Gmail for the enterprise.”

“It turned out that Washington D.C., was using Gmail for disaster recovery and giving employees the option to use it as their primary e-mail.” But LA is implementing Gmail for more than 30,000 city employees (including police and fire departments) as well as planning to move to Google Apps productivity suite for everything from “calendar, word processing, document collaboration, Web site support, video and chat capabilities, data archiving, disaster recovery and virus protection. “

CTO Randi Levin is leading the charge on the move to cloud computing, and is taking on concerns about cost, data rights, and security.

• On Cost: “The city estimated $5.5 million in hard savings form the Google adoption, and an additional $20 million savings in soft costs due to factors like better productivity.”
• On Data Rights: Nondisclosure agreement with Google includes that the data belong to the city “in perpetuity,” so “if the city wants to switch to another vendor after the contract ends, the city will be able to recall its archived data.”
• On Security: “Google is building a segregated ‘government cloud,” which will be located on the continental U.S. and the exact location will remain unknown to those outside Google. The data will be “sharded”—“shredded into multiple pieces and stored on different servers. Finally, Google will be responsible for “unlimited” damages if there’s a breach of their servers.

LA conducted an request for proposal for software-as-a-service (SaaS) or a hosted solution and received responses for 10 vendors including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Google was selected by an Intradepartmental group of IT managers and a five year contract issued for $17 million.

Currently (since January), LA is conducting a Gmail pilot with about 10% of its city employees, and implementation for the city is slated for mid-June.

Additionally, LA is looking into the possibility of either outsourcing or putting under public-private partnership the city’s servers.

And the interest in government cloud isn’t limited to LA; it is catching on with Google Apps pilots or implementations in places like Orlando, Florida and within 12 federal agencies.

Everyone is afraid to be the first in with a major cloud computing implementation, but LA is moving out and setting the standard that we will all soon be following. It’s not about Google per se, but about realizing the efficiencies and productivity enhancement that cloud computing provides.

A Turning Point for the Government Cloud

Technology, A Comfort to the Masses

Typically, as technologists, we like to point out the great things that technology is doing for us—making us more productive, facilitating more convenience, allowing us to perform feats that humans alone could not do, and enabling us to connect with others almost without regard to space and time. And truly, we are fortunate to live in a time in history with all these new unbelievable capabilities—our ancestors would be jealous in so many ways.

Yet, there is a flip side to technology—what some refer to as the 24x7 society—“always on”—that we are creating, in which life is a virtual non-stop deluge of emails, voicemails, videoconferencing, messaging, Friending, Linking-in, blogging, tweeting, YouTubing, and more.

We are becoming a society of people living in a Matrix-type virtual world, where we go around addicted to the online cyber world and yet in so many ways are unconscious to the real-world relationships that are suffering in neglect and silence.

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal, 22-23 August 2009 entitled, Not So Fast, by John Freeman states that “we need to protect the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships.”

Certainly, online communications and connections are valuable, and in many ways are meaningful to us. They can create wonderful opportunities to bond with those near and far, including those who would be normally beyond our reach geographically and temporally. For me it’s been great reconnecting with old friends from schools, jobs, and communities. And yes, who would think that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger would be but a FaceBook message away for me?

Yet while all the online interaction is fulfilling for us in so many ways—filling voids of all sorts in our lives—in reality the connections we make in the virtual world are but a tiny fraction of the real world human-to-human relationships we have in terms of their significance and impact.

The Journal article puts it this way: “This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?”

One of the biggest fears that people have is not their own mortality, but that of being left alone in the corporeal world—for each of us, while a world unto ourselves, are small in the vastness of all that is around us. Perhaps to feel less alone, people amass and encircle themselves with great amounts of familiar, comforting, and loving people and things. And while people have these, they are connected, grounded, loved, and they are comforted that they are not alone.

But the harsh reality is that no matter how much we have in our lives, people are beings onto themselves, and over time, unfortunately and extremely painfully, all worldly things are ultimately lost.

The Journal states: “We may rely heavily on the Internet , but we cannot touch it, taste it, or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interaction.”

Connections are great. Virtual relationships can be satisfying and genuine. All the technology communication mechanisms are fast, efficient, and powerful in their ability to reach people anytime and anywhere. Yet, we must balance all these with the people we care about the most. We cannot sacrifice our deepest and most intimate relationships by sitting in front of a computer screen morning, noon, and night and walking around with the BlackBerry taking phone calls and emails at our kids' school play, on their graduation day, and during their wedding recital. We are missing the boat on what is really important. We have forgotten how to balance. We have gone to extremes. We are hurting the ones we truly love the most.

“We need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from efficiency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments, but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships.”

Finally, with all the technology, we are in a sense becoming less human and more mechanical—like the Borg, in Star Trek—with BlackBerrys and Netbooks as our implants. Let’s find some time to pull the plug on these technologies and rediscover the real from the virtual.

Technology, A Comfort to the Masses

Information Management Framework

The Information Management Framework (IMF) provides a holistic view of the categories and components of effective information architecture.

These categories include the following:

Information-sharing--Enable information sharing by ensuring that information is visible, accessible, understandable, and interoperable throughout the enterprise and with external partners.

Efficiency--Improve mission efficiency by ensuring that information is requirements-based, non-duplicative, timely, and trusted.

Quality--Promote information quality, making certain that information provided to users is valid, consistent, and comprehensive.

Compliance--Achieve compliance with legislation and policy providing for privacy, freedom of information, and records management.

Security-- Protect information assets and ensure their confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

All areas of the framework must be managed as part of effective information architecture.

Information Management Framework

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Information Management Framework

Making More Out of Less

One thing we all really like to hear about is how we can do more with less. This is especially the case when we have valuable assets that are underutilized or potentially even idle. This is “low hanging fruit” for executives to repurpose and achieve efficiencies for the organization.

In this regard, there was a nifty little article in Federal Computer Week, 15 Jun 2009, called “Double-duty COOP” about how we can take continuity of operations (COOP) failover facilities and use them for much more than just backup and business recovery purposes in the case of emergencies. 

“The time-tested approach is to support an active production facility with a back-up failover site dedicated to COOP and activated only during an emergency. Now organizations can vary that theme”—here are some examples:

Load balancing—“distribute everyday workloads between the two sites.”

Reduced downtime—“avoid scheduled outages” for maintenance, upgrades, patches and so forth.

Cost effective systems development—“one facility runs the main production environment while the other acts as the primary development and testing resource.”

Reduced risk data migration—when moving facilities, rather than physically transporting data and risk some sort of data loss, you can instead mirror the data to the COOP facility and upload the data from there once “the new site is 100 percent operational.”

It’s not that any of these ideas are so innovatively earth shattering, but rather it is their sheer simplicity and intuitiveness that I really like.

COOP is almost the perfect example of resources that can be dual purposed, since they are there “just in case.” While the COOP site must ready for the looming contingency, it can also be used prudently for assisting day-to-day operational needs.

As IT leaders, we must always look for improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of what we do. There is no resting on our laurels. Whether we can do more with less, or more with more, either way we are going to advance the organization and keep driving it to the next level of optimization. 

Making More Out of Less

Mr. Clean and Enterprise Architecture

How many of you know people at work whose desk’s are BIG dumping grounds for papers, magazines, office supplies, coffee cups, knickknacks, and G-d knows what else?

One guy at work moved out of his office after about 4 years collecting mounds of stuff, and a new guy moved in last week and cleaned up the place, it looked like a completely different office. I had never noticed how spacious the office was, how bright it was with the big window, or how gorgeous the shinny mahogany furniture was. It was a true metamorphosis.

One of my colleagues, told a story about how one of the people she used to work with had so much paper on the desk, people used to think the guy was incredibly busy with work all the time. When he moved on and they finally got to check out the work at the top of the 3” pile, they found that the newest stuff, at the top of the pile, was THREE YEARS OLD!

Why do some people keep their offices looking like a dump yard?—Perhaps, some people are truly busy, overworked, and maybe even a little overwhelmed; others, like in the story above, may just want to SEEM very busy and hardworking so their bosses and peers leave them alone at work; then there are those who just like having a place to sprawl out their stuff without their significant others yelling at them to clean up after themselves; finally, some people just feel more comfortable and homey in their clutter—so different strokes for different folks.

While some workplaces, let each person handle their workspaces as they see fit, The Wall Street Journal, 27 October 2008, reports that others are enforcing a more structured and clean work environment, called 5S.

5S is a “key concept of lean manufacturing techniques that have made makers of everything from cars to candy bars more efficient. The S’s stand for sort, straighten, shine, standardize, and sustain.”

The 5S approach “has been moving from the plant floor to the cubicle at hundreds of offices around the country.”

Some companies, like Kyocera, are taking this even further and invoking “Perfect 5S,” which “not only calls for organization in the workplace, but aesthetic uniformity. Sweaters can’t hand on the back of chairs, personal items can’t be stowed beneath desks and the only decorations allowed on cabinets are official company plaques or certificates.”

When I started my career at IBM, we had a “clean desk policy” that was more like 5S than Perfect 5S, and it was generally speaking a good thing. Coming into this environment right out of college, brought discipline to the masses and promoted positive work habits.

In architecting a better enterprise, should 5S or clean desk policies become the norm?

In my opinion, if we implements 5S to create a rigorous authoritarian culture (emphasizing top-down) and to micromanage our employees, then no, we’re just acting the workplace police and making our people miserable because we can. However, if we do it in order to truly increase efficiency, promote a cleaner more livable environment for all, and we communicate this effectively to our employees, then it has the potential to be a good thing for the people and a good thing for the enterprise.

Mr. Clean and Enterprise Architecture

Balancing Strategy and Operations and The Total CIO

How should a CIO allocate their time between strategy and operations?

Some CIOs are all operations; they are concerned solely with the utility computing aspects of IT like keeping the desktops humming and the phones ringing. Availability and reliability are two of their key performance measurement areas. These CIOs are focused on managing the day-to-day IT operations, and given some extra budget dollars, will sooner spend them on new operational capabilities to deploy in the field today.

Other CIOs are all strategy; they are focused on setting the vision for the organization, aligned closely to the business, and communicating the way ahead. Efficiency and effectiveness are two of their key performance measurement areas. These CIOs are often set apart from the rest of the IT division (i.e. the Office of the CIO focuses on the Strategy and the IT division does the ops) and given some extra budget dollars, will likely spend them on modernization and transformation, providing capabilities for the end-user of tomorrow.

Finally, the third category of CIOs, balances both strategy and operations. They view the operations as the fundamentals that need to be provided for the business here and now. But at the same time, they recognize that the IT must evolve over time and enable future capabilities for the end-user. These CIOs, given some extra budget dollars, have to have a split personality and allocate funding between the needs of today and tomorrow.

Government Technology, Public CIO Magazine has an article by Liza Lowery Massey on “Balancing Strategy with Tactics Isn’t Easy for CIOs.”

Ms. Massey advocates for the third category, where the CIO balances strategy and operations. She compares it to “have one foot in today and one in tomorrow…making today’s decisions while considering tomorrow’s impacts.”

How much time a CIO spends on strategy versus operations, Ms. Massey says is based on the maturity of the IT operations. If ops are unreliable or not available, then the CIO goes into survival mode—focused on getting these up and running and stable. However, when IT operations are more mature and stable, then the CIO has more ability to focus on the to-be architecture of the organization.

For the Total CIO, it is indeed a delicate balance between strategy and operations. Focus on strategy to the detriment of IT operations, to the extent that mission is jeopardized, and you are toast. Spend too much time, energy, and resources on IT operations, to the extent that you jeopardize the strategy and solutions needed to address emerging business and end-user requirements, and you will lose credibility and quickly be divorced by the business.

The answer is the Total CIO must walk a fine line. Mission cannot fail today, but survivability and success of the enterprise cannot be jeopardized either. The Total CIO must walk and chew gum at the same time!

Additionally, while this concept is not completely unique to CIOs, and can be applied to all CXOs, CIOs have an added pressure on the strategy side due to the rapid pace of emerging technology and its effects on everything business.

Balancing Strategy and Operations and The Total CIO

Information Management and Enterprise Architecture

Information management is the key to any enterprise architecture.

Information is the nexus between the business and technical components of the EA:

• On one hand, we have the performance requirements and the business processes to achieve those.
  
• On the other hand, we have systems and technologies.
• In between is the information.

Information is required by the business to perform its functions and activities and it is served up by the systems and technologies that capture, process, transmit, store, and retrieve it for use by the business. (The information perspective is sandwiched in between the business and the services/technology perspectives.)

Recently, I synthesized a best practice for information management. This involves key values, goals for these, and underlying objectives. The values and objectives include the following:

1. Sharing –making information visible, understandable, and accessible.
2. Quality—information needs to be valid, consistent, and comprehensive.
3. Efficiency—information should be requirement-based (mission-driven), non-duplicative, timely, and delivered in a financially sound way.
4. Security—information must be assured in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
5. Compliance—information has to comply with requirements for privacy, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and records management.

The importance of information management to enterprise architecture was recently addressed in DM Review Magazine, May 2008. The magazine reports that in developing an architecture, you need to focus on the information requirements and managing these first and foremost!

“You need to first understand and agree on the information architecture that your business needs. Then determine the data you need, the condition of that data and what you need to do to cleanse, conform, and transform that data into business transformation.”

Only after you fully understand your information requirements, do you move on to develop technology solutions.

“Next, determine what technologies (not products) are required by the information and data architectures. Finally, almost as an afterthought, evaluate and select products.” [I don’t agree with the distinction between technologies and products, but I do agree that you first need your information requirements.]

Remember, business drives technology—and this is done through information requirements—rather than doing technology for technology’s sake.

“Let me also suggest …Do not chase the latest and greatest if your incumbent products can get the job done.”

In enterprise architecture, the customer/end-user is king and the information requirements are their edicts.

Information Management and Enterprise Architecture