Vision
Threats In the Age of Obama
The world does not change in discrete, binary steps. There is a great deal of continuity from the past to the present and on to the future. But many of us sense things are different in the world today. Technology is changing every life and every business, economic megatrends are producing changes, war and conflict and terrorism inject uncertainty, and the entire dynamic of human events is moving faster and faster.
On top of that, a new U.S. administration led by a new President has just assumed executive power in the U.S. This is clearly a time for us all to take stock.
I was privileged to have been asked by Michael Tanji to contribute to a book he edited on topics relevant to this new dynamic called “Threats In The Age of Obama.” This compilation consists of a survey of the new national security threat landscape by Tanji and then examinations of a wide swath of threats captured by national security experts.
Topics and Contributors include:
- The Threat Landscape, Michael Tanji
- The Tangled Relationship Between Organized Crime,
Terrorism and Proliferation, Christopher A. Corpora, Ph.D - The Terrorism Meme–Looking Beyond the Current Threat,
Matthew G. Devost - Crazy as a Fox, Adrian Martin
- Infectious Diseases, Foreign Militaries, and US National
Security, Christopher Albon - Pakistan as a Nuclear Risk, Steve Schippert
- Nuclear Nonproliferation in the 21st Century, Cheryl Rofer and Molly Cernicek
- Into the Complex Terrain, Tim Stevens
- Simulated “Black Swans”: National Security, Perception
Operations, and the Expansion of the Infosphere,
Adam Elkus - An Outbreak of Peace and Democracy, Daniel H. Abbott
- Ideas and Strategies for a More Secure Future, Michael Tanji
- Preparing One’s Mind to See, Art Hutchinson
- The Issues of Non-State Actors and the Nation State, Samuel P. Liles
- The Future of Missile Defense Policy, Tom Karako
- Toward a Contemporary Deterrence Strategy, Carolyn Leddy
- An Information Age Strategy for Government Information Technology, Mathew Burton
- The Future of Cyberspace Security: The Law of the Rodeo,
Bob Gourley - Security Evolution, Gunnar Peterson
- Arming for the Second War of Ideas, Matt Armstrong
- Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace, Shane Deichman
- Reconfiguring the National Security Architecture, Shlok Vaidya
- A Grand Strategy for a Networked Civilization, Mark Safranski
Most of these authors are wired web2.0 experts who are well published in new media and reachable by any who seek to interact on these very important topics (see contact info below). My recommendation: Read the book and scrutinize it. If you find any aspect you take issue with, seek out the section’s author and engage them in the intellectual interaction required to drive a greater understanding of these many issues. We also plan several events where the contributors will sit on panels and take questions and interact.
Whatever your method, please find ways to contribute to the dialog. Your contributions can significantly enhance our nation’s ability to succeed in our responses to the many threats of this age.
Please check out the book here: “Threats In The Age of Obama.”
Contributing authors include, in alphabetical order, Dan tdaxp, Christopher Albon, Matt Armstrong, Matthew Burton, Molly Cernicek, Christopher Corpora, Shane Deichman, Adam Elkus, Matt Devost, Bob Gourley, Art Hutchinson, Tom Karako, Carolyn Leddy, Samuel Liles, Adrian Martin, Gunnar Peterson, Cheryl Rofer, Mark Safranski, Steve Schippert, Tim Stevens, and Shlok Vaidya. And of course, editor and contributor, Michael Tanji.
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.
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:
– 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.
How fast is 3G and what is 3.5G and when will 4G be here?
Most enterprise CTOs are very interested in the "cloud" and ways to tap
into cloud-based resources. An interesting aspect of this discussion
has been how to access the cloud while on the move. Today's cellular
networks support that access today, and future enhancements are making
that support even better and much much faster.
How much faster? I'll try to put that in context in this post.
Early 3G network to had a download speed of 384kbits per second and an
upload speed of 192Kbits per second. The wireless router you might
have in your home, by contrast, might have a speed of 54Mbits per
second. So, about 140 times faster.
But the 3G networks in place today use new transmission algorithms that
enable much faster throughput. Here is a little more context from
vendor pages:.
Verizon asserts their broadband access, based on CDMA2000 1x EVDO (Code
Division Multiple Access Evolution-Data Only) provides download speeds
of up to 1.4Mbits/s and uploads of up to 800kbits/s.
AT&T is leveraging its GPRS technology called EDGE to deliver
higher speeds that Verizon's. AT&T's EDGE delivers speeds of
around 1.7Mbits/s and upload of around 1.2Mbits/s.
Sprint asserts that its broadband cards delivery 350-500kbps but then say you might get a peak of 3.1Mbps. I wonder if or how often that happens.
What's coming next:
A key emerging protocol is HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access). HSDPA is
sometimes called 3.5G. This protocol is in the HSPA (High Speed Packet
Access) family and allows download of up to 14.4Mbits/s download and
5.8Mbits/s upload. Now this is getting interesting.
HSPA+ allows speeds of up to 42Mbits/s. This is almost what you would
expect to see in your home wireless LAN. The next step is a project
called Long Term Evolution. This LTE will start with providing
150Mbits/s to handheld devices and soon thereafter expect protocols and
algorithms to increase that upto 1gig of bits per second to your mobile
device.
When will these new protocols and speeds be available to consumers?
The answer is, the best roadmaps I have seen are all tightly held insider
views, but if you look at what is being rolled out right now we should
expect a continuing stream of announcements that brings the timing of
these new protocols more into focus. Public information show many
vendors moving to the first version of LTE by 2011. Indications I'm
getting are that it
will be accelerated into 2009.
So, brace yourself for the innovation that will drive in the devices that connect to the cloud through cellular.
Day One at Synergy Conference
This post provides a summary of day one of the STRATCOM Synergy conference. The conference is focused on integrating combat ops/intelligence implications for national intelligence processes. Conference leader Brigadier General Billy Bingham (USAF, ret) opened the conference by reviewing what was discussed last year’s Synergy conference. He also laid out the goal for this year’s conference, to keep moving things forward and to ensure we are “Integrating operations and intelligence so we can achieve our nation’s objectives in the most efficient means possible. ”
The morning included a presentation by the STRATCOM J5 (Brigadier General Mark Owen). He was followed by Major General Michael Ennis, Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Services for community HUMINT at CIA. The afternoon was filled with discussions and briefings that brought home the perspectives of operators from the Ops/Intel world, including a panel filled with ops/intel professionals which discussed lessons learned. Perspectives on ops/intel synergy on the front lines were provided by a seasoned Marine Corps professional. Key areas where ISR models clash were highlighted by a seasoned Air force ISR Colonel. An update was provided on army operational intelligence.
The following provides some takeaway’s from the discussions:
Brigadier General Owens mentioned the many missions of STRATCOM, including nuclear deterrence, and also cyberspace. In his view, STRATCOM’s mission in cyber is to ensure freedom of action in cyberspace. He also signaled a strong intention of the Commander, STRATCOM to return the J2 position to the importance it once had. He also signaled a strong intent to do that while integrating ops and intel into the mission. He talked about the terms he likes to use, those of intelligence and warfighters, since the operators are warfighters.
General Ennis gave personal stories underscoring how important it is for ops and intel to work together. He said great staffs have always worked that way and now at CIA it is all ops and intel together, at JSOC it is all ops and intel together. He thinks it is wrong to use the old models of ops and warfighters. That too frequently forces a separate structure. In the old days there was an ops cell and an intel cell and they were separate. Today, in efficient operations, the intel and ops cells are together. General Ennis is a strong believer in new tools and thinks three in particular are dramatically changing the way we are working together. Blogs, Wikis and the class of tools that lets users go after content in search vice just headlines. By Blogs and Wikis he meant the many open source/Internet based wikis that can provide context and situational awareness. For example, the MCIA cultural intelligence initiative makes extensive use of these tools. He also provide some thoughts on the term “information sharing.” There are things he doesn’t like about that term because sharing implies the data is yours to own and to decide when to share. He believes in joint interagency platforms for ensuring responsiveness, relevance and unity of effort. Regarding Open Source, he would like to see an interagency open source center that is focused on hard problems. Regarding IT, he believes a common IT backbone is critically important to mission success.
The afternoon speakers hit on many great topics related to ISR and the different cultures in the Services and how they clash over ISR. There were many great stories and lessons, and several meaty recommendations. But the bad news is all the stories sound the same as they have for years and the lessons learned are the same ones we have been relearning for years. I guess the point of the conference is that we need to embody those lessons somehow.
More 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:
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.
Vision for the Enterprise CTO: Lessons from DNI Vision 2015
This
note provides two lessons and a comment for enterprise chief technology
officers that comes out of a new vision document from the Director of
National Intelligence (DNI).
The DNI, Mike McConnell, just released Vision 2015, a vision for a
globally networked and integrated intelligence enterprise. This
vision is for far more than just IT, but it has lessons for all
enterprise technologists.
This document lays out a compelling, motivating vision for the future
of one of the largest enterprises on the planet, the US Intelligence
Community. Currently this enterprise is guided by a Director who
exercises authority over its 17 major components and several smaller
organs. But those many parts also have other chains of command and
frankly the enterprise is not optimized for mission success. I’ve now
read a vision, however, that I know will change the future.
This is not just an IT vision, which might be ignored by
parts of the enterprise. It is an enterprise vision. So, the first lesson I believe this vision has for enterprise CTOs: life can be so much simpler
if your boss releases a compelling, motivating vision for the entire
enterprise.
The IT guys in the intelligence community clearly had input to this document. Some smart techies wrote large sections of this, I can tell. Here are a few paras from the vision:
QUOTE:
The end state will be seamless access to all intelligence information, tools and processes across multiple agencies and databases. Our information architecture will have to undergo a fundamental shift: from the multiple hub-and-spoke model of information collection, analysis, and dissemination based on specific discipline to a unified architecture designed around a common “cloud” (i.e., a distributed peering network) containing our information. This information infrastructure will allow authorized end-users to discover, access, and exploit data through a range of services, from federated query to integrated analytic tool suites.
Currently, each intelligence agency operates and maintains its own network and information infrastructure: power, cooling, circuits, switches, routers, databases, information management systems, data centers, security and enterprise systems management tools. By 2015, we will migrate to a common “cloud” based on a single backbone network and clusters of computers in scalable, distributed centers where data is stored, processed, and managed. The shared data centers will be unique facilities designed and located for access to communication and power supplies. The Intelligence Enterprise will benefit greatly from a more robust, secure, and effective means to organize, update and retrieve all of the information it collects. The centers will also allow experience and technologies employed across the Community to be leveraged, focusing scarce technical resources and reducing costs.
Over the last 20 years, the Intelligence Community has been challenged to keep pace with rapidly evolving information technology. Although a less-than-agile acquisition and procurement system has been part of the problem, the Intelligence Community is also undermined by its basic approach. If we are to maintain a technology edge, we must adopt an enterprise wide, service-oriented architecture that is interoperable with systems in other federal departments, and can share information with non-traditional partners. A service-oriented architecture provides a proven means to adapt new technologies while responding to changing user needs. By creating “software as a service,” this architecture reduces system complexity and deployment risks through a shared development style, uniform standards, and common interfaces. These services will enable a user-defined analytic environment through the use of composite applications – discrete services that can be pulled from a central library and dropped into a user-defined workspace.
The range of Enterprise-wide services that should be deployed by 2015 include communication services (e.g., common e-mail, directories, calendaring, and collaboration); data services (e.g., federated queries and searches, tagging, entity extraction, and storage); security services (e.g., single sign-on, access control, monitoring, and auditing); and analytic services (e.g.,portals, data mining, visualization, and modeling and simulation tools).
UNQUOTE
Something this vision does very very
well is capture the IT components of the vision, which is very
empowering for enterprise technologists. This points to what I believe is the second big lesson for enterprise technologists: CTOs
should ensure their vision for the future makes it into the bosses
vision.
And a closing thought: To me the IT components of this vision were a
very familiar read. It is the same vision that was successfully
accomplished under the leadership of Mike Pflueger and Mark Greer when
they transformed the DIA and DoDIIS enterprise from 2004 to 2007 (I was
honored to have been their student and their CTO). They lead a team
of us at DoDIIS HQ and throughout the global enterprise to consolidate
the efforts of 11 major enterprises (and several smaller ones) into one
strong globally networked intelligence enterprise. In my entire
career they are the only two people I met who I’ve seen accomplish this
type of effort in government. [Mike and Mark, my crystal ball is clear
on this issue. You will likely be getting a call from the DNI. The call might come in 2014 saying a rescue is needed because this IT integration was harder than they thought. But hopefully the call will come in 2008 and ask your
help/advice on this in its early stages. If you can work your magic in
the early days of this effort the nation will be far better off for
it.]
CTOvision Blog 