elemental links

@ Virtualization, Cloud Computing & Green IT Summit: Progress Report on Cloud Computing in Government

Cloud Computing in Government: A Progress Report, moderated by Robert Ames of IBM

Panelists:

• Doug Bourgeois, Director, National Business Center, Dept. of the Interior
• Casey Coleman, CIO, GSA
• William (Bill) Turnbull, Associate CIO for Advanced Technology and Systems Integration, Department of Energy

Robert Ames of IBM opens, sets context for panel and quips on the 4th Cloud Delivery model, “Hype as a Service”, via David Vap.

Casey Coleman, opens saying hard to give progress report at this early stage, but there is a lot of momentum for cloud computing in the government.  A big part of that momentum is the recently launched Apps.gov site. 

Goals of CIO Council and Apps.gov work: establish governance, procurement Leadership, technology innovation, Implementation and adoption, enable sustainable and cost-effective computing, operate as a service provider, and conduct outreach activities.

Doug Bourgeois of the National Business Center is up next.  National Business Center is a service provider to other government agencies.  Doug begins with starting point operational challenges: security, infrastructure sprawl (datacenter growth containment), limited flexibility/adaptability to change.

How to overcome this: 1. security program, 2. service-oriented architecture to add standardization, interoperability and business process management into organization, 3. virtualization 4. dual data center (risk management, failover).  These provided preparedness.

Made business decision to employ cloud technology, refer to their cloud site for more information, including roadmap (pdf).

Now, William Turnbell of the Department of Energy.  DOE’s efforts include (1) data center virtualization, (2) private clouds (Argonne National Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, National Renewable Energy Lab (green focus)), (3) business applications and (4) research areas: security, HPC, authentication in the cloud.

William states that not all applications are suitable to general purpose clouds.  Experimenting with different private cloud approaches to suit different business needs, including high performance computing.

Q: Biggest Challenges?

Doug: Challenges that rise to top: Governance model for the cloud.  From roles and responsibilities from security standpoint.  Shared multi-tenancy model, who decides, who pays, when it is time to upgrade.  (This is private cloud issue).

Federal government is moving more quickly than OEM suppliers.  OEM (software) licenses are not very cloud friendly. 

Casey: Security is big challenge that people talk about.  Not comprised security, but a different approach is required.

Apps.gov changes purchasing model.  Right now, need purchasing authority to participate.  But, it could (eventually) move to the users of applications and IT services in federal government.  Would need to change purchasing model, authorities and governance.

William: Not all applications move smoothly to the cloud.  Some require re-writing, this is a significant challenge.

Opened to Audience Q&A

Q: Audience question directed at Doug, why did NBC build out the infrastructure, when it could have been commercially acquired?

Doug: Didn’t implement a bunch of new infrastructure to implement cloud, moved existing infrastructure to cloud, added virtualization, management controls: provisioning, metering etc.  The decision was based on economy of scale.  Leveraged existing investment, able to spread that investment out to greater number of consumers (agency support).

Q: Culture Issues?

Casey: Disruptive technology adoption always has culture issues.  Early uses are collaboration and commodity IaaS.  As move to mission critical support, there will be more private cloud adoption.

Q: Security/Risk

Doug: Mission is sensitive but unclassified information (personally identifiable information).  Implementing 3 security zones, dev/test, production, PII.

Q: NASA with Nebula is creating an open source cloud.  What is the role of open source in your agencies?

William: Open source can be looked at as another competitor.  Run TCO models on both commercial and open source offerings.  Key that there is a community supporting the open source software (project).

Doug: Looked at from economic perspective.  Viable from risk perspective.  Are using some open source products at O/S level.

Robert Ames, IBM: Notes really interesting / innovative work going on in the open source community, such as Hadoop.

Q: Can existing datacenter assets be used to create IaaS services?  Especially, with efficiency gains of virtualization etc.  What happens to underlying assets?

Casey: Enormous legacy datacenter investment.  Great question.  Are currently asking themselves how this can be repurposed.  Some newer assets and applications may be candidates to be IaaS providers.  But some older assets and applications may never be cloud friendly, cloud ready.

Q: Low hanging fruit / general characteristics of good cloud candidates? Hybrids models (mix of public and private clouds)?

Doug: Can be very theoretical question / answer.  Best advice is to look at commodity stuff, things with low security model, things with low interoperability requirements.

Casey: USA.gov citizen portal is moved to a cloud solution.  Cost savings approx 75%.  Another high potential area is email and collaboration.  Agency requirements are similar.

William: Collaboration is one area. 

Q: Working with communities?

All of the panelists mentioned working on security models, and working with researchers on security models.  Robert Ames added information sharing, agencies who use / require the same information, and opportunities for new findings (disease prevention) via access and updates to a shared information source.

Q: Apps.gov and IaaS, will there be agency offerings, such as NBC, with commercial offerings?

Casey: Good question.  Very early stages right now.  Could evolve to a competitive marketplace over time.

Q: Platform as a Service?

Casey: Interesting aspect is that government applications developed on a government provided PaaS could then be shared amongst other government agencies, the IP would be a public asset.  Robert points out this could be “jumpstart for innovation”.  Both Casey and Doug agree.

Q: What about compliance issues like HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley?

Casey: Great many compliance issues.  For example, agency video on YouTube also needs to be agency website where it is captioned.  So, compliance is about the offering (video), not necessarily the delivery platform (YouTube). 

Doug: Cloud users have a responsibility, nothing (technical) prevents them from bringing HIPAA type data to non-compliant platform, so there needs to be education, governance and communication.

In Closing…

Doug: Try it, start small, low risk.

Casey: Despite hype, cloud is real.  Reduce friction, increase capability delivery.

@Virtualization, Cloud Computing & Green IT Summit, Washington, DC

This week, I’m attending 1105 Government Information Group’s Virtualization, Cloud Computing & Green IT Summit in Washington, DC. The program is a mix of invited speakers, panels and professional education sessions, featuring both government IT and technology industry leaders.  I’m interested in all three topic areas, so I’ll be splitting my time across the tracks, as well as taking in the exhibition area. 

This is the first Government cloud event I’ve covered.  I’m interested to hear about the opportunities, successes, issues and concerns of this early adopting community.  And of course, how those compare/contrast with enterprise IT adopters.

It’s my understanding that wifi is limited, so I’ll be semi-live blogging – live capture, delayed posting.  If you are attending the conference and want to connect, ping me on Twitter.

@ SOA | BPM Symposium in San Antonio, Texas

This week, I’m at the Inaugural SOA | BPM Symposium in San Antonio, Texas.  The program, put together jointly by the SOA Consortium and BPM Consortium, features invited speaker talks, case studies, panels and group discussion on using SOA and BPM, individually and together, to achieve business value.

For those following the SOA Consortium since the onset, you know we view SOA and BPM as complementary strategies.  Each delivers business value on its own.  But, used together, the business value amplifies.  Of course, in the beginning we were amongst the minority that saw SOA and BPM as complements rather than competitors.

In fact, in our first Executive Summit series in February 2007, leading CIOs and CTOs implored us to help "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".  From their point of view, SOA and BPM are complements:

    “SOA, BPM, Lean, Six Sigma are all basically one thing (business strategy and structure) that must work side by side”. – CTO during SOA Executive Summit

An excerpt from our Executive Summit whitepaper (pdf) expands on this statement:

“The CIO and CTO participants think about SOA from a top-down business view. That view starts with business processes, expands into business activities, associates those activities to the balance sheet, and then considers the required business services to accomplish those activities. These business services are not at the discrete technical implementation level. Rather, the business services refer to services provided by humans, or machines.

Essentially, these executives see SOA as the means to “execute the business model”. For this to transpire, the methods to define and record this executable business model, and the supporting technology must be seamless. In the minds of IT executives, SOA and BPM related products are used in concert to accomplish one goal, despite the discrete technology industry packaging.”

Now, with the artificial divide removed, it’s time to bring the communities together to share insights, warnings and value statements.  I look forward to hearing real-world stories and participating in the symposium discussion.

To extend the insights and conversations outside of the conference room, I’ll be live-blogging at SOA Consortium Insights and Business-Driven Architect from Tuesday’s session, and we’ll record several of the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions to be published as podcasts.  I’m hosting on Wednesday, so no live-blogging.  And of course, there will be twittering both days. 

Join me: Inaugural SOA & BPM Symposium, September 15-16 in San Antonio, Texas

I imagine that my co-conspirator, Karen Larkowski of the BPM Consortium, is promoting this same event as the Inaugural BPM & SOA Consortium, but whichever way you hear about it, please consider joining us for this two-day program on using SOA and BPM, individually and together, to achieve business value.

We have a packed agenda featuring invited speakers, case studies and group discussion.  Grabbed from my SOA Consortium Insights post, some agenda highlights:

Clay Richardson, Forrester, Analyst Keynote on The future of BPM and SOA

Dr. Wolfram Jost, Executive Board Member, IDS Scheer on Survival of the Process Fittest

In times of turmoil, change, and volatility – people and technology are in flux, but business thrive on the processes they run on. The consistency, speed, and quality of processes are what drives the delivery of products and services to customers and improves the bottom line. The companies surviving the economic storm have been process oriented all along. But becoming “process-fit” is more than applying BPM technology; it’s a cultural mindset.  This presentation focuses on what it takes to effectively use BPM to better survive troubling economic circumstances with a process-oriented mindset, culture, and technology.

David Broadbent, Business Process Consultant, Parity Solutions on How to Overcome Resistance to Change in Change Programmes

There have been many papers written about how business process management can yield benefits to organizations but not enough about dealing with the people aspects of change. David Broadbent presented a case study at the OMG BPM Think Tank in Putten Holland in November 2008 looking at the aspects of culture on change programmes, describing culture as the ‘forgotten variable’ in change programmes. Following ongoing work with a number of clients this talk will take some of the thoughts he presented to the next stage, namely how to resolve the ‘Resistance to change’.

Olivier Brousseau, IT Chief Architect, Oilfield Services IT division of Schlumberger, on Information for Excellence journey at Schlumberger, a SOA case study

Schlumberger launched at the end of 2007 a program called "Excellence in Execution" with a goal to deliver flawless execution to its customers. In 09, this remains a key strategy to ensure that the company comes out of the downturn changed and more competitive. Schlumberger’s customers are executing more difficult and much larger projects in more remote locations. This implies huge advances in technology to be able to recover hydrocarbons cost effectively. It also implies that the value of reliability in operations to our customers has increased dramatically.

Recognizing that Information and IT systems will play a key role in improving the business processes required to support this program, VP Quality and CIO of Schlumberger called for a step change in delivering information and IT systems. IfX, Information for Excellence, is the New standard to drive the organization towards field efficiency. The IfX will ensure that applications are field-friendly, that they minimize redundancy of information entry, improve control, and streamline field operations and processes.  The talk presents the IfX Journey at Schlumberger, and how SOA is a key enabler to deliver IfX compliant systems.

Tushar K. Hazra, PhD, Principal and Solution Architect, Distinguished Engineering Group Federal Consulting Practice, Computer Sciences Corporation, on Leveraging BPM and EA Connections for Building Your Transformation Enterprise, a case study

In today’s transformational business world, process innovation and improvements are keys to the successful delivery of tangible business values, agility, and performance.  Many companies and agencies start their BPM (business process management), EA (enterprise architecture), and SOA (service oriented architecture) initiatives independently to achieve such goals.  However, when BPM, and EA or SOA projects are connected early, significantly higher business benefits can be achieved than the outcome of their individual completions.  Practitioners can gain a deep understanding of processes from BPM. This knowledge can subsequently be utilized to establish a roadmap for building a transformational enterprise through EA and or SOA projects, in many occasions concurrently.

This session presents a case study of an ongoing joint BPM and EA initiative that leverages the true significance of managing business processes involved in EA.  The case study offers a commentary of the “what”, “how”, and “when” aspects of the initiative and shares relevant lessons learned.   

Fred A. Cummins, HP Fellow, on SOA for Business

SOA is about accessing shared business capabilities across organizational boundaries.  This means SOA is about the architecture of business, not just the composition of IT solutions.  The implications of this are far-reaching and affect not only the structure of business processes, but the structure of the organization and the means by which the enterprise is optimized and transformed.  This talk will provide an overview of SOA from a business perspective: the specification and integration of services, the implementation of business processes, the analysis of value chains, and the changes that are needed in enterprise governance for the enterprise to fully exploit the enabling technology.

Aleks Buterman, Principal, SenseAgility Group on Integration Capability Portfolio as Means of Competitive Advantage

What if you could integrate major mergers in weeks, rather than years?  What if you could accurately forecast integration value, cost and timelines?   Any organization armed with this set of core competencies would have a sizable competitive advantage in the marketplace.  These questions are not meant to spur debate, nor are they academic.  Processes and tools have progressed far enough over the past decade where building a capability portfolio focused on integration is no longer a state of the art.  Assessing and improving the effectiveness of this capability portfolio is crucial to organizations who use M&A as part of their growth strategy and investment professionals who underwrite and finance these deals.  This presentation will outline how capabilities enabled by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM), and Master Data Management (MDM) can be assembled into an Integration Capability Portfolio that can be leveraged at any time, and with great velocity.

In addition to the above sessions, there will be panel discussions, an introduction to Business Ecology, the announcement of the SOA Consortium Case Study Contest winners, and open discussion time.

The SOA & BPM Symposium is a public event.  For more information on the agenda and registration, please go here.

 

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

SOA Zombies invade Boston, Film at 11:00…

…well, 11:00 on the evening of July 23.  As I mentioned on Business-Driven Architect, I’ll be hanging with the SOA Zombies, believers and one famous SOA obituary writer, at ZapThink’s “Night of the Living SOA Dead”:

“On July 23, 2009 dozens of experts, pundits, and influential guests will gather in Boston, MA for an evening of networking and discussion on the topics of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Architecture (EA). Open to public enrollment and attendance, the topic of discussion for the panel will be the recent news and discussion about the "Death of SOA." Is SOA really dead? Is it dying? Or is it changing? And what about those that are currently doing something with SOA or even just interested in the topic? Are we the "living dead"?

As a way of encouraging dialogue, networking, and communication within the SOA and EA, ZapThink is hosts its evening ZapForum networking events throughout the world. At this upcoming event on July 23, 2009 in Boston, MA, guest experts expecting to attend include Anne Thomas Manes (Burton Group), Dana Gardner (Interarbor Solutions), Jason Bloomberg (ZapThink), Brenda Michelson (Elemental Links), Sandy Rogers, and Ronald Schmelzer (ZapThink).”

The gathering is Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:30PM-8PM ET @ M.J. O'Connor's Irish Pub, 27 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02116.  For more information go here.  But before you do that, note this 50% off discount code: PRTDISC.