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This Week in Public Sector Innovation

November 15, 2012 By

VA moves to the Cloud: In what is being reported as one of the largest federal cloud computing projects to date, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced this week that it will move more than 600,000 users to Microsoft Office 365 for Government. The agency will use Microsoft’s government community cloud for email, calendaring, instant messaging, web and video conferences, and collaboration. The deal is worth $36 million over five years and the transition will be phased in over the length of the contract, with 15,000 users expected to migrate in the first year. HP is part of the deal as the systems integrator. Read the full story from Information Week.

Elections have consequences, Part I: Despite the fact that President Obama was reelected and the House and Senate remained under the control of the same parties that were in control before the election, there will be a number of key changes affecting the technology industry. From a government IT standpoint, the President’s reelection means a continued focus on using technology to make government more efficient and effective, leveraging cloud computing, big data and consolidating data centers. See more from E-Commerce Times.

Elections have consequences, Part II: Expect big changes to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee with current Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) retiring and current Ranking Member Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) term limited in that position. Also expect some changes to the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee structure as there are two vacant subcommittee chairmanships – Oversight and Investigations and Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade – and a number of members vying for those posts. No decisions on chairs expected until after the Thanksgiving holiday at the earliest. See SIIA’s election blog post for more.

Blackberry earns FIPS certification: Government’s affinity for Blackberry devices has been driven in large part by security. With other device makers stepping up their security in recent years, we have seen a shift to other devices in the government market. The announcement last week that the new Blackberry 10, scheduled for release in the 1st quarter of 2013, has received FIPS 140 certification is a good sign for Blackberry fans. GCN has a post.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: PSIG, Public Sector Innovation Summit

How the Election Will Impact Federal IT

November 7, 2012 By

Now that the campaign is over it’s a good time to take a look at what the future holds for federal IT. Here are a couple basic things we know: There is continuing pressure on federal agencies to deliver better services to citizens, while reducing the overall cost of government. IT has and will continue to play a role in this effort. We also expect to see moderate overall cuts to federal IT spending, somewhere in the 5 percent range, so agencies will have to reprioritize some ongoing IT initiatives.

All of this bodes well for “innovation” and we expect to see a continuation of the effort to move agencies to cloud computing, consolidate the existing data center infrastructure and better leverage government data. We also expect to see a continued focus on performance and mission-oriented goals and increased attention paid to the need to reform federal IT procurement.

As for federal IT personnel, we know there will be changes at the agency CIO level and probably at other places like GSA and OMB where federal IT policy is driven – we just don’t know what they are yet. All indications are that Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel is planning to stick around for a while as should Federal CTO Todd Park (pure speculation on my part, but I haven’t heard anything to the contrary). We know that President Obama will have to appoint a permanent OMB Director sooner rather than later and that could trigger a reshuffling of some responsibilities and priorities at OMB.

On Capitol Hill, there will be a significant change to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee leadership, as current HSGAC Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) retires and current Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) has to step down as RM because of term limits. Tom Carper (D-DE) appears to be in line to be Chairman and Tom Coburn (R-OK) to be Ranking Member. Both Carper and Coburn have focused in the past on reducing government waste and maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of government, so we can anticipate some focus there. Sen. Carper’s ascension to the Chairmanship, along with Sen. Coburn’s new role leaves vacancies on the Federal Financial Management Subcommittee. Sen. Brown’s (R-MA) reelection loss and Sen. Akaka’s retirement leave a couple of other subcommittee spots to be filled. Other members of the Senate who can play a key role in government technology are Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and newly elected Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), both of whom represent the tech heavy Commonwealth of Virginia.

The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee will be more stable than its Senate counterpart with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) remaining Chairman and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) remaining as Ranking Member of the full committee. The key Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement will continue to be led by Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), with Gerry Connelly (D-VA) likely to remain as Ranking Member.

The Government Reform Committees are going to play a significant role in the look and shape of federal IT over the next two years as Chairmen Issa and Lankford move forward with legislation to reform federal IT acquisition. The bill, known as the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) which has yet to be introduced seeks to empower federal CIOs and speed the acquisition process. This bill will likely draw a lot of the federal IT community’s attention next year and I expect Rep. Connelly to play a key role in this debate, with his newly drawn 11th Congressional District heavily populated by tech contractors.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Government, PSIG, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

November 1, 2012 By

Cloud Computing Praised Following Hurricane Sandy: In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, federal efforts to transition existing data centers and other IT assets to the cloud are being lauded for their contribution to keeping government operations up and running. According to reports from Federal Computer Week the Federal government saw limited disruption in IT operations and agencies like GSA credited recent transitions to cloud computing for providing them with a more robust, geographically diverse and redundant infrastructure helping them weather the storm. The big question going forward is will natural disasters like this most recent event spur more agencies to adopt the cloud or update their aging IT infrastructure?

EPA Awards Contract for Email, Collaboration in the Cloud: On October 31st, EPA awarded Microsoft and Lockheed Martin a $9.8 million contract to migrate existing EPA email and related applications to Microsoft 365, their cloud-based email and communication platform. Under the terms of the contract award more than 25,000 users will be transitioned to Microsoft Office 365 for Government, a new multi-tenant service that stores U.S. government data in a segregated community cloud and includes e-mail, calendars, scheduling and collaboration tools for internal and external use. See the press release here.

Next 4 Years to Bring Continued Innovation to Government IT: Nextgov has a profile on what the next four years will look like for Federal IT, regardless of who wins next week’s election. Their point and it’s an accurate one, is that four years ago as President Obama came into office, there was little discussion about cloud computing, agile development, mobile apps for agencies, or bring your own device. Today, agencies have moved mission-critical applications to the cloud and we continue to debate a host of key IT issues such as BYOD, collaboration and how to better empower federal CIOs. Read the full take from Nextgov.

Cloudy Election? Did you know that some states, including battleground states Virginia and Florida allowed residents of their state living overseas to cast their primary votes using LiveBallot, an online balloting website based on Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform? No word on whether or not the general election will allow that same technology. Information Week has the story from earlier this year.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Government, PSIG, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software, Software Events

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

October 25, 2012 By

Top IT Trends, Part I: Regardless of who wins the Presidential election on November 6th, we know technology will be driving a large part of the economy for years to come. So what will be driving technology for the next 5 years? This week, Gartner released its top 10 list of tech trends that will be driving the agenda. It includes:

  • Organizational entrenchment and disruption
  • Software-defined networks
  • Bigger data and storage
  • Hybrid cloud services
  • Client and server architecture

For the full list see the report from Forbes.

Top IT Trends, Part II: Now that we know what the top overall IT trends are for the next five years, what can we expect for government in 2013? According to the Government Business Council, the research arm of GovExec, it’s more of what we have been seeing over the past couple of years. That means: cloud, big data, data center consolidation, mobility, cybersecurity and health IT. Read the full report here.

OMB reporting big savings from PortfolioStat: OMB savings estimates resulting from the coordinated effort to identify and eliminate wasteful IT spending across government will total $2.5B over 3 years as a result of PortfolioStat. The savings come by reducing federal commodity IT spending and leveraging innovative tools like big data to maximize the efficiency of existing IT resources. See more on the OMB blog.

Sequestration makes its way into final Presidential debate: As Washington continues to try and figure out the potential impact of “sequestration” on agency budgets, should Congress and the White House fail to reach a deal to avoid it, President Obama vowed Monday night that it would not happen. The proposed cuts, totaling $120B, which go into effect on January 2nd, are already reportedly slowing contracting by some agencies, as uncertainty causes concern. Politico has a story.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Government, PSIG, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software, Software Events

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

October 18, 2012 By

Federal News Radio CIO Survey: In August Federal News Radio survey 130 federal CIO personnel on key issues affecting government IT today. Among the key findings: budget issues are driving CIO priorities, DOD views cloud differently than do civilian agencies (they see more savings), and many CIOs are concerned about the impact of sequestration on IT spending. See the full summary from FedNewsRadio.com here.

George Washington University hosts discussion on Rep. Issa’s IT reform proposal: On Thursday, GWU’s Law School hosted an open discussion on House Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) Chairman Darrell Issa’s proposed reform of the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act, which governs federal IT acquisition. The proposal, which is not expected to be introduced until early next year, would empower federal CIOs by giving them budget authority, as well as codifying a number of the Obama Administrations proposals from the 25 Point Plan to Reform Federal IT Management such as data center consolidation and FedRAMP. Ecommerce Times has a story. See the draft bill on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee site.

FedRAMP continues to make progress, news: FCW / 1105 Media released a report this week on the challenges of implementing the FedRAMP program. FedRAMP, which reached its initial operating capabilities in June has not yet approved a single Cloud Service Provider under the program. FedRAMP has approved 15 third party assessment organizations (3PAOS) to work with CSPs to meet the baseline control requirements and expects to grant provisional authorization to 3 CSPs by the end of this year. Read more with a link to the survey here.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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Filed Under: Government, PSIG, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software

Cloud Computing and Its Green Lining: Responses to James Glanz and the New York Times

October 17, 2012 By

Author James Glanz created a stir in September with his New York Times article, when he wrote that cloud computing and Big Data are actually big energy wasters. I have written about this controversy previously for the SIIA and have found that not to be the case. In fact, data centers are environmentally friendly for three reasons:

  1. Large data centers are more efficient than small and medium-sized data centers, so regardless of this looking negative at first blush, the electricity/unit of computing is less.
  2. Devices themselves are using less energy especially as  desk tops and laptops give way to tablets and smartphones,
  3. Cloud data centers can and will drive to renewable energy, as detailed in this report. Companies like Oracle, Adobe, and  IBM are devoting their considerable resources to sustainable computing practices, and this trend will only increase as they continue to work to make data centers more efficient and clean.

A number of voices have come out in support of cloud computing’s environmental benefits for these very reasons. The New York Times hosted quite a few on their Room for Debate page. Here is a short sampling.

Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google, knows from personal experience how data centers work, operating Google’s servers, networks, and data centers. He writes on the New York Times website:

“Because of our obsession with efficiency, we’re able to help others be more efficient as well. Small and medium data centers use two-thirds of the total energy because it’s much harder to run them efficiently, so the trend of replacing on-premise servers with efficient cloud services will reduce the amount of energy used to run the same workload.”

Similarly, Jonathan Koomey, research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University refutes Mr. Glanz:

“Modern cloud-based data centers are much more efficient and have much higher utilization levels than standard data centers, giving them substantial economic and energy-related advantages. And the shift to mobile computing promises big efficiency gains for users as well. For example, laptop computers, which typically use a third to a fifth of the power of desktops, outsold desktops for the first time in 2009 (according to IDC data). Sales of tablets, which are even more efficient, are growing much faster than those for laptops.”

Gary Cook, the senior I.T. sector analyst for Greenpeace International’s Cool IT campaign,  also provides cautious optimism, writing:

Customers need companies to be more transparent about their energy choices so that they can understand the true environmental performance of their Internet and cloud use and make more informed choices. If given the information, people will choose a company that chooses clean energy. We can – and should – be able to feel good about our likes, tweets, photos and music, but it’s up to these companies to take the bold steps to make that possible.

Charles Babcock of Information Week summarizes the other side thusly:

“Everyone is doing a lot more computing, as the story notes. But as we do so, the amount of electricity consumed per unit of computing is going down, which the story somehow misses. Nowhere does the Times address this salient point. Instead, it concludes we are doing a lot more computing and, therefore, we are all guilty of driving environmental degradation. If you’re going to reform the world, you need to build a better soapbox than this.”

Tracy Carlin is a Communications and Public Policy Intern at SIIA. She is also a first year graduate student at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology program where she focuses on intersections in education, video games and gender.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Policy - Cloud Computing, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software

Digital Policy Roundup: FTC Announces Online Privacy Workshop on Consumer Data, U.S. Internet Governance Delegation Formed, Update on Proposed Net Traffic Proposal, and more

October 16, 2012 By

FTC Announces Online Privacy Workshop on Consumer Data

The Federal Trade Commission announced on Monday that it will host a workshop in December to explore the practices and privacy implications of comprehensive collection of data about consumers’ online activities. The Workshop follows up on the FTC’s March 2012 report, Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change, which called on companies handling consumer data to implement recommendations for protecting consumers’ privacy, including privacy by design, providing simplified privacy choices to consumers, and greater transparency to consumers about data collection and use. The FTC is encouraging consumer protection organizations, academics, business and industry representatives, privacy professionals, and other interested parties to attend, and has solicited input for specific topics and requests to participate in panels. SIIA will submit a request to participate in this workshop.

U.S. Internet Governance Delegation Formed, Update on Proposed Net Traffic Proposal

The U.S. has fully formed its delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), consisting of 100 members from government, industry and civilians, with representatives from the Defense and Commerce departments, the FCC, FTC and NTIA, he said. Industry representatives come from both the telecom and Internet industries. Mark MacCarthy, Vice President of Public Policy at SIIA and adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program, has been named to serve as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the WCIT.

Other recent announcements from WCIT Ambassador Kramer include an update that the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) is likely to withdraw its controversial Internet traffic compensation proposal, but is now considering another proposed revision to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) that would, among other things, establish a “sender-party-pays” model for Internet traffic compensation that could require the sender of any Internet content to pay for its transmission.

Publishers, Google Settle Book Dispute

On October 4th, several book publishers (McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons, and Simon & Schuster) and Google announced that they had settled their seven-year dispute over copyright infringement issues relating to Google’s book search program. While the announcement says that Google “acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders,” it is silent as to the terms of the settlement, and more specifically Google’s views on whether unauthorized scanning and indexing of works constitutes fair use. The announcement did state that, under the settlement, a publisher may opt to have Google remove its works from the Google Book Search database and those publishers that choose to keep their works in the database may request copies of electronic versions of their works from Google. It is unclear if there was any payment made by either party as the terms of the agreement are confidential, and because the deal is a private settlement, there will be no public settlement document. The announcement also said that the settlement need not be approved by the court. Although the publishers have now settled, the Authors Guild has continued their suit against Google as a class action suit.

Senate Leader Confirms Cyber Will Again Come up in Nov.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) confirmed over the weekend [ http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/261891-reid-vows-fresh-bid-to-pass-stalled-cybersecurity-bill ] that the Senate will again consider cybersecurity legislation (The Cybersecurity Act, S. 3414) when it returns for its “lame duck” session in November. The legislation failed to garner the necessary 60 votes to advance in August, but supporters appear optimistic that the less politicized environment and looming threat of the Administration’s executive order on cybersecurity will help garner additional support from Republicans. Of course, any speculations about the outcome of that process should be held until after the elections, as changes in administration or congressional leadership in either body could have a significant effect on the lame duck strategy.

SIIA Federal Cloud Survey Goes Live

Last week SIIA’s Public Sector Innovation Group launched its inaugural Federal Cloud Survey, seeking to aggregate data on the federal government’s progress in adopting cloud computing, mobile technologies, and data center consolidation. Federal government IT professionals are encouraged to have their voice heard by responding to the survey, which can be found here. The findings of the survey will be published as part of SIIA’s Cloud/Gov Conference in Washington, DC on February 12, 2013. Learn more about Cloud/Gov here.

For SIIA policy updates including upcoming events, news and analysis, subscribe to SIIA’s weekly policy email newsletter, Digital Policy Roundup.

David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy.

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Filed Under: Digital Policy Roundup, Government, Policy, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software, Software Events
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