Mashup
Vivek Kundra: Still the Alpha CTO and now the First Fed CIO
Today’s news on Vivek Kundra’s role in the federal space made me think of another CTO, Yuvi Kochar. Yuvi, the CTO of the Washington Post, is a great connector of CTOs who leads the informal collective of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable. Although I had heard Vivek speak a time or two, the first really deep interactions I had with
Vivek were through Yuvi’s work in service to the tech community and I much appreciate that.
For a quick update on Vivek from a CTO perspective see: Read the rest of this entry »
Vivek Kundra: The Alpha CTO
Every CTO I know has heard of Vivek Kundra, CTO of
the District of Columbia. We have all been following his accomplishments
in transforming the technology program in DC and have watched in excitement as
more and more capabilities have been rolled out to serve the city and its
citizens. We have followed reports of bold moves he put in place to ensure
technology programs deliver. We have read about his new approaches to
technology portfolio management and watched as he discussed the leap ahead he
delivered to his enterprise by his audacious, courageous use of Google Apps and
other cloud-based solutions.
If you are not one of those familiar with Vivek, here
is a short bio: Vivek Kundra is the CTO for the
District of Columbia where he leads an organization of over 600 staff that
provides technology services and leadership for 86 agencies, 38,000 employees,
residents, businesses, and 14 million annual visitors. He brings to the role of
CTO a diverse record that combines technology and public policy experience in
government, private industry, and academia. Previously, Vivek
served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for the Commonwealth
of Virginia, the first dual cabinet role in the state’s history. In the
private sector, Vivek led technology companies
serving national and international customers. Earlier he served as Director of
Infrastructure Technology for Arlington, Virginia. He also taught classes on
emerging and disruptive technologies at the University of Maryland. Since Vivek became District CTO, he has been honored with major
IT awards. In 2008, the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium recognized him among
outstanding IT innovators. In addition, InfoWorld Magazine named Vivek among
its “CTO 25”.
I recently saw Vivek at a meeting of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable,
an informal collective of area CTOs led by Yuvi Kochar, CTO of the Washington
Post Company. Before the meeting we chatted about mashup technologies (including his Apps for Democracy contest and also JackBe). During the meeting Vivek discussed several
aspects of his innovative efforts to transform the District’s information technology
infrastructure. A point that struck me was his leadership through
principles. Three key ones he articulated were: 1) Leveraging commercial
technology, 2) Driving transparency, and 3) Rethinking notions of IT
governance.
Vivek and I just finished a phone call where we discussed these and other items
in more detail. Here is a bit more on his approach.
1) Leveraging commercial technology: Commercial radios and cell phones
allowed a rapid enhancement of the tactical communications infrastructure of
the DC workforce, including the police workforce. Police squad cars are
also now equipped with commercial, but toughened, laptops. Commercial web
technology has been leveraged in ways that leaped ahead of old clunky office
automation and also enable rapid development and mashups.
2) Driving transparency and engaging citizens: Technology
impediments to information access and information sharing were eliminated in
ways that enable citizens to see how government decisions are being made.
Data was also exposed in ways that enabled mashups and agile
programing/development. Examples include DCs digital public square and
Apps for Democracy efforts.
3) Rethinking notions of IT governance: Totally new, innovative ways to
manage IT portfolios were created and used to ensure all stakeholders could
evaluate the technology program and better make informed decisions on when to
terminate programs and where to invest more money. Chief among these
innovations was an approach to portfolio management that replicates a stock
market trading floor. More important, however is the relentless focus on
performance and innovation to support performance. Beside rethinking
these notions of governance Vivek also took measures to smartly
watch/reduce/reprioritize IT costs.
I asked Vivek for thoughts that might be relevant to technologists who have set
their sites on careers where they can deliver results. Many of us would
like to follow in his footsteps. I wondered, if there is a particular
computer programing language we should all be learning now? Should we be
diving into Python? That’s hot now. And what about databases? MySQL
and Hadoop are all the rage. The thoughts I got back from Vivek were
incredibly insightful and far more relevant than the simplistic question I
asked.
V: Technology is important, and we do need to know technology. But in these very exciting times where
Moore’s law pushes us all forward it is actually more important to be able to quickly learn new technology rather than focus on one and only one. This is the beauty of the new world of
technology. There is always something to learn. We should also always remember that the reason to learn is the mission. To an enterprise CTO, technology by itself is worthless. Technology
only has value if it addresses business problems and drives business success.
Therefore technologists must have an ability to translate between the worlds of
mission needs and technology and need an ability to rapidly learn and deeply
understand both.
I asked Vivek for his intention for sharing his models and methods, since they
have clearly delivered success in DC. He is doing quite a bit there so
all of us who would like more info have plenty of ways to learn more:
V: The DC CTO site at http://octo.dc.gov
provides links to many of the ongoing activities of the office and for those
who would like more on the models that produce the results we link to policies,
guidelines and procedures. We also provide information on how our
governance process works. But additionally we host visits to our
office by interested parties and have begun blogging about them. In
another effort we hope will help move the models forward we are pressing ahead
with plans to turn our stock market approach to portfolio management into an
open model and will open source the code that makes it work, which should help
drive more innovation there.
Speaking of innovation, Vivek seems to have found a way to accelerate
innovation, which is something all CTOs are interested in doing. I asked
him for his thoughts on where to look for innovation. Another interesting
reply:
V: You can look for innovation many places, but remembering that
necessity is the mother of invention you should keep an eye open for places
that innovate because they really need to. I always keep an eye on the
developing world and am so incredibly amazed at the tech innovation
there. Enterprise IT does not mean that every program and project must be
delivered with huge budgets and huge staffs and the incredible innovations
coming out of the developing world prove that time and time again. I’m
excited and enthused about developments like cell phone voting in Estonia,
electronic census that works in Chili, fishing villages around the world using
instant direct data to plan movement. Innovation occurs many places, but
some of the greatest lessons for innovation are coming from the developing
world.
I asked Vivek about how to find balance between setting standards and enabling
innovation:
V: Standards are important, but if a standard gets in the way of
innovation kill it. Use standards that enable innovation.
This is the role of the CTO.
Vivek also offered thoughts on social networks.
V: In seeking ways to make your cycles of innovation move faster, never
underestimate the power of social networking tools and the networks you can
build with them. Facebook is the example most talked about but there are
many others including networks built around ecommerce like eBay and
Amazon. I believe we should not only embrace them to enable the power of
social networking but to help us leverage, in a large way, the IT
infrastructure of these platforms. The new generations today are making
maximum use of these platforms and I view this as a very optimistic point.
As for me, I view the results of Vivek Kundra and his models as optimistic
points. The great thing about being a CTO is the learning never stops in
this field and Vivek is a great teacher we should all be learning from.
For more on Vivek and the way hew views technology, including some of his inputs to the Obama adminstration, see: http://www.ctovision.com/2009/01/federal-government-technology-directions-and-the-fed-cto.html
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.
Vivek Kundra: Democratizing Data and Putting it in the Public Domain
I'm hoping most enterprise CTOs have had a chance to learn more about Vivek Kundra's Apps for Democracy initiative. I'm really impressed by this activity for many reasons, but primarily because it got results of use to the citizens and visitors of DC. This initiative proved yet again that Vivek Kundra is a CTO who gets things done. From his bio:
to the Cabinet post of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the District
of Columbia. As CTO, Kundra leads the Office of the Chief Technology
Officer (OCTO), an organization of over 600 staff that provides
technology services and leadership for 86 agencies, 38,000 employees,
residents, businesses, and millions of visitors.
Prior to this Vivek was getting things done in the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the private sector, and in Arlington Virginia.
In his current position he became an instant hero to an entire enterprise when he took the bold step of moving his enterprise to a Google Apps foundation. The video below provides some background on this move.
An equally wise, and similarly bold move was Vivek's initiative called Apps For Democracy. This contest began with Vivek insuring that the DC government is being as open and transparent with data as possible, exposing data in a variety of common formats. This was no simple task, requiring vision, perseverance, and a dedication to plow through city hall obstacles that only a motivated leader could tackle. Vivek set the groundwork for success by working with a great thought leaders like Peter Corbett at iStrategyLabs and by coordinating with Internet enthusiasts like the crew at Mashable. The Strategy Labs team created a proposal for this project and brought this project to life in six days! created a page encouraging mashup entries, and the result was an incredible generation of capabilities that serve DC citizens and visitors to our Capital. 47 applications were created in a way that did not require long procurement processes or costly integration contracts. What do the apps do? Check them out yourself here: medal-winners
My favorite: DC Historic Tours. This is really really cool. Thanks Vivek!
For more see the video below:
Apps for Democracy from Shaun Farrell on Vimeo.
What else can I say about Vivek? He also has great models for internal program management. His approach is nothing like the one I learned from Gartner the everyone trys to implement. And it is better than the one I learned in the corporate world that worked very well for us at TRW and Northrop Grumman. His approach is nothing like the one we used at DIA. In fact, if I had it to do over again I would use his approach in my old enterprise. For more on his way, see the write up for his 2008 InfoWorld Top 25 CTO award.
So hey, what's next? My hope is that the methods and models of Vivek (and iStrategylabs) are applied across the nation and up to state and federal levels. Think of the good that could be done.
Collaborate and Deliver With More Cowbell
Participants in this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference, hosted by the ODNI's ICES group and the CIA's WIRe team, were treated to a shared experience that is hard to capture in a blog post. So I won't try. But I will say this, we all had some great collaboration and coordination lessons and context, and we were able to participate in creating that ourselves because the conference organizers established a great ambiance and gave us access to wiki's, blogs, twitters and WiFI that knitted that all together. I really appreciated being there.
One lesson I'd like to note now was underscored by Fred Hassani. Fred found a great way to make us all think about the variety of collaboration tools at our disposal. In a musical analogy he underscored how hard it can be to make music with instruments that don't traditionally play well together. But in a sign that the spirit of the community is strong, we all saw how a cowbell can make really really great music if you put your heart into it. And we the community of professionals can make use of any tools we are provided to collaborate, even if they are not our favorites. We will always make due and will always overcome. One way we will overcome is through mashups. Just like in music you can mashup piano's and cowbells, in IT you can mashup imagery data and SIGINT data and analytical data etc.
Which brings us to a great video that underscores this point– not from thte WIReICES conference, but from a group of spirited collaborators from SNL who many of us in the community look up to.
So please check this out and as you do please think of the IT tools in your enterprise. I guess the point made for CTOs is that we need an enterprise that allows mashups of all tools and all data. You never know when the maestro will call for more cowbell.
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.
CTOvision Blog 