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August 30, 2002
Web Analysis Tools and Web Site Effectiveness
This blog from Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog caught my eye because I've recently been looking for log analysis tools. I've been out of that market for a while and was surprised by how little has changed.
In the past I used log analysis software and I wasn't impressed. Two leading free tools (Analog and Webalizer) are doing industrial-strength but very uninspired job. They are old and busted. They are Ford Ts. They don't go beyond producing basic stats and occasional graphs. (note: I haven't used commercial tools, maybe they're much better). I felt that it could be done better, that we need a Ferrari of log analysis tools, a new hotness. Unfortunately I didn't know how to build this new hotness but when I saw it I knew this is it. I'm not going to bore you with the details, just see their 60 seconds demo. I was blown away by simplicity and usefulness. It really takes analyzing logs to the next level.
I watched the demo and was pretty impressed. Seems like a pretty neat tool and there's a 30-day free trial. I installed a web log analysis package called Sawmill yesterday which seems to do a pretty nice job as well.
On another note: building a little 60 second flash demo of a GUI based software product is pretty cheap and it needn't be slick to make its point (as the above demo demonstrates [which would indicate its a demo and a metademo]). As a CIO with responsibility for a large IT budget, you can imagine how much marketing material I see every single day. Most of it I throw away or delete unopened. When something does catch my eye, I'm frequently amazed at how hard it is to get a good understanding of what a product actually does. Most web sites are collections of marketing material which is dumbed down to the point of giving the curious no idea what the company or product really does. Seems pretty stupid to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get me and people like me just to spend a few moments looking at your product and then not do a good job of communicating what it does.
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August 29, 2002
Hacking on My Mind
In the kind of serendipitous juxtaposition (whew!) that only happens in a news aggregator, I ran across this article on the local Salt Lake City chapter of 2600 by Dave Fletcher and right next to it was this little piece about NBC not being willing to interview someone who'd broken into their system.
The insecurity of computers and networks is downright scary. While I may not condone some other their activities, the local 2600 chapter does appear to be quite well organized and they approach what they do with almost an academic flavor: regular meetings where papers are presented and discussed (followed by the nefarious activity, presumably). Frankly it seems that the only reason businesses are able to get anything done is because no one's made a concerted attack yet.
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Web Services in California Government
Michael Clark, who works for California's Department of Social Services wrote me with a wonderful story of using XML to link multiple government systems. I quote him here with permission:
XML is one of those concept technologies that I find many have trouble putting into action. I can, after all, pass data any way I like. It will probably be smaller and of course we know it will be proprietary and ultimately either fail outright or die after lengthy fits of pain (usually the programming staff). I do use XML structures as often as possible and look for emerging XML standards to implement in areas we do development in, though often the XML standards are not ready, half baked or will simply never gain acceptance. I refer to the XML standards that I see for content types like news stories etc. Internally I have had to develop a document standard for information on the web, since no good standard exists, at least yet.
I will admit that I did not use SOAP on the system I wrote because I felt it's just too darn complicated and most of the counties have legacy systems. I went with SOAP's half brother XML-RPC because it was much simpler. Also it was implemented in about 15 different languages, so there was a lot for resources available for different development shops. This let me set a simple standard of participation without the counties thinking they were adopting a bigger counties protocol and also prevented the feeling that we (the state) was shoving something down their throats (because it's a neutral ground everyone agreed to it). Here's the problem we needed to solve with web services.
The information system is largely browser based, wonderful for those counties who had poor systems or could not afford one at all. But then we have a number of "rich" counties that already had case management systems doing the job (food stamp error rates), the problem was they fed other systems which fed other systems etc... four months later data made it to the state level. To make the system real time, and get everyone on board we told them, if you have a system, use it, but extend it with this simple standard XML-RPC client that talks directly to our system, if you don't here is a browser based system free of charge.
The result is that we built the system in 78 days. The counties that already had existing systems went out and read the standards, picked up the code base that made sense for their platforms and tied their systems up to ours. No loss of investment at the county level for anyone. For once the smaller less technical counties have a level playing field for participation and the bigger counties (who normally want to do things their own way) got on the system quickly and in there own way, no one found it difficult. A very high acceptance rate with, very, very low investment (quite a change here in CA).
Michael had written me because he felt that some of the things on my blog might be discouraging this sort of development. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have some issues with XML, but I firmly believe that XML and web services offer great hope of linking systems less expensively and to great effect, as Michael's note points out.
If you've got XML and web services success stories from inside government at any level, please send them to me. I'd love to have a collection of them for people to refer to and use to convince doubters that we must push ahead.
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August 28, 2002
UVSC Talk on the Dark Side
I'm speaking to the UVSC Computer Science Department this afternoon. My talk is entitle "What I've Learned on the Dark Side." The idea for the talk is that Computer Scientists (like me) often view "IT" as that icky stuff that business people do. The truth is that its a $1.5T (yes, trillion) enterprise globally and that it CS doesn't pay attention, they're going to find themselves marginalized.
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August 27, 2002
Credit Card Fees and eGovernment
Yesterday's Deseret News ran an article on credit card fees for online services:
Are you one of the Utahns who were a little upset when you found out you had to pay a $3.50 "special fee" to register your car online this past year? Nearly 213,000 people coughed up the special fee — a total of an extra $745,500 Utahns had to pay — from August 2001 to July 2002 to renew registrations on cars, trucks, snowmobiles, trailers and boats...
Three quarters of a million is a significant chunk of change. The article quotes the Governor and I on the issues surrounding fees for online services and strategies for reducing them. The biggest challenge we face is that most of the revenue collected through fees is already appropriated, so an agency like the Tax Commission isn't free to use some of the money they collect for licensing a vehicle to pay the credit card company. They have to get that money somewhere else. The somewhere else is usually a special "online fee."
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Book Review: Strategies for Web Hosting and Managed Services by Doug Kaye
I've just finished going through Doug Kaye's book on web hosting. Doug describes the web hosting options available and describes strategies for outsourcing, risk management, modeling traffic, and other issues. This is the most complete collection of information about hosting I've ever seen. The information in the book is a great start for someone looking at a hosting effort that's too large to just turn over to a shared hosting service.
This book stops short of getting into what it takes to design, build and operate a multi-tiered transaction oriented web application like eBay or Amazon. That is kind of the next step from this book. Still, this book serves a real need and I'm sure there's plenty of people out there wishing they knew what's in this book. I'll be sure to recommend it to my class.
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Utah.gov Email
About a year ago, I wrote a paper about using the utah.gov URL for state business instead of the state.ut.us domain. State agencies took this to heart and I'm happy to say that most state web sites now sport the utah.gov domain and we're building brand with some advertising and things like the messages you hear while you're on hold.
Another thing I asked was that employees adopt utah.gov as their email domain. Previously each department (or division) used a different domain for email. We set up a translator service and about 4000 people signed up for a utah.gov email. Eventually the translator service became unwieldy. We just finished (thanks to the hard work of lot of folks) creating a single master directory tree along with a unique UID for each employee in the executive branch (around 22,000). Now everyone has a utah.gov email address and a UID that will stay with them regardless of where they work in Utah State government. We've also got the infrastructure now to support single sign on for state employees. This is a huge step.
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Open Source for E-Government Conference
I'm speaking at the Open Source for E-Government conference in Washington D.C. on Oct 17th-18th. infoDev, the Cyberspace Policy Institute of The George Washington University, and the UNDP are the sponsors.
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National States Geographic Information Council
GIS systems play an important role in government IT at all levels. Utah's group is among the best int he nation. I've been asked to speak at the annual meeting of the National States Geographic Information Council on Sept. 10th at 2pm. I'm going to give them an XML message. That may not be what they had in mind, but its what I think is important that they hear.
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Ogasawara's Open Source in Government Website
Todd Ogasawara has put together a blog on open source software in government. Todd made a presentation at OSCON on a project he'd done in the State of Hawaii using open source.
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August 26, 2002
Bug Tracking
Joe Leary on his blog says:
As part of the State Portal project we need a bug tracking system. A quick search of the internet provided a reference to a free bug tracking package that seems simple to install and use.
I'd recommend Bugzilla. My experience in this area is that you want a very good bug tracking system that will scale well. Since we'll want to expand the use of any successful project to other areas and projects, we should use something that can go the distance. Bugzilla will do that.
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The Correct Use of SOAP
In an article entitled "Web Services: Is it CORBA Redux?" Gordon Van Huizen writes:
Similarly, Web services installations will require a scalable software infrastructure that offers directory services, SOAP routing, service management and pluggable security across the enterprise. Enterprises that fail to plan for this will not be able to fulfill the promise of Web services as its adoption grows.
I like this quote, but its not actually the main point of the article. The main point is (let me put this simply):
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Message-based SOAP: good
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RPC-style SOAP: bad
While I agree and happen to have a good feel for what he's talking about, having been involved in building some pretty large CORBA based applications, I think the overall theme needs expansion and repeating.
There's no silver bullet that will remove the incredible complexity of fine-grained concurrent programming. Moving all the applications further away from each other, having them built by disparate teams, and not being able to ensure that they'll even be there when they're needed makes the problem even more difficult. RPC has been around for three decades. Adding an XML front end to it is just putting lipstick on the pig (and a real ugly color of lipstick at that).
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Weblog Guidelines
Ray Ozzie has published a set of weblog guidelines for employees. We don't have some of the concerns he mentions (like SEC issues), but much of it is directly applicable. I've stayed away from anything this specific, but I don't see anything here that is too onerous. The one issue I do have is this:
Ozzie's guidelines are very clear that all weblogs are treated as private by an employee who does not represent the company. I think that's entirely reasonable for public weblogs. There need to be official spokespeople. However, in a more inwardly focusing weblog, the product manager for a specific product of the engineering team lead for a project is clearly speaking as an expert on that product or project and should be seen that way, not through layers of disclaimers.
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Blogs for Students
Scot Hacker is trying to find the right blog for students in a course he's teaching. Regular readers will recognize that as a concern I've had as well. I've always had my students keep lab notebooks and I used a blog for my course last year. This year, I want the lab notebooks online as blogs. Since the course already uses Slashcode, the journal feature is a natural tool to consider. There are even RSS feeds of journals, a key requirement. I think that some students will be taken by blogging, however, and want a more robust tool than the Slashcode journal system. For that, I'd recommend Radio.
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Blogging and Categorization
This short article in Business 2.0 references our experiment with blogs here in Utah and questions the effectiveness of using a search appliance like the one from Google to turn them into a useful knowledge base. While I'm inclined to agree in theory that categorization is probably better than raw search (that's why I use categories on my blog), I think that this argument is analogous to the Yahoo! vs. Excite (or Altavista or Infoseek) debates of a few years ago.
If you remember, Yahoo!'s claim to fame was human categorization of web sites into topics while the others relied on machine indexing. There's no doubt that the human categorization was useful, but it was also expensive. Eventually an indexing and ranking scheme came along (Google) that was good enough that the debate went away. Now most people use Google and its good enough.
That said, there are some categorization experiments for Radio that I'm anxious to try out.
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Governor's Remarks at IT Commission
As I mentioned, the Governor appeared at the IT Commission last Thursday and spoke about his IT plan. The Deseret News had a brief story about his remarks and my followup.
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August 23, 2002
IT Commission
We had a meeting of the IT Commission yesterday afternoon. The Governor came and discussed his plan for IT and his desire that we find a way to "increase our velocity." After he left, I filled in some of the details. The Commission staff had prepared a long list of "possible concerns" regarding the new plan and advised that we "go slow."
The Commission is a creature of the legislature and has an important roll in the policy, legislative, and funding side of IT. I'd find it more useful if they were forthcoming with positive suggestions and encouragement instead of merely reacting with "go slow" every time we try to do something. My boss isn't telling me to go slow.
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August 21, 2002
Digging Ideas Out of People's Heads
Dave McNamee is doing a good job on his weblog of narrating his work and keeping his co-workers updated about where his head is at on any given day. Good work Dave!
I worry sometimes about the public expression of information that should be kept confidential, but I worry more about the exponentially worse problem of keeping confidential that which should be publicly expressed. I can think of ways to solve the first problem, but I can't dig ideas out of people's heads. They must be expressed to be used.
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Web Services a Mirage?
In Migrating to Web Services, Roger Costello says:
How far along is the industry in achieving the Web services vision? Here's my take on it:
- The Web services vision is a mirage at the present. If you jump on it today you will loose.
- The only thing that's real today is XML. Use it.
I agree with this. My paper on Enabling Web Services is aimed squarely at how to use XML today so that an organization can use web services later. Roger is more conservative than I am with respect to some of the emerging standards. For example, he says: "Describe your Web services in an HTML document." where I'm very much in favor of using meta data such as XML Schemas, RDF, WSIL, and WRDL to take a stab at describing these services in a more structured way. Here's why: they're just not that hard and having the meta data structured gives you much more freedom to automatically process it later. The HTML will have to thrown away and can be automatically produced from the meta data in any event.
Roger also has a nice introductory paper on REST on his web site.
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Graduate Students and Tuition
Dave Fletcher comments on the Utah Legislatures fixation on out of state graduate students:
Marginal Cost of Goods. The Utah legislature's executive appropriations committee spent a lot of time yesterday talking about the cost associated with tuition waivers for graduate students at Utah's two research institutions (University of Utah and Utah State University). These graduate students, most of whom are teaching assistants or research assistants are granted in-state tuition. Legislators are concerned that the State is paying too much to support out-of-state students.
He continues with some good comments on the marginal cost of admitting new students. My take is slightly different: Here are a bunch of very bright people who are willing to come to our state and work for almost nothing in a university research program. Basic research and number of patents are one of the very best predictors of economic prosperity for a country (and probably a state as well). We ought to let them come here for free! The fact that we're able to take back almost all the trifling amount of money we pay them as research assistants in fees and tuition is amazing.
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Hacking Radio Stats
I was poking around in the Radio rankings and noticed something peculiar. If you look at this ranking, you'll notice that there are about 100 referers from a business opportunity site. However, when you go to that site, the weblog in the ranking isn't mentioned or linked anywhere. Turns out there's a bit of javascript in each page on the bizop site that loads the count GIF from radio.xmlstoragesystem.com.
I'm not sure I see the point. There are better ways to track webg site usage for non-Radio web sites, so that can't be it. And I'm not sure what good bolstering your ranking on the Radio Ranking does. The point is to have people read your weblog, not have a high ranking. The latter is meaningful only in as much as it is a reflection of the former.
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August 20, 2002
XML Schemas vs. DTDs and Other Issues
John Gotze in Gotzeblogged writes:
The most interesting document on this I've read for a long while (and I've been reading a lot) is Phil Windley's Enabling Web Services. I must follow up more in details, because there are lots of good points, but also a few places where I disagree: DTDs? No, use XML Schemas, I'd say. WSIL? Hmmm. Maybe, but we (government) need to engage in UDDI too.
I think using XML Schema instead of DTDs is probably the right choice. I'll update the paper. In particular the XML Schema language gives you the power of a context sensative grammar rather than a context free grammar (at least for types) with little increase in complexity. They also probably have a brighter future. The main point is, however: document what you create and keep it up to date.
I think UDDI is premature except inside the orgranization, so I stick by my recommendation to use WSIL. WSIL can be easily integrated with UDDI later when (if?) it takes off. He then says:
In policy-making terms, however, Phil and other RESTians have a particular and peculiar problem: How do you explain what it's all about in political, non-technical words? I'm a techie, and I hardly understand it. My collegues (and bosses) are political scientists or whatever, and simply don't get it at all.
Boy, isn't that the truth! I worked very hard on the paper because I knew this was an issue going through multiple major revisions. Still, I'm aware that it is pretty condensed and is really more readable by a technical audience than a general audience. On thought is to expand each principle into its own mini-paper with more room to explain, more examples, etc. I'm open to suggestions.
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Pleasant Surprise
As I've mentioned here before, I have traditionally had my students keep a written lab notebook of all the actions they take as they set up and administer their machines. This year, I'd like to have them keep their notebooks online in a blog. That enables me to keep up with what their writing in an aggregator rather than everyone passing bulky written notebooks around.
I've got a few options:
- Have the students use Radio. Pros: its easy Cons: it costs money and they won't necessarily have there own windows box to run it on (the lab machines will be running Linux).
- Have the students install something on their lab machine like Slash or Monoraul Jerk. Pros: they control it and its free. Cons: they won't be sophisticated enough for these installations until a month into the class (although its a great exercise).
- Use the Slashcode Journal system that I already have running on the class site. Pros: its easy. Cons: no possibility for multiple channels or RSS.
Turns out that the pleasant surprise is that the Slash journal system does do RSS. I was thinking, "OK, I could modify journal.pl to output RSS." There's already a "op=display" parameter. Lo and behold, if you change the "display" to "rss" you get RSS. Pretty cool.
I will need to modify journal.pl a little. It doesn't put the journal writers name in the title, but in the description field which many aggregators doesn't display. Having 40-50 sites show up in my aggregator all labeled "CS462, Enterprise Computing Journals" wouldn't work. [Update: I made the change easily in just a few minutes.]
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Candidate's Weblog
Tara Grubb is a candidate for U.S. Congress, North Carolina, District 6. (from her weblog).
I think its interesting to see a weblog from a candidate. I'm not familiar with the District 6 race in NC, so I don't know if Ms. Grubb is a viable candidate or not, but a weblog is a nice personable way to get the word out.
Now, a real weblog by a sitting politician is something else of interest. I'm not aware of any. Politicians, for good reason, take public positions very carefully and with much advice from people they trust.
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Apache Gains Ground
The latest Netcraft survey shows Apache gaining substantial share against Microsoft's web server. As you can see in the graph, iPlanet and others are sinking into oblivion. We have quite a few instances of Microsoft's web server running and it causes most of our web-based security problems. Like everyone else, apparently, we've been replacing it.
Our state de facto standard is for iPlanet, but Apache is on the emerging standards list and I've been encouraging its use in the State whenever I can. I've been an Apache user since it was first released. Like any piece of widely deployed software, it has had some security problems. The difference is that they've been geometrically smaller in number than Microsoft's and they're quickly and reliably fixed.
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August 19, 2002
Tiered Support Model at ITS
Today ITS announced their Tiered Support Model (this link is on the state intranet). What they've developed is a localized implementation of the tiered support model described in this paper.
The primary goals of ITS, in altering its organizational structure and processes, are:
- putting into practice a consistent, customer-focused process for assisting customers;
- tracking every issue and request—and performing trends—in order to improve the quality of our products, services and processes;
- eliminating reoccurring issues by identifying and resolving the “root cause” of each issue;
- improving response and resolution times; and,
- developing a knowledge base as a resource in providing prompt, accurate problem resolution.
They've been working on this for some time and its been in pilot for a few months. They report that during the pilot period:
- There has been a significant increase in documented issues and requests, due to customers submitting all issues and requests to Customer Support.
- There has been a small, measurable decrease in average time to problem resolution.
- There has been a lower percentage of reoccurring issues.
- There has been a greater number of issues being resolved at first contact with Customer Support.
Along with these positive results, the TSM should also, in time, result in clarity of roles for engineering and operations groups throughout the state. In addition, the TSM establishes a set of metrics for operations and customer support that can be tracked over time and used to drive improvement.
This has been a large undertaking for all involved and a significant change (which is always difficult). If ITS is to be the vendor of choice for delivering basic IT services to agencies, this is the kind of change that must be made. I take my hat off to ITS and congratulate them on the launch.
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Newest Member of the Utah.gov Blogroll
Shellie Faraday's Radio Weblog is the newest blog by a Utah State IT employee. Shellie works at the Department of Health. In case you haven't recently visited any of the other Utah.gov blogroll sites (see list on the left), there is some interesting material being generated.
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August 16, 2002
Digital State Results
Government Technology Magazine reports on the results of Part II of the Digital State survey. I reported those numbers earlier here. There's a quote that I think is very relevant to what we're doing:
Kent Lassman, director of the Digital Policy Network and a research fellow of The Progress & Freedom Foundation, noted the rapidity of change in this particular arena. "With nearly half of the top-10 states improving their ranks from last year, double-digit climbs up the rankings by three states and five newcomers to the top-10 rankings, this category shows how an initial adoption of technology is not enough to stay ahead. States are continually improving and, as a result, the front of the pack is a volatile place to be."
I often hear from people in the State who says something like: "Utah is top ranked, why are we making all these changes?" This quote is the answer to that question. In a rapidly evolving area like IT or eGovernment, we cannot rest on our laurels (and there is a nice comfortable looking pile of them in Utah). We have to be continually changing and moving forward. I meet and talk to CIOs from other state frequently and the message from them is consistent.
Other comments I sometimes here go something like: "Why are we so concerned with competing with other states?" The answer is twofold:
One way to look at it is not so much as competition, but benchmarking. The overall mission to the citizens is to deliver the best service we can and accomplish our agency missions established in statute. By benchmarking ourselves against other states and then looking to them for ideas when they do something good, we can accomplish that goal more effectively.
The second part of the answer is that there is a competition going on that is centered on economic development. We compete everyday with other states for economic development. The Governor has important goals in this area: (1) that job growth outpace the growth in the population, (2) that wages grow faster than inflation, and (3) that the effect be felt statewide. To accomplish those goals, we have to attract companies to do business in Utah. If you don't think companies look at our rankings in the Digital State survey and others, then spend some time over at DCED and they'll disabuse you of that notion.
Recent changes to how IT is organized and governed in Utah are aimed squarely at increasing our velocity in eGovernment and IT.
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August 15, 2002
Chasm Bridge Web Services Summit
I'll be speaking at the Chasm Bridge Summit on web services on October 15th.
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Of All the Stupid...
Yesterday I wrote about IM Bots. A pretty cool idea. Today I see in this Internet World article that ActiveBuddy has won a patent on the idea. I'm not a rabid anti-patent kind of guy, but this one seems pretty wimpy. There's plenty of prior art (like this Eliza IRC bot from June 1999). But whats more, small companies rarely win by having a patent. That's for IBM and other large companies who can employ hundreds of corporate attorneys. Even there most of them primarily use their patents defensively rather than offensively. The best way for a company like ActiveBuddy to win in the market is to spend their time and money on innovation, not in the courtroom.
I once had business dealings with a company called CoolSavings. They have a patent on online coupons. They spent so much time trying to convince us that we had to do business with them or they were going to come after us in court that we never did get to a business deal. I don't think its a smart way to do business.
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Smoke Jumping
Business 2.0 has an article about Tech's Most Valuable Temp. The article is about the Feld Group, an enterprise computing consulting firm started by Charlie Feld. They're responsible for the tech turn around at Delta Airlines. For over a year now, I've marveled at how I could go to the Delta web site and change my seat assignment, call into the customer service line right away, and have them be able to see the change I just made. That's how its supposed to work. According to this article, the integration goes deeper than that.
I find myself agreeing with Feld a lot. For example:
Governance is another issue. Most of the time, Feld thinks, a decentralized IT operation is another form of abdication, like outsourcing. "You've got to stop letting everybody buy their own stuff," he insists. Otherwise, functional heads will overspend in fat years and underbuy in lean. Costs spin out of control; any long-range plan disappears. A big company needs just five or six major suppliers. One of the first things Feld did was put Delta's entire desktop business -- 46,000 computers -- out to bid. Every three years, when the boxes have depreciated, Delta puts the contract up for bid again. Until then, it's one less headache.
I've found this to be right on. Bucking conventional wisdom, not only is decentralization of basic services expensive, it also leads to worse service and less flexibility. People can't understand why I'm interested in desktops when the Governor's talking about eGovernment. To me, they're very related. Until we stop worrying about desktops and spending so much of our effort making them work, we'll never have the mental freedom to make the changes necessary to do eGovernment right. We have to clear away the distractions and concentrate on adding value. We can't do that when most our time is spent on basic services.
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Why this is Fun
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about being the CIO for a state government is the sheer breadth of what a government does. As an example, I just found out we have a program (and web site) devoted to wind power in Utah by reading Dave Fletcher's blog.
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August 14, 2002
Unintended Consequences
One of my favorite sayings is that I love when good things happen and I don't have to be involved. I don't think its original with me, its an expression that anyone who manages anything has thought at one time or another.
Web services are like that. In this article on Loosely Coupled, Phil Wainewright talks about the Bookwatch Plus service and what makes it all possible: namely services offered by five different companies, people or groups who didn't know beforehand that their service would be used to create this book watch service.
Tim Oreilly writes: "Innovation will come from APIs that support 'unintended consequences'." Bookwatch Plus is perfect example of Tim's point and what we're trying to promote with principles like those in my Enabling Web Services article.
I used to teach programming language design and theory. One of the great lessons of programming languages is that if you put a feature in, some clever programmer will figure out something cool to do with it. The same is true of creating good services, making data available in ways that enable future use, and documenting the resulting APIs so that others can use them. Cool things will happen.
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People are the Key in Technology
In an article in the Atlantic Monthly called Homeland Insecurity, Charles Mann quotes Bruce Schneier thusly:
"The trick is to remember that technology can't save you," Schneier says. "We know this in our own lives. We realize that there's no magic anti-burglary dust we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don't offer much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people."
The article is a great read and offers numerous insights into the problem with most homeland security proposals, but I was struck by the strong and pervasive belief, expressed in the article, that technology won't solve these problems.
That's a general theme and is applicable to things besides security. For example, Information Technology Services has initiated a tiered support model for network and server operations that has at its heart the same principle: when it comes to delivering highly available service, people and processes are much more important than the technology. At best the technology makes the job easier. At worst, it makes it more difficult.
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IM Bots
Rick Gee turned me on to this. There was a story today on NPR about bots that interact with people over IM. If you go to Active Buddy, you can interact with some of their bots. They are essentially Eliza programs with a better database, or at least that's what it seems. eBay apparently uses one for FAQs. All in all, a pretty clever use of IM, in my book.
A few questions:
- Does anyone know if there's a IM interface to Ask Jeeves? I couldn't find one on their site. Seem like a natural.
- I don't see (with a quick look) any similar development efforts for Jabber. Does anyone have pointers to something like this for Jabber?
This seems like it would be pretty easy to put together for utah.gov as a FAQs, for kids to ask questions on homework, etc.
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August 13, 2002
Reorganizing IT
Last week (before I went on vacation), Governor Leavitt announced a restructuring of IT in Utah State government. The change was covered by the local press (The SL Tribune covered it as well, but has a stupid policy of only allowing access to the last week's issues without paying a fee).
This change is designed to increase our capacity to create cross agency eGovernment applications as well as to strengthen the enterprise view of IT. My life has suddenly gotten a lot busier as I work to implement this plan. Its clear from the Governor's letter that he expects business line managers to be more conversant in IT and for IT to be more aligned with business.
Utah has long been recognized as a leader among the various states in the management of IT and its use of eGovernment. I believe that these changes and the direction they set will allow us to maintain that leadership in the face of some pretty stiff competition.
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Do It Yourself DSL
An article from Business 2.0 about a small town who got fed up waiting for the telcos to offer broadband in their community:
Oppedahl and about a dozen of his neighbors bought it last year for approximately $5,000. Then they scooped up cable modems, routers, and other equipment (usually for pennies on the dollar on eBay) and spent the past 10 months setting up the first subscriber-owned DSL co-op in America. While it all might seem unremarkable to outsiders -- it serves 12 homes at average DSL data speeds -- it does offer a compelling script for rural towns that don't want to wait until the next ice age to join the 21st century.
This isn't unlike the UTOPIA project in spirit, although UTOPIA is somewhat larger in scale (500,000 end users).
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Utah Wins EPA eGovernment Grant
Utah was amoung 44 states that got a grant (about $400K) to work with EPA in developing the National Environmental Information Exchange Network. The Exchange Network is a joint project for sharing environmental data between EPA, states, and other partners over the Internet. This is a component of the Federal eGovernment initiative. Utah has been a participant in a pilot project for the last year that showed the benefit and feasibility of this larger project.
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Utah.gov Blogroll Keeps on Rolling
Al Sherwood, on my staff, is keeping a blog and it looks like it will be interesting. One of the biggest questions in my mind is will this prove to be a valuable way for me to keep up with what my direct reports are working on and thinking about. I'm hoping it will.
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Enabling Web Services
I've completed a paper on Enabling Web Services which takes my earlier principles, cleans them up, and wraps some explaination around them along with pointers to other resources. This will appear in this month's Capitol Connections newsletter.
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Another Addition to the Utah.gov Blogroll
Wade Billings is the newest member of the Utah.gov blogroll.
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Network World Article on Blogging
I was interviewed for this article on blogging and using it in large organizations a few weeks ago. Most of the interest was generated by my offer to pay for blogging software for the first 100 State IT workers to start one.
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August 12, 2002
I'm Getting Arrested
On Wednesday afternoon, I'm getting arrested. This is one of those ugly little situation where they actually haul you out of your office with handcuffs on and embarrass you in front of your friends. Fortunately, its for a good cause. I'm being arrested by the Muscular Dystrophy Association and held for $2000 bail. If you're a vendor (or anyone else who doesn't want to see me rot in prison) and you're willing to help me raise my bail, please let me know. I'm beginning to think I'll just have to serve my time.
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Enterprise Desktop Management
On his weblog, Ray Ozzie says:
In terms of building software that people actually use, I strictly prioritize my platform investments and always have based upon "where the users are". No religion. Obviously that means Windows first. But we didn't know what to make of the Linux phenomenon when we were building Groove, so we covered our bases by funding a company (Macadamian) to enhance Wine so that Groove would run. We eventually gave up: nobody gave a hoot about Linux on the desktop. Regarding the Mac, two factoids - take them for what you will: a) the top personal request on the Groove website is currently "when will there be a Mac version?", and b) no major enterprise customer has yet asked to purchase a Mac version. Quite perplexed.
As CIO for a large organization (22,000 users) I've puzzled over what to do with OS choice (particularly for Mac users) for some time. I think I have at least part of the answer.
One of the problems with managing desktops in small clusters is that the workload is overwhelming. Suppose that you manage 22,000 desktops in clusters of under 100. That is, for every 100 users or so, there is a separate administrator who is responsible for buying the PCs, installing them, maintaining them, and eventually disposing of them. This one person needs to know a lot about a lot of things. They become a PC administration generalist of sorts. In this scenario, having a few users who want to use Macs is a nightmare because the administrator already is overworked and needs to know too much about managing Windows without having to learn Macs.
Now, imagine another scenario where PCs are managed by a team of people where all 22,000 PCs are bought, installed, maintained, and disposed of by one group (not necessarily centralized in a geographic sense, just unified and working as a team). One might think that this system would be more rigid and less willing to support alternate operating systems and software, but that need not be the case. In this scenario, there are people who are experts at purchasing and installing PCs, experts at mail, experts at LANs, experts at OS bugs, experts at specific software problems, etc. The organization has the same number of people, but now with the ability to specialize to a much greater degree. In addition, the organization as a whole can purchase and amortize enterprise-class PC maintenance software (like that from Altiris, a Utah company) to rationalize and automate the maintenance of PCs across the organization.
Such an organization could easily lay on a few people, at little additional relative cost, to support Macs and a few Mac users here and there wouldn't cause anyone undue stress. There would be no need for an entire division to have to make the jump to Mac or something else all at once. Indeed, as long as the software is interoperable (which mostly means that it supports common data formats) wider latitude in software selection could be allowed as well. Modern LAN technology and PC maintenance software make this scenario much more plausible today which is why more and more organizations are going this route. In addition to saving a lot of money, you also get increased levels of service and greater flexibility. Who could argue with that?
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August 11, 2002
New Utah.gov Blog
Dave Willis, IT Director for the Dept. of Commerce, is the newest member of the utah.gov blogroll.
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August 5, 2002
Vacation
I'm going on vacation. Don't expect to see much here until next week.
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August 4, 2002
An Open Source Challenge with Linux?
I've been thinking of giving myself an open source challenge and trying to work for a week with just open source software. I think its possible, but not easy, so the question is---how hard is it? I won't let my work suffer because of it and I don't have a lot of extra time to be configuring things and loading them up.
So, with that in mind, I repartitioned my laptop and installed Redhat Linux 7.3 (Valhalla) on it yesterday. I've been a long time FreeBSD user (built a whole company on it), but have used Linux in my class and on my home Samba server for the last couple of years.
I actually started out to install FreeBSD 4.4 just to see what it was like lately. I got it installed, and started fiddling with the X server config and got tired of it. Redhat was a dream in comparison. It recognized that I was doing a laptop installation, found the right X server and fired right up with 1400x1050 screen resolution, audio working, etc. I'm thinking that getting the wireless card working will be a chore (I did it once last summer).
I also installed OpenOffice 1.0.1. I've been a longtime StarOffice user, but find it difficult enough to use, that I usually go back to Word when the chips are flying. I'm sure OpenOffice us similar, but on Linux, there's no Word to go back to. I was happy to find GAIM, an AOL Instant Messenger replacement that works well since that's one of my other "must have" apps.
Two things I know right now aren't going to work: Groupwise and Radio. I can run Groupwise in a Windows emulator. I'll probably just have to keep using Windows for Radio. One nice thing about being on Linux is I could go back to using MH in emacs for my personal mail (no finer mail reading system ever devised by man).
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August 3, 2002
Fighting SPAM in Utah
The Salt Lake Tribune reports:
A Sandy law firm, Nelson Snuffer Dahle & Poulsen, has filed 58 complaints in 3rd District Court on behalf of Utah residents who received unsolicited e-mail advertisements from a variety of companies.
This is allowed under a new Utah law sponsored by Rep. Patrice Arent. I have to admit, as we were reviewing that law, I wondered if anyone was really going to do anything with it. I'm glad to see that someone is using it to fight back.
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August 2, 2002
Part II of the Digital State Survey
Utah received a #3 ranking in the Electronic Commerce & Business Regulation category of the Center for Digital Government's annual Digital State Survey. This is up from a #8 ranking last year in the same category. The departments of Tax and Commerce have been leaders in this area.
We placed 22nd in Management and Administration and didn't place in the top 25 in Digital Democracy. This is only part II of a four part survey that culminates in an overall ranking. Normally Utah does pretty well overall, finishing 7th last year.
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