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.