A Blog I Like: ShepherdsPi

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technologies in Governments, Lewis Shepherd, publishes a blog on technologies relevant to enterprises big and small. 

Lewis writes about tools, techniques and concepts in ways that bring home the real utility of advanced technologies.  Recent posts have been on word-clouds and other ways of visualizing information, semantic constructs, flexible devices and of course recent developments from the tech industry. 

Lewis’s blog should be on any technologist reading list and I consider him a “must follow” connection on twitter. 

You can read Lewis and find his twitter account at:  http://shepherdspi.com/

Next week I write about Matt Devost at: http://blog.devost.net/

Steve Ballmer and Cloud Computing

In this video Steve Ballmer shares some views on Cloud Computing and helps shed some light on why what we have now in most data centers is not really “cloud” computing in the technical sense.  

I think we all need to be ready to use the term two ways.  When talking to users and non-technical types we will probably always hear the term used to refer to anything that occurs in a different location, and this is the simplest definition of the term.  In that context, almost everything we have now is in “the cloud”.  But when we technologists use the term we are primarily talking about architectures specifically designed to support large scale, distributed, replicatable computing that is normally outside the “firewall.” 

A look ahead: Some technology developments to expect in 2009

2008 was a year of rapid changes for Chief Technology Officers.  We should expect 2009 to move even faster.  Where will the biggest trends take us?  I offer some considerations below.  Please
look these over and give me your thoughts.   Push back if you have
disagreement.

First, my overall advice for CTOs in 2009… Just like the new thin interfaces you will be testing in your lab… be flexible.   Now here are some more thoughts on what's in store for CTO s in 2009:

• Here is a no-brainer: Increasingly CTOs will leverage social media to
  collaborate.  Things are moving so fast that we all like to network to
  seek help on big things and to get advanced warning on what is coming
  next.  More of us will be on Twitter, in Facebook, and writing blogs. 
  And this is a good thing.

• "Mashups" will still be very
  important as an enterprise objective in 2009 (and beyond).   And the
  company that will help accelerate them into the federal enterprise is
  JackBe.  They do things in a way that enterprise CTO s like.  They build
  in connections to governance, security, identity management.  And they
  play well with the entire ecosystem so you don't have to rework all
  legacy just to use them.  Of course web2.0 will remain a key trend, but mashups takes web2.0 to a new, more mission-oriented level and for enterprise players the mission is what is important.

• An approach we will all learn to love and follow is "context
  accumulation".   This very important term was coined by Jeff Jonas, and
  I think Jeff is going to have all of us moving out on that in the next
  12 months.   If you agree, visit his blog and by all means help others
  understand why this is really the only way we humans stand a chance of
  surviving/thriving in the onslaught of data.

• Federal acquisition of IT will still be criticized for all the
  reasons it always has been.  But there will also be an acceleration of
  a dramatic positive change brought about because of open source
  software and a new appreciation that IT acquisition processes
  (RFI/RFP/FAR/DFAR based purchases) do not apply to software that is
  free.  Free software is not being bought, it is being used, for free. 
  The whole reason the FAR exists is to ensure when the taxpayer's money
  gets spent it gets spent wisely.  When things are free the FAR has less
  applicability.  Services for open source are being bought and since
  that uses government money of course the taxpayers will continued to be
  served by the same FAR-type processes that are meant to ensure open
  competition, but that is not for free open source software, that is for
  services to configure and manage the software.

• Will this be the year of enterprise security?  We have been banking on that for a long long time.  We know the answers on how to make enterprises more secure.  There is a great recap of some of the most important components of security in the CSIS report.  But there are many more things that can be done as well. My goal, as captured here, is to improve security by two orders of magnitude within the next 24 months. 

• Netbooks, Thin Clients and Cloud Computing will accelerate
  throughout the technology landscape, especially inside the federal
  government.  These trends in both devices and the cloud components are directly related and are also benefiting from the global, unstoppable trend toward open computing
  (open software and open standards).  One to watch in this area:  Sun
  Microsystems.   But also track the dynamics of the netbooks providers. 
  Dell will get serious about netbooks, but Acer will continue to grow
  market share.

• A key accelerator of Cloud Computing has been the powerful technologies of virtualization, especially those of VMware.  Open source and other virtualization capabilities are coming fast too.  Trend to watch in 2009 is the arrival of higher order, more elagant capabilities to manage virtualizaiton accross large enterprises.  VMware and Opsware (HP) will continue to evolve to do this, but Appistry, Vizioncore, Xsigo and Sun (and others?) are coming fast.    
• Increasingly leaders will recognize that concepts of operation that
  require humans to tag and create metadata are sub-optimized.  When busy
  people are tasked with burdensome tagging operations they too
  frequently become tempted to cut corners and rush the process.  Over
  time, meta data generated this way just becomes meta crap.  This
  growing recognition in the federal space will sweep in new technologies
  and new approaches to discovery of content.  One to watch to solve this
  issue:  Endeca, because of their approach to visualizing information and enabling human to computer iterative examination of data. 

  

• Flexible computers will arrive in production this year for early
  adopters and many CTOs will use them in labs to assess applicability
  for massive deployment in the coming years.   These flexible computers
  are the ultimate thin clients.   Backends/servers/architectures
  developed for the cloud perfectly suit ultra thin, flexible computing
  devices. For more on this hot topic, start at the site of the Flexible Display Center at ASU.

• Collaboration will increasingly be seen as the means to link human
  brains together.   Collaboration tools that are stand alone stovepipes
  will be a thing of the past.  Users will collaborate using the entire
  technology environment:  voice, video, data, whiteboard, chat,
  application sharing, info discovery will increasingly be integrated
  into a single fabric.  Key players here:  Adobe, Microsoft and Cisco.

• In a big change for how money is moved in major enterprises, the CIO
  will be given responsibility for the energy budget.  This will encourage
  CIOs to modernize to conserve energy, since money saved from energy
  costs can be invested back in modern IT.  This will be a very virtuous
  cycle, that saves money for organizations, saves energy, and modernizes
  IT.   

• In a stunning turn, IPv6 will be rapidly adopted, not by enterprises,
  but in homes.  The major home communications provider that delivers
  full IPv6 to home environments (and to cell phones) will have an incredible advantage over
  competitors and will dominate.  The many rich features of IPv6
  delivered to consumers will finally push enterprises everywhere to move
  out on IPv6. 

• In 2009, as in every year prior and for most into the future, there
  will continue to be bad people using technology to do bad things. 
  Enterprises will move to protect info, but bad guys will keep moving to
  get the data.   And the use of social networking tools by terrorists
  will likely grow.  This is not a foregone conclusion, but I'm not
  personally sure what can be done to mitigate the use of advanced
  technology by bad people, other than to say that we good people need to
  work together more to stop them, and my hope is that we can keep 2009
  safe and secure.

Thoughts/comments/suggestions?  Please let me know what you think.

CTOs, Global Cyberwar and Our Collective Future

If you are a technologist, please take a moment to download the PDF of the report by the U.S. Commission on Cybersecurity.  This report, titled Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency, is the best proclamation of the challenges of cyber I have read.  It is also a roadmap that will help any trying to navigate these very tough issues.

I've been involved in things cyber for a long time.  My deepest
involvement began in December 1998, almost 10 years ago to the day.  
In all that time I've seen lots of studies and lots of papers and many
treatments of the issues.  But I've never seen one that captures the
complexities and the need for specific actions as well as this one. 

I'd really recommend you read every word, if you want to be considered literate in this field.   But if it will be a little while till you get to it, here are some key points:

The three major findings are:  1) Cybersecurity is now a major national security problem for the U.S., 2) Decisions and actins must respect privacy and civil liberties, and 3) only a comprehensive national security strategy that embraces both the domestic and international  aspects of cybersecurity will make us more secure.

The report makes a few points about the Bush Administration's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI).  In general the give credit to that initiative, and call it good.  I agree, it is a great activity I've previously written about that is led by one of the most effective people in government today and has done great work.  But as the comission points out, the work of the CNCI is good but not sufficient. 

The biggest shock for me in this study:  The amount of funding on R&D for cyber security.  I have been looking into the many activities underway, and maybe that look made me deceive myself into thinking it was a well funded effort.  According to the comission, however, they estimate that the total R&D funding in the federal government for cybersecurity is about $300million.  Less than two-tenths of one percent of the total federal R&D.

The report has a great section on identity manangement. 

I am convinced the organizational approaches outlined in the study are the right ones as well.  There is only one place in our government where we can lead solutions to this challenge.  Where is that?  Hey read the report!

What else do I recommend CTOs do besides read the report?  I think one way we can all help the cybersecurity effort is to think through which standards bodies are the most important to engage with regarding security.   A few are here:
http://www.ctovision.com/2008/05/standards-organizations-ctos-should-track.html

One to watch regarding standards and security

In May 2008 I provided an overview of Standards Organizations CTOs Should Track.  Standards groups don't change that fast, so the list is still pretty much ok, but I was very light on industry consortia.  Industry groups can play a large role in setting and implementing standards.  Industry reps send the majority of thinkers to standards bodies and industry management decides what standards to follow or ignore.  Tracking industry consortia can be very important to the CTO. 

Since security is such a hot topic (see: The Future of Cyberspace Security and Melissa Hathaway Op-Ed on Cyber Security, for example ) I wanted to point out one I think we should all watch.  The Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet or ICASI. 

The Technology Implications of the Obama Win

There are several megatrends sweeping the technology industry today.  Some of them are about to be accelerated.  

I like to use five key topic areas to track megatrends in IT: 

- Convergence and trend towards unified communications and user empowerment
- Globalization and increasing internationalization of IT and demographic shifts
- Increasing open development of software and hardware
- Power, Cooling and Space (PCS) impacting data centers and every place computing is done
- Increasing pace of technology development and probability of disruption

Over the past two months two major events have occurred which are impacting these trends.  

The
first was the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the resulting cascading
effects on the financial industry.  The impact on IT spending and the
movement of more enterprises to grid/cloud computing because of that
are still being assessed, but for some thoughts see: Wall Street Crisis

The second was the Presidential election of Barack Obama.   

The Future of Cyberspace Security: The Law of The Rodeo

This is an update of my now annual assessment of the future of technology associated with good and evil in cyberspace which was first posted here.

Predictions
of the future of technology are increasingly starting to sound like
science fiction, with powerful computing grids giving incredible computational power to users and with autonomous robots becoming closer and closer to being in our daily lives vice just in computer science departments. Infotech, nanotech and biotech are fueling each other and each of those three dominate fields are generating more and more benefits that impact the other, propelling us even faster into a new world.   Depending on your point of view the increasing pace of science and technology can be good or
bad.  As for me, I'm an optimist, and I know we humans will find a way
to ensure technology serves our best interests.   

Wall Street Crisis, Enterprise Technology and Cloud Computing

I just read a great overview on "The Tech Fallout from the Wall Street Crisis" posted by Rich Miller at the Data Center Knowledge site.   Here are four of the six key points Rich makes:

• North American financial companies will slash their IT spending
  27.3 percent to $17.6 billion next year, down from $24.2 billion in
  2007, according to updated projectionsfrom
  the Tabb Group, which tracks technology on Wall Street. The vast
  majority of that decline will be spending reductions due to the
  failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill
  Lynch, Tabb predicted.

The National Security Implications of Free 3D in a Browser

Jeffrey Carr sent a short broadcast via Twitter the other day: “

New post on 3D imaging and Virtual Earth – mind blowing video http://bit.ly/3SxtdA “  

Jeffrey was blogging about a capability shown in the short clip below:

As you watch that, keep in mind that what you are seeing is a capability that can run on any PC that can run Internet Explorer (which is just about all of them).
The clip shows a capability that Microsoft’s Caligari toolset “TrueSpace” has to build high resolution 3D models then upload them into Virtual Earth.

Currently national security planners, as well as others with mission needs for geospatial information, have many choices for solutions.  But most good solutions require loading specialized software on the workstation.  This includes, of course, Google Earth.   Google also provides 3D creation capabilities with Sketch-Up.  And that is a powerful combination.  But the need to load programs on workstations and move data to workstations complicates enterprise IT solutions.  Additionally, Google Earth is reportedly not accurate in elevation measurements.   Now the new capability shown in the YouTube clip indicates a solution that can give highly accurate 3D models to planners everywhere, and it can do that without having to instal large stand alone apps on workstations and without having to move large datasets to the workstation.    

A use case:  Imagine a USMC team preparing for an evacuation of a group of citizens.  They shift into their Rapid Response Planning Process (R2P2) and move out.   Although this process ensures all available information is used and can accomodate information from external sources, the urgency of the mission means it will proceed no matter what.   No one involved is going to waste time trying to download new software programs or test applications or risk breaking systems that are working well.  New data is fine, but new software is not needed.   This 3D model that runs in a browser could be of tremendous use at times like this.  If the data is there, models can be presented to the planning team and they can visually walk through buildings before their mission.  The models can be provided from locations far away or from local data if available.  And they can be presented on any computer with a browser.   

That is just one use case.  Many more can be brainstormed by planners, and I’d recommend this dialog get underway soon.  But there is actually another meta-point to make.   Consider the fact that this dialog can start much earlier in the process because of new web2.0 capabilities.  Thanks to Jeffrey’s micro-blogging on Twitter and the Google YouTube posting on his Blog, the national security community has some early warning on things we should be thinking through.  

My recommendation:  If you haven’t done so already… sign up for Twitter.  If you’d like to see some good feeds to follow start here.  

Microsoft Surface uses Jet to accelerate demand

This is the third of three blog posts on technologies encountered during my visit to Redmond. This one is on Microsoft Surface. 

(First a note:  although this is about Surface, Microsoft also announced another hot capability called Sphere.  For more on that see the blog of the CTO of Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments- Lewis Shepherd)

Microsoft Surface is something you may have heard about in the press.  For
those of us who experimented with technologies like the “Touch Table”
from Applied Minds we already have familiarity with the basic concepts. 
You interact with data using your hands.  But there is something dramatically different with the Microsoft Surface. 
The biggest thing is that it is designed from the ground up to work with the rest of the technology stack.  
You need smart programmers and integrators still, but it is easy
for technologists to work with this system so it will very likely
proliferate. 
Many software packages already exist for it, and more are being written all the time. 
It will be used in the National Security space really soon. 
It is just a matter of time before it is.  And its cost will ensure that it is widely used.