One of the most effective ways to reduce fire fighting in daily administration is by standardizing the operating environments and automating deployment and configuration. A standard operating environment (SOE) that can support multiple use cases is a more robust and tested platform to build upon. It provides a uniform environment for troubleshooting when something goes awry. Reducing the differences in your operational environment to critical changes also reduces the overall complexity in multi-tier environments. Using centralized automation tools to define, build, and deploy these standards streamlines the process even more. Standardization is not a new concept, nor is it disruptive way of thought. The industrial revolution owes part of its existence to standardization. Computers and gadgets get reviewed and reviled based on adhering to standardized parts and ports. Yet for some reason, every environment I've worked in has one-off, bespoke systems to one degree or another. Some had admins who thought it was easier, better, smarter, more secure to build custom environments. Some had admins who wrote wrapper scripts around standard UNIX utilities because they didn't like the way a particular error was handled. The only real outcome was increasing difficulty of maintaining and replicating the systems. While bespoke suits will fit better at first, you'd best be prepared to work hard to exactly maintain your shape otherwise you're in for regular and expensive tailoring.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk –www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company The Yellow Pages are so 1990. When America wants something, we hit a search engine. But, if you’re the only game in town, there’s no need for SEO - or is there...? The second Uncle Sam at Your Service Study provides government with real citizen feedback from the checkout line. And, the timing’s good. It’s been five months since the Prez dropped Executive Order 13571, calling for agencies to streamline service delivery and improve customer service.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk –www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company The date on the tombstone - September 15. Open gov that was shouted from the rooftops on Obama’s first day died last week with barely a whisper - far from the headlines. The Senate approps subcommittee slashed $11 million from the House allocation, already $15 million under FY2010 funding. Transparency advocates like Sunlight are openly mourning the passing. But, the real question here is, does anybody really care?

The federal government is the largest purchasing agent in the world – yet for many years it was treated as if it was the red-headed stepchild of business enterprises and multi-national companies. This was nowhere more evident than in the world of information technology (IT). The problem was that corporate America didn’t quite know how to engage the feds, talk their talk, or understand their very specific needs and challenges. All of which is at the very heart of marketing. So for a long time, the accepted thinking was that the U.S. government is just like every other business customer and that the same marketing strategies that work in the world of B2B selling work in government too.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk –www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company The definition of insanity. Assume the same behavior and expect a different outcome. So, we’re for change. That’s why we launched MeriTalk - and the Merit Awards on June 13. The Merit Awards aren't a CIO-stroking contest - aren’t black-tie soirees vulgar in an era of government austerity? We want to incent and recognize real change in IT's bottom line.

Late last month I joined over 500 people gathered at the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) annual Training Event in Philadelphia to discuss progress in NIEM adoption, hear about tools that have been developed by government and industry to facilitate NIEM processes, and learn about best practices developed by the NIEM community. In addition to 20 federal agencies and 40 state and local government agencies, both Canada and Mexico were represented by senior government IT executives. A range of very diverse projects were discussed at the Philadelphia event, including the initial Canada-USA-Mexico data exchange project that will facilitate sharing of stolen vehicle data beginning in 2012. So, what is NIEM and why all the buzz? NIEM is, at its most fundamental level, a U.S. Federal government initiative that promotes the accurate exchange of data between organizations through the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML). This may sound elementary - after all, this was what XML was intended to be used for since its approval as a W3C recommendation in 1998. However, when two or more participants in a data exchange begin to work through the 'details' it becomes readily apparent that the vocabulary that one uses internally may be quite different from that used by the other. For example, does the database field identified as 'Name' by one entity refer to a person or something else? A person's full name? Including suffixes? Is the database field 'surname' equivalent to the second agency's database field 'Last_Name' or a local police department's field 'perpetrator'? Is a single agency's internal database design guideline consistent across various databases from which data might be pulled for sharing as a consolidated record about some individual?

DLT recently participated in DLT recently participated in the XChange Public Sector conference that which brought together leading analysts to focus on opportunities in the public sector community, including new products, services and solutions, as well as insight from leading industry speakers. The opening session, presented by speaker William Eggers, focused on the impact of changing federal and state IT initiatives on public sector integrators and vendors. These vendors have been challenged to develop programs to meet the evolving needs of the government customers. Eggers discussed his research findings on why some big government initiatives succeed while others fail, and drove home the key point that successful programs have elements that can be replicated. These elements act as a type of map to “systemic barriers to success” that are built into challenging programs. One program mandate that can’t be avoided is the migration to cloud computing. The federal government has a major interest in making that switch, even though the adoption process is slow-going. DLT’s CTO Van Ristau participated in a panel discussion about this during the Federal Cloud Session: Drilling Down into the Federal Market. The discussion aimed to provide insight into cloud computing initiatives that emphasize a push to reduce infrastructure costs, speed application development, reduce complexity, and shrink the energy and real estate footprint of federal IT activities.

The problem is that we don’t typically have a disciplined methodology for arriving at a plan of action. Consider the following: You have to know what the loss is that you are trying to avoid. Sound simple? I assure you that most money is spent protecting assets without any regard to the loss that they represent. Remember, it’s not the laptop computer that you are protecting per se. It is the monetary value of some aspect of that asset. It could be the replacement cost of the asset. Do you think that would change your view of what was needed as a control? Of course! The replacement value of the computer is only a factor if you physically lose the computer or it is broken through physical damage. Anti-theft devices, padded carrying cases, security awareness training for employees are all possibilities but if the cost of these measures exceeds the cost of the computer then I’m guessing that you wouldn’t be likely to apply them. You may do some but not all and it would depend on analysis of which would represent a greater cost reduction.

It is interesting that there is no equivalent term in Latin for risk outside of the word for danger. While security is the state of being free from danger or threat, risk, is a more complex topic and cannot be addressed without the concept of loss. It is the probability, not merely the possibility of something unpleasant or unwelcome happening that will result in a loss of some kind (life, liberty, property). The term did not even come into existence until the 17th century after the Medici had leveraged eastern mathematics in the calculation of probability in financial terms and still the word risk is derived from the word danger. Big mistake!

Exadata Larry, after expounding on the benefits of Oracle’s high performance cloud computing server—Exalogic— he went on to further tout version 3 of Oracle’s renowned database machine—Exadata. With the release of version 3, Oracle now offers customers two versions of its acclaimed database machine: X2-2 and X2-8. “The new configuration extends the Oracle Exadata Database Machine product family with a high-capacity system for large OLTP, data warehousing and consolidated workloads. There are now four configurations of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the new Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack and the Oracle Exadata X2-2 quarter-rack half-rack and full-rack systems. Offering customers a choice of configurations for managing small to large database deployments, the Oracle Exadata X2-2 and Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack machines can scale to multi-rack configurations for the most demanding database applications.” Larry emphatically proclaimed that Exadata has become the best machine for data warehousing and OLTP and he used SoftBank as an example. He indicated that at SoftBank Oracle replaced a 60-rack Teradata machines with only 3 full racks of Exadata and depending on the application those three (3) Exadata racks, ran 2xs to 8xs faster than the 60 rack Teradata configuration with only 5% of the hardware. Oracle eliminated 95% of the racks and on average still ran 5 times faster.