John Stewart Examines and Explains Twitter

Note: This is an update of the now famous John Stewart Twitter explanation that links to the Comedy Central version.  The YouTube version was pulled in order to better serve you. 

This video clip from the Daily Show just made my day.  

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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

This video reminds me of discussions I’ve been in with so many people who wonder why anyone would ever want or need a microblogging capability like this.

As for me, I like Twitter.  It lets me keep a key slice of friends in the loop on things and it lets me learn from a large group of folks.  It gives me insights into conferences and events I can’t be at.  And it provides a great source of new reading and links to URLs I would never have found without it. And since I follow Rainn Wilson there, it provides a chuckle or two as well.  

I know many CTOs who are also using it in similar ways (for example, see @lewisshepherd or @Padmasree ).  Following them is a great way to stay in the loop.  

If you are not on Twitter, check it out.  If you are on Twitter, connect to me at http://www.twitter.com/bobgourley

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.

Three Events of Federal CTO Interest: Will You Be At These?

FYI, in case your schedule will allow us to connect in person I wanted
to update you on a few events I plan on being at over the next few
weeks.

The Advanced Technical Intelligence Association TECHINT conference will
be held 9-11 Dec 2008.  This conference focuses on the technical
dimensions of intelligence, and has a theme of "integrated
performance."  The theme refers to the need to integrate capabilities
from all the agencies engaged in national security to better perform in
meeting our national security challenges.   On 9 Dec I'll be speaking
at a panel on the real and growing threat in cyber space.  There will
be no blogging or tweeting from the conference.  But if you are going
to be there please drop me a note and lets connect in person there.  
For info see http://masint.org 

The AFCEA Solutions conference on Cyberspace will be held 10-11 Dec
2008 at the Ronald Reagan Center in DC.  This conference will be
focusing on the challenges and solutions of cyberspace related to
national security.  Speakers include Secretary of Homeland Security the
Honorable Michael Chertoff, The Deputy Secretary of Defense the
Honorable Gordon England, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks
and Information Integration the Honorable John Grimes, Ms. Melissa
Hathaway, senior adviser and cyber coordination executive for the
Director of National Intelligence, LTG Keith Alexander, Director of the
National Security Agency, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Information and Identity Assurance Mr. Bob Lentz and Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Information Management Mr. David Wennergren. 
I'll be speaking on a panel on Wednesday at 1530 on formulating a
common response.  

• This unclas conference follows a model that AFCEA has been using for
  several similar events.  They are actively seeking ways to enhance the
  value of these conferences by leveraging more Web2.0 capabilities
  before, during and after the formal presentations.  Blogging and
  tweeting from the conference is encouraged. You can visit the site at: www.afceasolutions.org/group 
  For the event schedule and program details can be found online here: www.afceasolutions.org

The US Army Intelligence Warfighting Summit will be held 15-17 Dec
2008.  This one will also be a conference where blogging and use of
twitter is not appropriate due to the sensitivity of info discussed. 
However, I would appreciate knowing if you will be going so we can
connect there in person.  Speakers will include the most senior Army
intelligence leadership, plus Vice Admiral Bob Murrett from NGA, LTG
Alexander from NSA, and Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems.  For more
on the event see: http://www.ncsi.com/iws08/index.shtml 

So, if you are going to any of these please let me know.  

And please follow me on Twitter so I can send you a few bursts from the AFCEA conference.  I'm at http://www.twitter.com/bobgourley 

Cheers.

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.   

Is Your CTO Making You Stupid?

Nicholas Carr writes in ways that makes people think.  I really enjoyed reading his latest in the Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"  This article covers some rather significant trends that IT is pushing into the global social fabric.  The changes he talks about are disturbing.  They are infecting people like a fast spreading disease. 

There is a chance you are suffering some of these symptoms yourself, so by all means read the article. 

Or if your attention span is going, here is how Nicholas Carr describes the symptoms : 

" Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

I hope you dive deep into the Carr article for more details, but if you have the disease yourself you might not.  So here is a gist of key points:

• Google and others have made research simple and fast and easy.

• Almost all data can come into your head via your browser.

• People read fewer (or no) books.

• People are loosing the ability to read and retain info from long articles.

• The Internet, through your browser, is the medium of choice.  Newspapers and print are on the out.  TV is heading out fast.

• We also write through the web, and that is changing the way we think.

• We too frequently are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the world.

What do we do with this cautionary info?  One immediate think all of us should do is remember to carve out time in the day, every day, to read, write and think.

But if you are an enterprise technologist you should also consider what this means for you and your organization.  Some ideas:

• The systems you are designing, developing and fielding to your workforce may serve your workforce better if their interfaces are more intuitive and less textual.  People will want to interface with enterprise systems they way they interface with the Internet (present your applications through browsers and summarize results and seek rapid human feedback on what they like or don't like about the results).

• To the greatest extent possible, build systems that present fast results.

• And present information in ways that let humans interact with it.

• And present information in ways that ensure the humans are in charge of the process and in charge of assessing the relevance of results.

• Don't stop innovating. 

• Stay on the net yourself so you can track where it is going.

• Get engaged in social media (if you are not already).  That means Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter (especially Twitter– it really changes your mind).

• Translate those many lessons into the enterprise technology you field.

If you can do that and if you can stay focused on the mission all your users will thank you, and in many ways I think you will be helping make your organization smarter.  If you don't do that then the odds are great that you will just be part of the noise.   You may even be contributing to making your organzation stupid. 

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on that topic?

The greatest new technologies (and great drama too!)

I like technology and I like drama.   These are two of the greatest of human creations.  And they can be even more interesting when combined.

There
has been some real drama in the West Coast tech scene the past few
weeks, heating up to a boil in the last few days, and about to come to
a head tomorrow.

The story is this:

- Two great expos for high tech startups are the DEMO conference and the TechCrunch50.

- DEMOfall08 will be in San Diego.   According to their website, Chris
Shipley has been around the globe gathering info on the best new
technologies and has brought them into one place for this conference. 
72 new digital technology products from 11 countries will be
introduced.  A record crowd of over 800 have registered already.   This
looks like an awesome conference and I can't wait to read about the
presentations and study the companies.  I'm sure I'll find candidates
for my own list of top disruptive technologies from what I read from
this conference. For more info see:   http://demo.com

- TechCrunch50 is Sep 8-10 in San Francisco.   It has a goal of
bringing the best start-ups and launching them in front influential VC,
corporations and the press.  Many companies also give demos.  It seems
to be about twice the size as the Demo conference, about 1700
attendees are expected.   Between the two conferences this appears to
be the one with more VC and big company attendance, but I am only
basing that on a review of the website.   The website, by the way,
shows an incredible panel of experts.  These are really the greats in
the community.  Experts judging at TechCrunch include Marc Andreessen,
Marc Benioff, Dan Farber, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Tim O'Reilly, and
Robert Scoble, to name a few.   Here too, I'm sure I'll find companies
that need to be on my early warning screen of disruptive IT.   For more
on TechCrunch, see:  http://techcrunch50.com

So now you see the drama?  How could these two great conferences end up being held at exactly the same time? 

The way this started, as far as I can tell, was captured in an April blog post from Henry Blodgete.  He said, I quote:

Now that TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis have scheduled their
TechCrunch50 start-up celebration conference at the same time as IDG's
DEMO start-up celebration conference, the allegations are flying:

Who moved whose conference to kill who.
Who ripped off who.
Who's screwing who.
Who's greedy, mercenary, abusive…
Etc.

The drama really heated up a few weeks ago when the long running
tension was written about by the New York Times.   An article by Brad Stone put it this way:

Demo, a 17-year-old conference franchise owned by the technology
publisher IDG, has served as the springboard for hit products like the
Palm Pilot and the TiVo digital video recorder. In San Diego during the
second week of September, 70 start-ups will pay $18,500 each to make a
six-minute presentation to a crowd of investors, journalists and
others. To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of
the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model
amounts to “payola.”

From that article, leaders and associates of both Demo and TechCrunch began exchanging heated posts and interviews.  

Here is one from Michael Arrington titled "Everyone Needs To Calm Down" 
Mr. Arrington asks folks to chill, but calls the Demo conference
unethical.   I guess I like the way he says what he thinks.  But I
don't think his post will calm anything down!

Here is one from Chris Shipley who says she has had it with the shoddy
reporting, invective and arrogance that has attended most of the
commentary.  The following are some quotes from her post at: http://guidewiregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/shoddy-reporting-invective-and-arrogance-yeah-i-want-some-of-that/

QUOTE:

When in a twitter I bemoaned the lack of original reporting (only one
reporter (cnet) and exactly zero bloggers writing this week about this
silly DEMO v TechCrunch episode actually contacted me), the infamous
blogger Robert Scoble suggested that if I'd blog my opinion, he'd link
to it. Does that mean that a perspective only exists or matters if it's
expressed in a blog post? Or that Robert's just moving too fast to do
any investigation outside his narrow medium?

Scoble's not the only guy living in the rarefied air of the
echo-chamber. Sarah Lacy, who works for the much-respected
Businessweek.com, conducted a five-minute video interview with TC50's
Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, during which the two leveled the
usual slander. Did Lacy fire one tough question at the two? Did this
journalist call me or the DEMO organization to get a response to
serious accusations? Um, the answer to that would be "no."

In fact, a few weeks ago, when Mike Arrington wrote an
assumption-based and error-filled story that demanded an apology from
the DEMO organization for a comment that was clearly not made by or on
behalf of anyone at DEMO, Lacy picked up the story and wrote with
righteous indignation that slander was the highest insult that could be
leveled against a journalist. Did she call me or DEMO before posting
her story? Again no.

UNQUOTE

So, what's my take on all that?

It is my intent to follow, from afar, both conferences, and review all
I can read out of both.  I'll make my own assessments on which hot new
technologies are of interest to me, and I'll try hard to help my
associates, friends and readers know my opinion by updating my blog
here.  Stay tuned to my list of disruptive IT:  http://www.ctovision.com/disruptive-technology-list.html

And I'll also keep tracking the drama.  

Day Two of the Synergy Conference

Today's sessions were an interesting mix of professionals from throughout the community.  Some of the most interesting dialog was on organizational models of senior staffs.  

For many years military strategists have pondered the best model for ops intel integration on senior staffs.  The introduction to the argument generally mentions that the dominate structure today is like Napoleon's staff.  Those who advocate keeping this model and those who advocate merging ops and intelligence into the same organization generally share the same goal of support to the mission and support to operational decisions. 

Among COCOMs it was SOCOM that first began advocating for and then
changing their staff to ensure tight organizational coupling and then
integration of ops and intel, and they were successful, perhaps because
of their mission orientation and leadership of seniors on their staff. 
But I also have to point out that over time their organizational model
actually returned to something that Napoleon would recognize today, and
there is a strong intelligence function on the SOCOM staff.    STRATCOM
has also been a command famous for forward thinking and adjusting to
accomplish new missions assigned to them.   Tremendous progress in
modernizing old command constructs was made over the last several
years.   A key lesson learned from that, however, is that many of the
steps taken had the unintended consequence of lessoning the ability of
intelligence to support the mission, and no one wants operational
commanders to be served with sub optimized intelligence.

The
good news is STRATCOM has seen that and is taking steps "to return the
J2 position to the importance it once had" (see yesterday's post). I
should also point out that on the CENTCOM staff, which is coordinating
and executing some of the most critically important operations the
nation is conducing today, there is a very strong J2 function.  Ops and
intel are functionally integrated at CENTCOM but it is a strong J2 that
ensures the integration, not  experimental approaches to organization. 
At CENTCOM, like at other operational staffs, the commander would never
give up his J2.  That position is critical to victory in the most
important theater of operations.

Many organizations integrate ops and intelligence and do it well.   For example, JSOC or CIA.  Both are very operational organizations with very key intelligence missions, and both have long had and integrated ops/intel way of working. 

We heard today of the SOUTHCOM model.  There may be some great reasons for change there.  They operate and plan for operations in a theater that is unique for many reasons.  I don't have enough info to judge what they are doing, but I hope they are learning lessons from folks like General Ennis and SOCOM and CENTCOM and STRATCOM.   

The highlight of the day, and maybe of the entire conference, was a panel and discussion the presentation on Web2.0 and enterprise services.   The panel was moderated by Mr. Sean Dennehy, Intellipedia and Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist in the Directorate of Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency.  His panelists included Mr. Drew Herrick, Deputy Technical Executive, Office of the Americas, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Mr. Scott Yaroschuk, lead for Emerging Technologies/Collaboration for the Joint Staff J6, and Mr. John Hale, Chief of Solutions Delivery for the Intelink Management Office (which some now call the Intelligence Community Enterprise Solutions (ICES). 

Sean provided a great overview of some of the Web2.0 capabilities the community is working with today, including:

    * One of a suite of Web 2.0 tools including:
          o Intellipedia for aggregation
          o Intelink blogs for communication
          o Tag|Connect (similar to the Internet's del.icio.us) for organization
          o Inteldocs (a document management system for file sharing community-wide)
          o Gallery (similar to the Internet's flickr)
          o iVideo (similar to YouTube)
          o Intelink Instant Messaging (IIM)
          o Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Although as a technologist I really appreciated his discussion of capabilities.  Perhaps more important lesson was his capturing of three core principles for social software in the Enterprise.  Three he lists are:

   1.  Work at broadest audience possible
   2. Think topically, not organizationally
   3. Replace existing business processes

Although Sean graciously credits ongoing Enterprise 2.0 academic studies with helping to codify these principles, I could tell he was speaking from the heart about them and the anecdotes he mentioned underscoring their importance.

Scott Yaroschuk continued to build on the presentation with real world examples of the use of these tools to improve and replace existing business processes on the joint staff.  This change to business process is the greatest benefit of these Web2.0 tools.   Drew Herrick provided example after example of communities of people coming together to solve hard challenges using these new tools, and every example underscored the key lessons Sean mentioned at the beginning of the presentation.

John Hale then led a standing-room only crowd through an in-depth examination of each of the Web2.0 tools provided by ICES.   These capabilities are really changing the way things are done in the federal space. 

Other presentations this day included a briefing/status report on the Secure Enterprise Datavault by Ms. Kristin O'Keefe of Army G2.   The SED will be the first accredited mulit-level secure data repository for use throughout the DoD and the IC. 

There were many other presentations today and many technology demos.  I'll blog more on them later

How to use the CTOvision site

The following are some power user tips for making the most out of the CTOvision.com blog. 

1) Fresh content is always on the main page at http://ctovision.com, but previous content is organized into five key sections which you can navigate to by use of the "Sections" menu on the left column.  The sections are:

• CTO Interest
• Cyber War
• The Future
• Enterprise IT
• Web 2.0

2) You can use/consume/syndicate our content by use of our RSS and Atom feeds.  More info is available here: http://www.ctovision.com/syndicating-ctovision-con.html  That page has a link to  "Subscribe in a reader."  That will take you to a feedburner site of CTOvision content that can be consumed in almost any reader or Web service.

3) At the top left of the blog is an e-mail sign up box.  This will
subscribe your e-mail address to receive a note each time a post is
made to CTOvision.com 

4) Every page of the CTOvision site has a news ticker along the left column.  This automatically defaults to display news with the term CTO in the feed.  But you can click other buttons listed there to automatically display news of some of the greatest powerhouse IT firms.

5) Every post on the site has a rating where users can click on a number of stars to give some feedback on the value of the post.   Your votes here are very much appreciated.   Directly under the rating stars for the post you will see a list of suggested reading that is automatically generated by the "Outbrain" service that CTOvision uses.   Outbrain selects those sites based on article content and how you have voted, so they should be of interest.

6) To make maximum use of the CTOvision site, consider connecting to me via Twitter.  Every page on the site has a link at the top right column that says "Follow Me on Twitter."  Or click this link.

7) The site also has a search box, powered by Google.  This is the best way to get to deep, buried content.

8) Other features include a list of the top blogs of interest to the Chief Technology Officer and a list of sites of some of the great thought leaders in our community.

9) There are many pages of independent content relevant to the CTO that can be found through search.  A list of these pages can be found in the lower left column.

10) Every post has a link to comments for the post.  This user contributed content is frequently the most important content.  Please visit it to review the postings of others and please leave your own thoughts if you can contribute to the dialog.  Posts also have an ability to let you easily share to Facebook and del.icio.us and Digg.

Thanks for reading the site.  If you know of a chief technology officer who could benefit from the dialog on CTOvision.com, please forward this note along.

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.  

I hope to see you at the Synergy Conference

The second annual Synergy Conference and expo will be held 12-15 August 2008 at Marco Island, FL.  Last year’s conference provided a great way for participants to learn from each other and interact with speakers from both operational and intelligence backgrounds.   I sure enjoyed it. It was one of my last official events before leaving DIA.    I had a couple speaking parts, so I got to solicit feedback on my views of the future of technology, and I really appreciated that.  But it was also really enjoyable to be on a panel led by Col Montgomery that let me interact with John Marshall of JFCOM, LTC Mahoney of NRO and Ms. Lynn Schnurr of the USA G2 (she is the CIO for G2). 

I also spoke on a dinner panel with General Clapper and Rita Bush.   What an honor to be seated next to them. 

And then I ended up on a third panel moderated by Lewis Shepherd that included Rita Bush, Gayle von Eckartsberg and David Chaffee.  I enjoyed that panel the most.  Ten minutes before the panel Lewis reminded me that I should have graphics.  No worries, I said, I’m a trained Naval Intelligence officer, I can produce graphics almost instantly.  The result was the attached.

A key graphic in the presentation is shown here.  This graphic is my list of who is wired and who is tired in enterprise technology.  On the tired list, Acquisition Executives.  They have a hard hard job that is thankless most of the time, largely because of the constant mission demands, the horrible government system they have to work in, and the fast pace of technology that is making them less relevant.

In my comments I mentioned that because of the rapid pace of technology and the increasing tech savvy of power users and the ability for users to “mashup” their own solutions, “Acquisition executives are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the delivery of capabilities to end users.” 

I didn’t mean for that comment to generate drama, but it seemed to do just that!  Friends/allies/associates in the audience went wild with the remark.  Then my comrade and community leader Kevin Meiners asked me for my handwritten notes and used them in introducing Jennifer Walsmith, the Acquisition Executive for all of NSA!   Much to my surprise, Jennifer agreed with me that things are getting harder on the acquisition community and there is a great need for change. 

This year I’ll be spending most of my time watching/listening/visting the expo floor, but I do have a few brief moments on a panel and look forward to seeing how I can insert some drama/controversy to the proceedings.  

Anyway, if you can make it to Synergy, please come.  If you can’t make it, please stay tuned to the blog.  I’ll try to capture interesting parts in future entries.   I’ll also plan on posting to Twitter while there, so please sign up for your Twitter account and connect to me there at http://twitter.com/bobgourley

More on Synergy:

The 2nd Annual Synergy Conference and Expo
will provide a unique forum to highlight advances the Intelligence and
Operations communities have made in support to military operations in a
tactical wartime environment and how these may reform national-level
processes. It will give front line Operators, Key Decision Makers,
Intelligence professionals, Technologists, and Academia the opportunity
to learn from and work with experienced tactical-level representatives.

In conjunction
with U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), the Government Emerging
Technology Alliance (GETA) is planning an event that will focus on:

• Changes occurring and envisioned in the relationship between Operations
  and Intelligence as a result of lessons learned from current wartime
  activities.
• Each of the Uniformed Services
  sharing their front-line experiences and providing thought provoking
  ideas about the critical need for change in an agile operational
  environment.
• Insight into activities at the
  Commands and National Intelligence Agencies with the critical
  challenges of better integrating Operations and Intelligence activities
  during a period of Irregular Warfare.