Lifting the Fog

Lifting the Fog on Cloud Computing was the title of the CMIT presentation I attended late last week at the University of Virginia. I thought Paul Daugherty's presentation (Chief Architect at Accenture) was particularly good, especially the section in which he defined the different categorical offerings in the cloud computing space (slide 6). However I would also strongly recommend that he cite when he reuses information or images from others in his work. Compare slide 3 with the Wikipedia Cloud page and this un-cropped image from How Stuff Works. He would not pass the class that I had without the citation.

Dan Burton, from SalesForce.com delivered a good presentation however I'm a little surprised that he didn't talk about how SalesForce.com is supporting apps.gov. Most of the application cloud components already in apps.gov orginate from SalesForce.com. I would have thought that could have been a good discussion point later.

The most interesting presentation was from Jill Singer, the new CIO at the NRO. She spoke about the secure cloud she helped to create with her former employer. What would you call it, a dark cloud? I'm all punned out at this point. But I found her presentation most relevant because in order for her to achieve the ROI goals she established for the project she had to have a healthy number of applications consolidate onto this new platform. As such, from a CIO policy perspective, I was interested in how she was able to meet that challenge; incentives or penalties.

Lastly, Miss Winn from Pitney Bowes presented, and I have to tell you, I was surprised by her presentation. When I think of Pitney Bowes I think of fax machines and postage machines. But they are experimenting in the cloud development arena and doing some interesting things. They need to generate a lot of buzz to get people like me to think of the organization as more than an equipment reseller.

Overall it was a great day, and I learned now how to ask better questions concerning this burgeoning field. I've been thinking, but regretably not doing anything in this field for some time, and I think it is time for my Agency to get into it. We have a need that will traditionally take a lot of effort and require a lot of pain to implement. I am instead proposing that we consider a pre-deployed cloud option to meet the requirement. Specifically, we are looking for a solution that will capture Use Cases, relate them to Requirements, relate them to Test Cases, package Test Cases into Unit Tests and capture the execution of tests prior to a release. This would turn then into defect tracking and management. I am confident that there is a Software as a Service solution available, and I am interested in considering it for the Agency.

Power to the People

In a post to ring in the new year I criticized what a magazine had targeted for things to look for this year and offered a few items that I was hoping to see in 2010. I am optimistic that one of them is indeed going to happen. Check out this story from Reuters. I said

I expect a recognition of Internet connectivity to be a defining factor in whether or not a family is in need of other assistance. As a result, I expect several federally sponsored WI-FI max projects to be started targeting low-income urban areas through cooperation between the Departments of Commerce and Housing and Urban Development.

Right now it looks like it is FCC-only, but that can change in a hurry.

The New Voice of the CIO

I attended the CMIT (Center for the Management of Information Technology) presentation on Cloud Computing last Friday. It was good and I'll probably write more about it. While there I got to speak with Jill Singer, the new CIO at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). This is the second time I have heard her speak. In her presentation she referred to a study released by IBM that is really good.



It is called the New voice of the CIO and I totally recommend it to you. The paper does a good job of identifying the dicotomy of how people in IT Leadership are pulled by the same forces in opposing directions.

Presenting at the NWA 2010 Annual Education and Networking Conference

I'm excited to be a presenter at the National WIC Association Conference this year in Milwaukee. I will be talking about my recent big project that automated the Grants Monitoring process at my Agency. The reason I've been invited to this conference is because while the federal government monitors the grantees, state agencies have the responsibility for monitoring all of the local agencies and clinics. As such, I look forward to sharing my lessons learned and helping them to avoid some of the risks involved with creating a system like that.

Skype on Verizon

This is big. Check out this article indicating that I'll be able to use Skype to make phone calls on my Droid. How crazy is that? Now I have a reason to get serious about Skype. I have only used it casually, but with this, I have a reason to really get with it.

You know though, that the cool thing about Skype isn't that you can make calls, it's the video conferencing. So, if we're going to really go for Skype, how far behind can the video camera and video chat be. The way the Droid is set up, the camera is on the wrong side, but if the camera could pivot, then I could set it to shoot me while I see the screen of the person I'm speaking with. That would be cool.

By the way, I was in Mexico, and in just a few short months I now know how completely dependent I have become on the fully functional Droid. I HAD NO GPS IN MEXICO. What the heck? They are still in the northern hemisphere. It should work. But there I was, car-dock, check, car-charger, check, Droid, check, GPS, no check. It also kind of stunk about trying to make phone calls. I had to dial 011 before all the numbers and for incoming calls the numbers were totally scrambled, so I had not idea who was calling me and whether or not i should answer it. (Not that I was screening, but I was on vacation) Text messaging worked well, but I had to end each message with a "from Tim" because, just like for calls, the numbers get totally jumbled when you text too. And while the Verizon 3G map has a lot of coverage, apparently there is none in Baja California. So I had no data for like 8 days. Oh, well, I was on vacation and you were getting 33 inches of snow.