Overheard talking about Trusted Internet Connections (TIC)

“A single gateway represents a single point of failure, something that could bring a whole range of mission-critical business functions to a halt — unless some sort of fail-over redundancy is in place. And with fewer gateways, the servers must take on larger loads, and they are likely to require higher specs that could be more costly. They must be configured efficiently so that they don’t become bottlenecks.” Michael Cobb, Is security improved when the number of Internet gateways is reduced?

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Trusted Internet Connections.  The United States government would like to limit the number of public Internet connection points to 50, with each Agency having approximately two gateways.

Overheard talking about Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC)

NASA would like to note that future guidance and configurations must keep pace with industry updates in common operating systems and applications. The FDCC technical guidance and policy releases tend to lag behind software releases. In order to remain relevant and viable, FDCC technical and policy development must advance at the pace of Federal Agency procurements of new commercial software. Linda Cureton, Chief Information Officer, Agencies Need to Implement Federal Desktop Core Configuration Requirements

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC).

Overheard talking about Einstein

“What is different is that we’re going to have comprehensive coverage across federal networks, and that all the information about potential intrusions or malicious code will flow to a central point, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team at DHS.” Robert Jamison, as quoted in Analysis: Einstein and U.S. cybersecurity

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is EINSTEIN.

Overheard talking about Amalga

In all the fervent testimonials to the benefits of automated and optimized medical practice, the panel seemed to be glossing over a roadblock familiar to CIOs of any industry: users who might not cotton to an automated system. Linda Tucci, Electronic health record adoption an issue for health care CIOs

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Amalga

Overheard talking about MultiSpeak

MultiSpeak is a schema that establishes a set of standard interface specifications and defines data entities and their attributes. For example, the “Customer” entity has 14 attributes, including: customer first name, last name, home phone number, billing address, and customer id number. Greg Wolven, WIN Energy: A Case Study in using MultiSpeak to Enable Best of Breed Software Selection

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is MultiSpeak.

WIN Energy chose MultiSpeak as the vehicle to enable a Best of Breed strategy and optimize the way the cooperative does business. WIN Energy can now select the various software technologies that are the best fit for the utility and, as long as the software packages are MultiSpeak compliant, they will function together regardless of software version upgrades. WIN Energy’s first MultiSpeak implementation between its accounting system, NISC’s CAPSXL+, and its automated field staking package, MiniMax’s StakeOut, was both highly successful and its first step towards a truly system-wide approach.

Overheard talking about the 8 principles for Gov 2.0

I really liked the PowerPoint on Transparency and Open Government put together by SanFrancisco’s CIO Chris Vein and CTO Blair Adams. The show is interesting visually and they do a great job documenting how the city/county of SanFrancisco is addressing challenges.

Here are their 8 Principles for Gov 2.0

• Complete
– All public data are made available. Public data are not data
that are subject to valid privacy, security or privilege
limitations

• Primary
– Data are collected at the source, with the finest possible
level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

• Timely
– Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve
the value of the data

• Accessible
– Data are available to the widest range of users for the
widest range of purposes.

• Machine Processable
– Data are reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

• Non-Discriminatory
–Data are available for anyone, with no requirement of
registration.

• Non-Proprietary
–Data are available in a format over which no entity has exclusive
control.

• License-Free
–Data are not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark, or
trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege
restrictions may be allowed.

Overheard talking about government IT conference trends

Am looking at conferences to see if I can pick out trends.

e.Republic posts speaker slides from their conferences after the event is over.  I think the slides provide an interesting peak behind the curtain.

GTC Southwest: The Texas Digital Government Summit 2010
February 2010

California CIO Academy 2010
February 2010

Overheard talking about government teleworking and telejobs

You can’t telework with paper. We need to get to where we can work on documents on a screen. Did you ever see anyone on ‘Star Trek’ carrying a clipboard? We need to get to a point where there’s no need for a desk except as a place to put your lunch. Wayne Leiss as quoted in The future of telework technology: A wish list

Wayne Leiss is chief information officer at the Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision.

Other items on the wish lists of telework managers include:

- The ability to share documents and edit jointly, and large screens to keep the documents readable.
- Better virtual private networks and more use of them.
- A wider array of options for devices, including a range of laptop computer screen sizes.
- Access to applications based on individual needs rather than enterprise-wide delivery.

Security is key. You need two-factor encryption, you need hard drive encryption

Overheard talking about changing the culture in gov’t IT

The previous approach was to protect everything and share what you must. Now the focus is to share everything and protect what you must. But culturally a lot of people were still very uncomfortable with releasing all that data. Sonny Bhagowalia, as quoted in Sonny Bhagowalia smashes technical, cultural obstacles to sharing government data

Sonny Bhagowalia is the chief information officer at the Interior Department.

We have 24,000 domains in the U.S. government and millions of Web pages. So the idea was to start connecting them and making it easier to find data from all those sites.

Everything we do in our lives is about information and data. I like to say that it’s not about the technology, it’s about the data. And when data is found in context, it becomes information. That whole continuum of data and then information is really where the world is going.

Overheard talking about GSA spending

GSA directs more than 80 percent of its IT spending to the operation and maintenance of existing systems, leaving only the remainder to invest in new technologies. Casey Coleman,as quoted in The CIO 14 years later: Power vs. paperwork