Windows Ate.

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Microsoft revealed the developer preview of Windows 8 today at the Build conference in Anaheim (which I attended via webcast–there’s no way I’m getting near Disneyland without them going after me for trademark infringement over my anthropomorphized rodent). And based on the demos, Windows 8 appears to amount to two admissions by Microsoft:

1) Wow, the iPad is kicking our ass. We better copy that.
2) The cloud and Web have won, so let’s make Windows the best way to hook into them.

First, the iPad. Windows 8 is totally designed to go after the iPad, using the Metro interface of the Windows 7 Phone and multitouch to create semi-original riffs plus some wholesale photocopying of iOS and Android functionality. It was demoed running on ARM and Intel based hardware, and it looked kind of slick in its side-scrolling 2-dimensional way. Maybe Microsoft should drop “Windows” and just call it “Tiles”.

But what really is intriguing from a developer standpoint, and probably from an corporate IT standpoint in the long run, is the way that Microsoft has turned web development standards into nearly full citizens of the Windows development world. XAML (and Silverlight) are one thing–that Windows 8 supports those for native apps is hardly a shocker. But JavaScript and HTML5 native support through the Windows Runtime (WinRT) API is a whole other thing, as is the fairly seamless support for discovery of both local and cloud-based services–developers don’t even need to know about them at coding time for users to leverage them.

One look at Windows 8 on ARM starts to explain why HP turned the other way and ran on the TouchPad. It looks fairly trivial to port JavaScript apps written for Mojo over (at least the core logic, with some rip-and-replace of some local calls with WinRT calls). I suspect it’s just a matter of time before there’s a PhoneGap plug in for Visual Studio as well and people start porting their apps written for iPhone and Android to get a shot at the Windows space. On the enterprise side, Office 365 and Azure get a leg up as well.

This is not as radical a departure as it might have been for Microsoft. There’s still that other interface they’re supporting — the Windows interface that got its last major update in 1995 (aside from the crazy stuff they’ve done with Start buttons and the Office UI). But it’s clear that the “legacy” UI will quickly become the ghetto UI, reserved for people who can’t convert their apps to cloud/web/Metro friendly ones quickly to start jamming them into Microsoft’s Windows 8 App Store.

Agency financial systems still deficient (or why the books are still hosed)

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My former colleague Jason Miller reports:

  1. 21 of 26 agencies responding reported the widespread use of manual processes in reporting systems.
  2. The Department of the Interior uses manual processes in almost every step of its financial reporting.
  3. The Department of Veterans Affairs has established an office, known as the Data Quality Service DQS, tasked with manually transferring information among various IT systems.

via Federal News Radio 1500 AM: Agency financial systems still deficient.

webOS Journey: Don’t Stop Believin’

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I just got this lovely note from HP, and I thought I’d share it with all of my webOS developer friends who may not have checked their mail yet because they’re too drunk or too busy writing Cocoa code:

Dear webOS developer:

We have opened the next chapter for webOS, and we understand that you must have many questions. Yesterday we announced that we will focus on the future of webOS as a software platform but we will no longer be producing webOS devices. While this was a difficult decision, it’s one that will strengthen our ability to focus on further innovating with webOS as we forge our path forward. Throughout this journey, our developers will continue to be a vital part of the future of webOS.

We will continue to support, innovate and develop the webOS App Catalog. Our intent is to enhance our merchandising and presentation of your great products and to continue to build our webOS app ecosystem.

As many of you are aware, we are currently scheduled to hold many developer events around the world. We are planning to continue with these events, however, due to the recent announcements; the nature of them will change. These updates will be posted on our events registration site this coming week. We are eager to present to you the updated strategy for webOS and to hear your feedback.

Lastly, I wish to express our sincere appreciation for your ongoing support for webOS and the many teams responsible for it here at HP. This is a particularly dynamic time in the mobile industry and sometimes tough decisions need to be made about not only what to do, but also what not to do. This has been one of those times. Together with our great webOS developer community, we are confident that we will meet the challenges ahead and build momentum for optimal success.

We will be communicating with you frequently over the next few weeks and we look forward to hearing from you throughout this process.

Thanks for your support

Richard Kerris
VP webOS Developer Relations

Navy to spend up to half billion on solar power for Pacific facilities

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From DOD’s contract release today:
Island Pacific Energy, L.L.C.*, Honolulu, Hawaii (N62742-11-D-1191); Pacific Energy Solutions, L.L.C.*, Honolulu, Hawaii (N62742-11-D-1192); and Photon Finance, L.L.C.*, Mountain View, Calif. (N62742-11-D-1196), are each being awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity multiple award contract for the purchase of reliable locally generated solar alternating current power from Solar Power Generation Systems at military installations for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) Pacific area of responsibility (AOR). The work to be performed provides for installation of Solar Power Generation Systems on roofs, parking shade structures, and vacant parcels of land. The installations will purchase solar alternating current power only, and will not construct, own, or maintain any generation assets. The maximum dollar value, including the base period and four option years, for all three contracts combined is $500,000,000. No task orders are being issued at this time. Work will be performed in the NAVFAC Pacific AOR, state of Hawaii. The installations include, but are not limited to, the following Oahu facilities: Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam; Marine Corps Base Hawaii; Schofield Barracks; Wheeler Army Airfield; Tripler Army Medical Center; Fort DeRussy; the Asia Pacific Center for Strategic Studies; Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station; Naval Magazine West Loch; the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai; and the Army Reserve Center on Maui. The term of the contract is not to exceed 60 months, with an expected completion date of August 2016. Contract funds in the amount of $15,000 will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was competitively procured via the Navy Electronic Commerce Online website,with 13 proposals received. These three contractors may compete for task orders under the terms and conditions of the awarded contract. Task orders issued under the contract are contemplated to be for a period of up to 30 years pursuant to the statutory authority of 10 U.S. Code 2922a.

HP to Change Name to EDS (or at least it should)

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Today, HP announced that the company would be killing its mobile unit, bringing an end to the soap opera life of Palm. They also confirmed, apparently, that they are looking to “spin off” the Personal Systems division and get out of the PC business.  And they may be interested in buying an enterprise search company.

This should come as no real surprise to anyone who’s been watching HP for any length of time.  While the leadership changes, the song remains the same: the grass is always greener in whatever business HP isn’t in, until it gets into it.  In fact, with the scramble to divest the PC unit (and whatever remaining Compaq DNA remains in the company), HP has apparently decided it wants to copy IBM and become a services company with enterprise software and servers.

I have a suggestion that should help HP’s executive suite finally exorcise the demons of past management, and move the company down the same path that IBM, Unisys, and others that it once battled in the mini/midrange/workstation space have followed with varying success: change the company’s name to EDS.  Come on. You know that’s who you want to be.

HP’s services unit, formerly known as the company called EDS, is everywhere.  It is clearly the center of what’s left of HP’s business once you get past that whole printer thing.  Managed services and cloud are core to the former EDS’ capabilities.  There are more HP Services people at the Defense Information Systems Agency than from any other contractor, I’ve been told.  The Navy is, despite its efforts to get out from under NMCI, still wedded to it for the foreseeable future because HP owns the infrastructure and the intellectual property that runs the network–and the Navy’s NGEN efforts have stalled.

The death of webOS is sad, but sort of moot at this point.  HP stalled its efforts for so long that developers (who were in love with the JavaScript-based environment at one point) had mostly given up on ever having enough of an audience to really take it seriously.  The OuchPad…er, TouchPad, was late to market, and a poor substitute for the second-generation iPad.  Those predicting the marriage of Palm to HP was doomed from the start because of organizational culture issues were numerous, but even cynics like me held out hope that HP had enough engineering chutzpah left to do something cool.

Sadly, no.

The same is true of the PC division.  A few days ago, I had heard comments about how HP wanted to rebrand itself as a high-end player, like Apple down the road in Cupertino. But HP’s systems are known mostly as Dell competitors for the race to the bottom of the discount laptop list.  I don’t hear complaints about HP servers, though.

So, do it, HP. You know you want to.  Change your name to EDS.  All your managed services customers never got used to those HP nametags anyway.  Your people are still called EDS in the field despite the new business cards.

Microsoft’s Cloud Service Hints at Future for Enterprise “Desktop”

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Originally posted at : Internet Evolution – Sean Gallagher – Cloud Service Is a Portent for Enterprise Desktops.

Microsoft's offices in downtown DC

Microsoft’s K Street office entrance

A day before the 30th anniversary of the unveiling of the personal computer, I was at a Microsoft media event in Washington. Called “The Future of Federal Work,” the event was intended to show off Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud-based collaboration and productivity platform in the context of how federal agencies will use it. But the event also offered a look at how Microsoft envisions the future of business computing in general, and what place the PC holds in that future.

With the rise of the Web and cloud computing, IBM’s Mark Dean has said that we’ve entered the “post-PC” era. Microsoft vice president of communications Frank Shaw says he prefers to call it the “PC-plus” era, since the PC is becoming just one of many devices people use to access and work with data.

The PC isn’t dead — it’s just becoming harder and harder to define what a PC is. And based on what we’ve seen of Microsoft’s plans for the Windows operating system, the divisions between cloud, desktop, and mobile device applications are going to get even more blurry.

Office 365 itself is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The biggest change may be in the business model for delivery. This platform gets customers out of the business of maintaining software infrastructure and the servers that run it, providing these elements through the cloud. And in the case of the government, that cloud is a private one.

Chris Niehaus

Chris Niehaus

Chris Neihaus, director of innovation for Microsoft’s US public sector business, said at last week’s event that Microsoft “used to be like Blockbuster, and now we’re evolving our productivity business to be more like Netflix.” As with Netflix, you can still get software delivered on disks, or you can download it on demand from the network on whatever device you have handy.

The demo of Office 365 was conducted on a set of giant touch-screens in Microsoft’s new Innovation and Policy Center in Washington. It was intended to show that the service bridges from thick-client desktop to browser to mobile device app with the same user interface, and it largely delivers the same user experience.

“The features and capability might not be at parity” across all devices, Microsoft public sector CTO Susie Adams said. “But the user experience is the same from a productivity experience.”

For many large enterprises, including government agencies, that commonality of experience, plus a previously installed base of Microsoft’s productivity tools, make Office 365 awfully attractive. This also means that previous investments in leveraging Windows management tools to enforce user authentication and security policies are largely preserved. And enterprises don’t have to invest in additional user and IT professional training to support this deployment.

A number of federal agencies are already using the service. Those that bought the predecessor Business Productivity Online Services-Federal (BPOS-F), including the Department of Agriculture, are being converted to Office 365 as the new service is being certified for compliance with federal information security management standards.

One part of Microsoft’s vision for the “future of work” was only hinted at during the demos. That part is Windows 8, the next release of Microsoft’s operating system, which will prominently feature applications based on HTML5 and JavaScript — already the standards for cross-platform mobile application development. By leveraging touch, clouds, and Web services, the next generation of Windows will further blur the line between what happens locally on a device and what happens in the cloud.

That approach isn’t unique. In fact, some may see Microsoft’s direction as a concession to victories by Apple and Google in the mobile realm, as well as by the Web over Windows as a development platform. But if people end up running Windows apps on their iPads and Androids, I hardly think Microsoft will consider that surrender.

— Sean Gallagher is an award-winning IT journalist and the former head of InformationWeekLabs. Gallagher is now an independent journalist and technology consultant based in Baltimore. He can be reached at: gallagher.sean.m@gmail.com.


Reboot

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This week will be my last as executive editor at Fed Tech Bisnow.  I gave notice this past week, and am preparing to return to the life I left to take the job–that of an independent freelancer.  I’ve worked as a freelancer on and off for the past two decades, and my brief sojourn as a staff editor at Bisnow’s vast publishing empire served to remind me that I have become somewhat attached to the risk, reward, and flexibility of being an independent.  I salute the Bisnow team as they continue their relentless march forward toward business world e-newsletter domination.

Virtual Integrated System Blog – Healthcare – A Pioneer Provider Reaches an IT Crossroads

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Virtual Integrated System Blog – Healthcare – A Pioneer Provider Reaches an IT Crossroads.

Before he became corporate vice president and chief technology officer of the Beth Abraham Family of Health Services–which is the second-largest long-term care provider in New York State–Steven Polinski worked for Goldman Sachs.  Beth Abraham’s mission brings a somewhat different set of problems, but it’s no less complex than those on Wall Street. It’s just a different kind of complex.

Beth Abraham (BA) is a $700 million not-for-profit with about 40 locations and two major business areas. One half of BA is a focused on long-term care programs, Polinski explained. These include four nursing care facilities with a total of 1,198 beds, a long-term home healthcare program with 100 visiting nurses and about 1,100 patients, seven adult daycare centers, as well as several hospice and smaller programs around the New York metropolitan area.

The other half of the business is a Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), a service that manages care providers. PACE includes Comprehensive Care Management Corp.–the largest of such program in the country–employing 200 nurses who deliver home healthcare in New York City and surrounding areas.

The two businesses have very different IT requirements.  When Beth Abraham started its PACE program 20 years ago, it was experimental. “The concept of PACE is, it’s all-inclusive care.  We get a fixed dollar amount per member from Medicare on a monthly basis, and we have the responsibility to provide all the healthcare services, including all sorts of preventive care, to keep those people as healthy as possible. We’re responsible for all the medical bills, so we do the best we can to keep them healthy. That makes Beth Abraham not just the healthcare provider, but also an insurer,” Polinski explained.

Since it started as an experimental program, Polinski says there was no commercial software available to support it. As a result, the PACE program employed custom-written software, and the organization has built up a proprietary software platform to handle care management and other operational aspects over the years.  At the same time, BA has two separate EMR systems: a hosted SigmaCare solution at three of its four nursing facilities, deployed in 2009 and 2010 (with the fourth scheduled to roll out in April); and an in-house system operated by McKesson Horizon EMR for home healthcare and adult daycare sites.

Moving to a new system for the managed care business that offers better EMR functionality (and meaningful use certification) is at the top of Beth Abraham’s IT agenda.  There’s also the issue of growing storage requirements for its three small in-house data centers, and the cost of networking a growing number of remote sites on the corporate WAN.  There’s also a strong impetus to make IT more efficient.

How to surmount all these challenges?  Polinski discusses his strategy in my next post.

An interview with Gary Winkler, Army PEO-EIS

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I’ve got a brief profile of Army Program Executive Officer for Enterprise Information Systems Gary Winkler appearing in tomorrow’s FedTech Bisnow.  But there’s only so much you can shove into an email newsletter. So here’s some of what Mr. Winkler had to say as he prepares to leave government service, raw and uncut. Be sure to pay attention to what he says about the mounting federal government talent drain…

(On succession plan:)

For the interim, Ms. Terry Watson, the deputy, will be acting. Dr. ONeil is still contemplating what the long-term succession plan will be. There are some options — he could move somebody else in here, and Terry could stay the deputy .  Dr. ONeil could “harvest my slot” — he looks across 13 PEOs and the SMT organization he has, and he may need the SES slot somewhere else, knowing Terry has been in the PEO for most of her career and knows our business area very well — he might be comfortable keeping her in the PEO position and using my slot somewhere else thrpught ASALT, maybe in the SMT community, Then we would go back to having a PEO and a military deputy at the col. level, which is what we’ve had before Terry came in back in December.

(On why he’s quitting now:)

I’ve been here close to 4 years, just past the 3 1/2  year mark, and I think we’ve done a lot. We’ve restructured, developed a lot of our staff, we have stability in the program offices, we have a strategic plan, we have a strategy map, a balanced scorecard we measure our performance against monthly — we’ve got a very mature  Lean Six Sigma organization, and  make sure that we do continuous process improvement.

We just have come a long way in the past 3 years from an org. maturity standpoint so the org doesn’t have to rely on superstars, and no one is a single point of failure — including myself. We’ve got processes in place and great people throughout.  So now is an appropriate time for me to move on — I feel like I’ve done all I can do here except doing the same., And what I’ve been focusing on in the last 6 mos to a year is developing our workforce, our younger leaders, because a lot of the programs are being very well executed. So I feel pretty good about where our office is, I need some more challenges.

(On Federal and DOD IT consolidation plans:)

(DOD consolidation roadmap) #00:06:08.0#

I think we have been working toward all of those (Kundra’s ) objectives all along.  Kundra’s 25 points on where he wants CIOS to go, we’ve been working toward that direction long before he came into the office. So from a strategic, operational and tactical standpoint. I don’t see too many changes for our programs. We’re trying to move our apps into data centers, whether they’re DISA, Army or commercial;  we have a procurement in source selection which should be completed in a month or two for commercial data center services.So I don’t see too many changes. It’s all good. And that shouldnt be surprising because we’ve been in business for a while here.  It will have more of an impact for organizations that have not had information technology systems acquisitions as their core mission — there will be a lot more changes for those who haven’t been doing what we do all the time.

(On his biggest challenges:)

The biggest challenge for anybody with this job is Time management — there’s just not enough time in the day, or night or weekend or holiday .  There are a lot of programs in this PEO, and they’re very diverse.  Just working the actions, knowing the issues and working them up at the headquarters level or the  OSD level just takes a lot of time.  Every one of our programs has a general officer sponsor, so I’m dealing with 30 to 40 general officers on a continual basis to address the hard problems and hard challenges, and those are the ones that usually cross org. boundaries. The tech issues aren’t so much a challenge, it’s all the other elements, wether it’s doctrine, organization, personnel, facilities, money… I don’t see money as a super big issue but the budgets are going down, so our PEO staff are going to have to be as creative as possible  to keep progs moving forward to deliver capabilities on schedule as resources shrink.

(On applying Lean Six Sigma across procurement:)

I do think we should apply Lean more widely.  The problem is a lot of that is outside our control. I can only control what we execute inside PEO EIS — a lot of the contracting process is really outside of our organization, so we work the pre-solicitation materials, but once an RFP goes out on the street we lose control of the procurement and contracting process after that., It’s really up to the contracting orgs.  I’d like to see more application of lEan 6 sigma in the contracting world.

(On the mounting talent drain from government, and whether new career paths like the Program Manager track will help:)

I don’t think so. I think there’s going to be such a squeeze on money that it’s going to be hard to develop new career tracks, courses, and training.  That’s all an investment and I would be surprised if it happens. It would be nice, but I think our professionals and our younger work force are going to learn through experience more than anything else — they’ll get acquisition certified, but anything above and beyond they’ll be swamped in doing hte work their mission requires,  The support contracting workforce is supposed to go down, The government workforce is going to shrink. It’ll shrink through attrition and hiring freezes like we’ve had.  In the Army, we’re supposed to attrit  10,000 people civilians out of the workforce over the next three years.  So, I think it’s going to be a big challenge. As people move up into more senior leader positions, do they have the experience, training and knowledge to do a really good job in those  more senior positions? I think they’re going to need some help.

(So, government is going to need to lean on private sector more?)

I think so.  I think as with every other industry there will be a shakeout .  And government suppporet contractors — you see that from time to time in other industries, where there’s a weeding out of different companies, and the market shrinks, but the ones left standing will be the ones that provide the best capability for the money, and provide government agencies the best expertise at the best price.

(that’s the business you’re moving into?)

That’s where I can see that I can contribute and add value . I don’t need to malke a lot of money, I just have to pay the bills. and if I can capture people leaving the govt workforce, for whatever reason they leave, whether its a pay freeze or they’re just frustrated — they’re leaving not because they don’t like the mission but morale issues.  So if I can capture them, take care of the morale issues and keep them working on the gov side helping those new leaders, it’s win win.  I know right now is exactly the wrong time to get into government support contracting, but if someone is in there providing great support at a great price, they’re going to do well as opposed to some of the companies that haven’t differentiated themselves.

(On the morale of senior folks in fed tech. )

That’s how I qualify it (morale issue). It’s probably a mixture. A pay freeze doesn’t help. The technical people are in demand ,and they have options, and the new retirement system people have options. So no longer are civil servants held by the golden handcuffs of staying in until they’re 55 and having at least 20 years, and if they leave before that they have no retirement. Under FERS, vested after 3 yrs of service, get a pension when  you hit 62 which is 1% of avg of high 3 salaries x num of years you worked.

Pension isn’t as good as the old system, but then again people can leave.  And I’m not sure the Army or gov. senior folks recognize that paradigm shift — that they now have a mobile workforce where people in demand don’t have to stay until they’re 55 and a min of 20 yrs of service.Unfortunately, I think the government is going to see a lot of good people leave because they can, and they want to do more.

(time off?)

That’s a good one. No.  I don’t mind working 15 hour days.  It becomes a habit after a while. No, I actually have 3 or 4 months of vacation that the Army is going to have to pay me for. So that will sustain me for the near term.  The big benefit of being an SES is you get to roll over more vacation because you don’t get to take it, and you get better parking spots.

Cross my fingers I can pay the bills — I’m used to being poor, I’m a gov. employee, so I wouldn’t know what I would do with more money.

My motivation is I can do more. I love the job here, love the people and the mission, but I feel I can do more.  Unfortunate that I’ll be banned from the Army for one year, so I’ll have to go help the OSD, and the Navy, and the Air Force and Cyber and Agriculture and other orgs that need my help. I think I can help them. I’ve got all the bruises and scars from working in this business over the years.

(Things that were important to your professional development?)

Professionally, not knowing what the heck I wanted to do, and bouncing around doing a variety of things, and never feeling like I fit in anywhere. So that seemed to work pretty well here.  There’s a good hodgepodge of programs here, and I have a technical background, and I have a business background too.  I worked in private industry, and then I came back into the government, and  I worked at headquarters, I worked here, I worked in an Air Force office, so, I think that diversity and just moving around seemed to be a good fit.  When I was in college, I was a EE, but I don’t think I was your typical engineer. Then I went to graduate school and I was an MBA student, but I wasn’t your typical MBA student, because they were wearing blazers and bowties to class, and I came in with jeans and a flannel shirt, then grew a beard, so I didn’t really fit in there either. But that was ok, because I had nearly a 4.0 so they couldn’t give me a hard time.  But I’m still trying to fit in somewhere.

(Words of advice for whoever takes over PEO-EIS:)

Just the standard words of advice: don’t screw it up.  Somebody has to do things their way, and I think with Terry Watson here everything will go smoothly. We have a great set of directors and PMs , and I think the organization will continue to thrive, even in the challenges that they’re going to face with budgets are shrinking.  Even with budgets shrinking, you know Sean, how the IT budget is.  Nobody can do anything without technology, so I don’t think this office will be hit as hard as a lot of others.

Amazon’s EC2 outage may be related to cyber-attack

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At the moment, I’m waiting for some sort of confirmation. But this is what I know:

Since Monday, Change.org — a site that hosts petitions and other social action efforts for others–has been the subject of a DDOS attack from China, according to Ben Rattray,  Change.org‘s founder.  They’ve been working with their hosting company and with cyber experts to help screen out the attack as much as possible, but the site was down much of yesterday.  And it’s down today, intermittently.

Interesting fact: Change.org is hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Interesting fact: AWS’ Elastic Compute Cloud data center in Northern Virginia is experiencing an outage of various services, affecting Quora, HootSuite, and other social media companies hosted on it.  That would be the same site that Change.org is hosted at primarily, since the NoVA data center is the US East region cloud.

The Chinese have been varying their attack.  Is it possible they’ve exploited Amazon’s EC2 APIs to attack now?

I haven’t heard back from Amazon.

Virtualized Desktops at the Library Check Out IT Savings

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(This post was originally posted to the Virtual Integrated Systems public sector blog.)

My wife is a librarian at a county public library. Not to brag, but she excels at helping her patrons find what they’re looking for, either in the stacks or in databases. But when she became a librarian, she wasn’t expecting the degree to which she’d be called upon to provide another service: tech support.

Public libraries have long been a significant service of local governments, but their mission has changed significantly over the last decade, as more of our lives have moved online. Libraries now are where people who don’t have PCs at home or work go to do everything from check their e-mail to apply for jobs, and librarians are increasingly called upon to help with basic computer literacy issues as frequently as they’re asked a research question or asked to recommend a book, if not more often.

But managing the configuration and security of public computers at the library can be an expensive undertaking. With budgets shrinking, adding more computers or even maintaining the ones that are in place can be difficult. The cost of adding software licenses for operating systems and applications can quickly outstrip the basic hardware cost. And with patrons bringing removable media to the library and accessing potentially malicious sites, the security risks are high.

Given their limited number of PCs, libraries have to restrict the amount of time patrons can use systems. The software they use to meter usage and assign computers can often create difficulties both for the patrons and the librarians who serve them.

Then there’s the issue of how to better serve customers who bring their own technology to the library, who may wish to use resources such as databases. While some libraries offer Web portals to access these services, the cost of setting up such systems can be prohibitive to mid-sized and smaller public libraries–especially when budgets are tight.

The City of Staunton, Virginia, for example, faced many of these problems with the operation of its public library, according to Kurt Plowman, the city’s CTO. Mounting maintenance problems and malware issues left the library’s computers unusable as much as 50 percent of the time.

“Our resources were stretched thin, so spending several hours a week fixing software problems and replacing parts was becoming a never-ending nightmare,” he said recently. “The public library was overdue for a solution.”

Plowman turned to desktop virtualization as a solution, using thin clients from Pano Logic to replace the library’s aging desktops. The city used VMware to serve up virtual desktops on demand to the terminals, clearing each session at its end and preventing the storage of any data on a shared hard disk by the user.

With virtual desktops, each user gets a fresh, controlled configuration, locked down from potential security threats. That means fewer helpdesk calls, fewer frustrated patrons, and much lower desktop support costs for the city, which is considering expanding the virtual desktop model to other departments of city government.

The City of Staunton was recognized for this solution with a Governor’s Technology Award for Innovation in Local Government at the Commonwealth of Virginia Technology Symposium in September 2010.

 

Daily Grind

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If you didn’t catch the news, I’m now Executive Editor for Bisnow’s Fed Tech e-newsletter and site.  Which, for the moment, means I’m pretty much the whole operation.  Shifting from a freelance  hurry-up-and-wait model to a full-time hurry-up and hurry-up model has been interesting, to say the least– especially reconditioning myself to get out of bad habits writing for the longer form have allowed to creep in.  Mark Bisnow has been a good teacher, to say the least.

A little of the Packet Rat lives in Fed Tech. It’s written in a breezy, informative way with attempts at humorous asides (some thrown in by me, some thrown in by Bisnow’s “chief humorist”).  Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but it’s never boring ,that’s for sure.

The one thing it currently lacks is social media engagement.  Yes, there are buttons to click to post to Facebook and Twitter.  But I want to have a running open conversation with people, too. So the blog and my @thepacketrat Twitter feed are going to evolve into a place to keep discussions going around topics I’ll cover in the newsletter, and to help feed ideas into it.

Please subscribe to the newsletter.  Send me your thoughts, comments, complaints, leads.  And thanks for your support.

We’re Really Screwed (or why the budget delay is worse than you think)

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It’s bad enough that people may not get to collect a paycheck for a while, and that projects will go idle, and people will probably lose money, miss mortgage payments, and maybe even find other work. It’s like Parks & Recreation’s season finale last year on a nationwide scale–maybe we should hold a telethon to keep the government open.

But what makes it even more totally insane is that it’s APRIL, and by the time a budget gets passed and signed at this point, it may be MAY or even, Deity Forbid, JUNE.  And what does that mean?

That means that the government will have, at best, 5 months in which to spend whatever they’re budgeted to on the programs they’ve been waiting to execute since October.

Here are some of the notes from my meeting with Ray Bjorklund, CKO of FedSources last Friday — we were talking about FedSources’ acquisition by Deltek, and then I asked him about the budget:

“The government was anticipating having X dollars to spend, but they know they can only spend a subset of that because they don’t know if they’re going to get all of X ,. or when. and that’s going to have a ripple effect on contractors. That means that, part. since there are some new entrants in this market place , who’ve come here because of the sickly national economy — this happens with every recession, where they come tracking over to the federal government–So there are some new players, and there are existing players, and there will be less dollars spent per contract. Well now you have to figure out how you’re going to compete far more effectively. ”

Small companies are nervous about overextending themselves in the federal market by responding to too many Requests for Information, but they’re afraid if they don’t, they’ll lose their positioning when the actual money gets spent.

Budgetary uncertainty: “We’ve heard about the army throttling back to about 80% of the spending rate — it’s actually higher than that.  Overall, it’s prob about 80%, but the amount that’s norm. set aside for contractors is smaller. It’s really painful.  And I’ve been in the govt. I was in the gov during the 1995-96 shutdown [and this is different]. Continuing Resolution [funding] usually has certain rules of thumb that apply to help agencies figure it out. But this year it’s become really difficult because you can’t apply the same rules of thumb.”
“What’s a little bit scary is that we may be reaching budgetary reconcilliation on the hill, and if the money is suddenly appropriated, how are these agencies within the 4 or 5 months left of the fiscal year going to be able to execute these programs, and do it smoothly, swiftly and accurately enough that no one gets in trouble? You come up to end of year spending and there’s always a risk that you’re going to create some kind of problem. That is going to cause more problems.”

So, as agencies rush to spend what they’ve finally gotten, the chances of administrative error, waste, fraud, abuse, lack of transparency, challengeable contract awards, and just plain major screwups is going to escalate. The chances of that happening will geometrically rise the closer we get to September with a budget.  And then that will be used as an excuse by some to screw with the 2012 budget….