CTOVision

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.

Wall Street Crisis, Enterprise Technology and Cloud Computing

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

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

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?

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.

Social Media and Web2.0 for National Security Planners

Over the last couple weeks I sent several friends and associates a draft article I was working up on Web2.0 for National Security Planners.  I enjoyed pulling that together, since it helped me convince myself that the right thing to do is to get more senior US strategists engaged in Social Media.  There are some real security concerns there and we dont' want all our national security efforts exposed to all our adversaries on the Internet.  But use can be made of these tools and the risks there can be mitigated so the overall benefit to the country will far outweigh the risks. 

One of the folks I sent it to was Dion Hinchcliffe, President and CTO of HInchcliffe & Company (see http://hinchcliffeandco.com ).   Dion has long been a very collegial person with an open/collaborative work style.  I met him several years ago when he was giving a presentation to my old community on the then new concept of Web2.0 and have been very glad to be connected with him since.   Dion read the article and published it in his Social Computing Magazine (see http://socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=578 ), and I am very appreciative of him getting the word out on that.

Another online associate is Helen Thompson of AFCEA.  Helen is herself a great contributor to the dialog on national defense.  She just published an article titled "Reconciling Collaboration and Security in the Social Media Space (see http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/anmviewer.asp?a=1680&print=yes ).   In it she references my article and underscores the point I make about social media tools being a good way to accelerate good idea.

The current draft of the article is at:  http://www.ctovision.com/social-media-national-security.html

Please check it out and let me know your thoughts/input/suggestions.