This Week in Public Sector Innovation

December 13, 2012 By

GSA nearing first FedRAMP approvals: As announced earlier this year, GSA is striving to complete the first round of applications by CSPs under the FedRAMP program by year end. To date, we haven’t heard anything to lead us to believe that they will miss this self-imposed deadline. GSA is expected to grant provisional authority to three cloud service providers in the first round and the expectation is they’ll move expeditiously with other CSP approvals after the first of the year. SIIA will be watching this process closely and continues to encourage GSA to move as many CSPs through the process as quickly as possible so that government agencies looking to procure cloud services will have a wide array of options. See Fierce Government IT for more.

Mobile still a hot topic for government: The CIO Council released a report this week detailing federal agency use of mobile technologies and making recommendations that aim to reduce the cost of secure mobile technologies, as directed in the White House’s Digital Government Strategy. The report, which can be accessed here, is the result of a collaborative inter-agency effort that involved almost two dozen Federal departments and agencies and was led by the Information Security and Identity Management Committee (ISIMC) of the Federal CIO Council.

Government IT priorities are changing but legacy systems still pull the money: A recent report from GAO shows that despite the efforts of the Obama Administration to focus most of its information technology attention on promoting the adoption of innovative new technologies and reducing the overall cost of IT, legacy systems still account for the vast majority of the federal government’s IT spending. According to the GAO report, in FY2011, 26 federal agencies spent $79 billion on IT with $54 billion or nearly 70% going to maintain existing systems. This is the challenge to modernizing our IT infrastructure that will need to be addressed as agency budgets are further restrained in the coming months and years. FCW has more.

Carper officially named Chairman of Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC): The Senate Democratic Steering Committee announced on Wednesday that Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) has officially been named Chairman of HSGAC, taking over for Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who retired. Carper was Chairman of the panel’s Federal Financial Management Subcommittee and has been a strong advocate for government reform over his years in the Senate. The Hill reports.

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

Breakthrough Talk: Navigating Transformation

December 13, 2012 By

Marc Strohlein, Agile Business Logic

In a relatively short period of time, technology has moved from the back office to the front office, and then out the door to the mobile Internet, all the while growing in impact and disruptive potential. In the process, technology moved from a business strategy-enabling tool, to one of transformation, at least for those information companies that have figured out how to truly leverage it.

It’s no secret that Google, Apple, and Amazon have mastered using technology to transform their businesses-not just once or twice, but continuously. Information publishers, on the other hand have often struggled to achieve such transformational effects. That’s because the challenges of selecting and exploiting transformative technologies are significant. So are the people and cultural issues that come with major technology shifts.

Executives are lulled by vendors’ siren songs of big data, cloud computing, tablets and mobile computing, semantic technology-the list goes on and on. But which ones will deliver breakthrough business impact and have staying power? And how do technology executives manage complex transitions from legacy environments without disrupting business operations?

The answer, and the subject of this upcoming panel at the SIIA IIS conference, “Navigating Transformation,” is that technology and business strategy need to become intertwined and embedded in the DNA of publishing firms. In effect, those businesses need to become technology firms that publish-ot just newspaper, book, journal, or online publishers.

The panel is comprised of Richard Belanger, Chief Information Officer, ProQuest, Peter Marney, Senior Vice President, Thomson Reuters, along with myself, Marc Strohlein, Principal of Agile Business Logic as moderator. Expect a lively discussion about the opportunities afforded by new technologies as well as their challenges and our collective wisdom about how to ensure success.  Our goal is that attendees will leave with clear ideas about how to leverage the transformative potential of information technology.

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: , , ,

SIIA Opposes Internet Resolution at World Conference of International Telecommunications

December 13, 2012 By

SIIA is troubled by reports out of the World Conference of International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai indicating that a resolution apparently bringing the Internet under the jurisdiction of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has made some progress. We oppose any measure that would allow the ITU to move beyond its historic role in telecommunications to take on an active role in regulating the Internet. We urge all member states to oppose inclusion of any such measure in the language of the final treaty.

Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPolicy

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Filed Under: International Policy, Policy Tagged With: ,

This Week in IP Enforcement

December 12, 2012 By

Spain Launches First Legal Online Registry for Content (The Hollywood Reporter)
Spain announced the creation of Registro On Line, a free online copyright registry trumpeted as the first in the world to offer a legally binding guarantee in the United States and Spain.

Hurt Pirates by Targeting Their Ad Money, Says Rock Star (paidContent)
David Lowery, lead singer of the rock band Cracker, says the best way to fight piracy is to hurt the pirates in the pocket book by cutting off their ad money, and specifically by naming and shaming the advertisers who allow the pirates to make money.

Google: Copyright Removal Requests Spike to 2.5 Million Per Week (The Hill)
Google announced that the number of requests it receives each week to remove links to allegedly infringing websites has risen from 250,000 per week to more than 2.5 million per week over the past six months.

Content Delivery Booms: Outbrain Buys Firm that Brings Media to Brands (paidContent)
The way content is being passed around the internet is changing, with companies like Outbrain that are making it possible for businesses to access and host content without engaging in costly licensing negotiations or piracy.

BRICs Score Lowest on IP Protection Index (Reuters)
A new U.S. Chamber of Commerce index intended as a tool for U.S. policymakers to push for tough protections of U.S. intellectual property gave Brazil, Russia, India and China the worst scores for protecting intellectual property.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Anti-Piracy, Policy - Intellectual Property

SIIA Calls for Legislation in the Fight Against Patent Trolls

December 12, 2012 By

SIIA today called on congressional leaders to enact legislation that provides more safeguards to prevent the economic and consumer harm caused by abusive patent lawsuits. In a letter sent to the Congressional leaders who led the passage of patent reform last year, SIIA joined with several other trade associations in issuing a call for action against the abusive patent lawsuits.

Abusive patent lawsuits from patent trolls are a tremendous blight innovation and entrepreneurship in our country. With The America Invents Act, Congress took an effective first step in addressing the problem of abusive patent litigation by trolls. Despite this important initial effort, patent trolls continue to damage the economy, hurt America’s tech industry, and threaten innovation. We’re calling on Congress to continue its work on this vital issue by enacting legislation that protects legitimate companies and innovators from misuse of the patent system.

SIIA has outlined a specific proposal, which was articulated in the joint letter to congressional leaders, for legislation that would help address this problem. Under today’s system, the patent troll business model is to make litigation as expensive and disruptive as possible, forcing legitimate and law-abiding companies to settle regardless of the merits of the case. The troll requests millions of documents through the discovery process–much of which is entirely irrelevant to the suit.  Because the patent troll has few, if any, documents to produce in discovery, they can do this with impunity.

The point of the troll’s action is not to achieve legal justice, but simply to  place an enormous burden on legitimate companies and give them little choice but to settle the case. SIIA’s proposed legislation would address this imbalance by shifting the discovery burden to the patent troll for any information over and above the core documentation that is essential to the merits of the case. By doing so, SIIA’s proposal will help protect legitimate companies from being bullied into settlements when patent trolls request millions of documents that are not actually needed in a patent lawsuit.

This proposal will disrupt a damaging and expensive litigation tactic: the abusive use of discovery to drive up litigation costs for the purpose of forcing settlements. Meanwhile, it will do nothing to curtail the rights of legitimate patent holders that are seeking to have their day in court.

Ken WaschKen Wasch is President of SIIA.

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Filed Under: Policy, Policy - Intellectual Property

Interview with New Member: LiquidPlanner

December 12, 2012 By

SIIA is delighted to welcome new member LiquidPlanner. I had a chance to speak with their CEO, Liz Pearce, to learn more about the company and the project management market.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about LiquidPlanner and what makes you unique in the Project Management market.

Liz: LiquidPlanner is unique because it is the only project management software to offer a bold new approach to scheduling. We call it “priority-based scheduling,” and it’s not only easier, but also far more accurate than traditional project management solutions based on the Gantt chart. Our robust scheduling engine actually automates much of the manual work that traditionally falls to project managers. In fact, our customers report their teams save an average of 16 hours a month from the automation benefits provided by LiquidPlanner.

Here’s how it works. In LiquidPlanner, you give tasks “best case / worst case” estimates and put them in priority order. Then LiquidPlanner automatically calculates for you an expected completion date for each task and for the project as a whole, based on who the work is assigned to and how much availability they have. Unlike other project management solutions, LiquidPlanner does not allow you to overbook a team member, so the results are based on real world availability of resources. Because projects and tasks are prioritized in rank order, you can instantly see when a change to one project impacts another – something that is impossible with most other tools.

LiquidPlanner also offers time tracking, collaboration, analytics, mobile apps, and more, all delivered through the cloud. We launched the company in 2008 and have over 1,200 customers in 50+ countries worldwide, many of whom are software, IT, and creative organizations.

Rhianna: How do you think the Project Management space has evolved in the last 3-5 years and what trends are driving that evolution?

Liz: The general proliferation of SaaS-based business tools has been transformative for the project management industry. Shared, collaborative systems are now the norm, in contrast to the time just a few years ago when the project manager alone held the keys to the castle. It’s resulting in a new “democratization of project data,” where information on workload, estimation accuracy, and tracking is now available to all members of the team. That means team members can get a barometric read on their own performance relative to others, not to mention better insight into their own contributions, areas for improvement, and roadmap of responsibility. Now, the onus is on vendors to provide solutions that are easier to use, so each team member themselves can update the project workspace without the need for a specialized project manager in the IT department. The trend of SaaS-based project management also means executives are getting unprecedented visibility into capacity and their ability to deliver products and services. I think you’ll see more and more businesses reporting internal cost savings from smarter project management tools.

Rhianna: You do a lot to ensure security and support with your solution. Can you tell us a little about the measure you take to ensure overall security and support of your solutions?

Liz: One of the great things about the SaaS model is that software providers live and die by the quality of service they offer. Naturally, we go to great lengths to ensure end-to-end security and reliability, from authenticating every user account via email to using SSL technology for server authentication and data encryption. We manage our own servers at a world-class data center here in Seattle. In addition to tight physical security measures, it’s architected to protect against hardware and software failure with redundant power and internet connections, hot failover servers, nightly off-site data backups, and 24/7/365 monitoring.

Rhianna: You recently took over the CEO position, having previously held the COO role at LiquidPlanner. What is your vision for the future of the company?

Liz: It’s an incredibly exciting time at LiquidPlanner. We’re really entering the second era of LiquidPlanner’s life as a company. The first five years were dedicated to R&D – we set out to tackle a really big, hard problem and disrupt an old and stagnant market. During this period, we essentially bootstrapped the company to profitability and established a loyal customer base around the world. Today, LiquidPlanner has more than 1,100 paying customers in 50 countries across multiple industries and the company was named one of “Washington’s Best WorkPlaces” by the Puget Sound Business Journal. The next phase for LiquidPlanner is all about driving the company’s growth and extending our platform. We see so many opportunities to help teams tackle increasingly complex projects in today’s competitive business environment, and we are investing heavily in social productivity innovation to meet this growing demand. My vision is that LiquidPlanner becomes a component of the must-have business software toolkit for businesses of all sizes, alongside industry leaders like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Box. We’re lucky to be doing business in a time when innovation, quality, and service are rewarded – on those grounds we are very solid. I’m extremely bullish on the future.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Webinar – Critical Success Factors for an Enterprise Mobile Strategy

December 12, 2012 By

Webinar Description

Organizations must fully develop an enterprise mobile strategy that considers both employee and customer facing aspects of today’s continually expanding use of mobile technologies. It is important to consider the customer experience as they launch new products, services, and applications. Grant Thornton LLP brings the perspective of working with both ISVs and the consumers of their products in a business advisory capacity. This recorded webcast focuses on several key aspects of an enterprise strategy:

  • Key criteria for an Enterprise Mobile Strategy
  • Application architecture- Is it ready for mobile
  • Planning for BYOD within the enterprise
  • Deployment interface
  • Importance of security

Click here to download the slides.

Presenters
Tony Hernandez, Principal, Business Advisory Services, Grant Thornton LLP
Mike Barba, Manager, Business Advisory Services, Grant Thornton LLP

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Filed Under: All About the Cloud, Mobility, Software Tagged With: , ,
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