Phil Windley's Technometria

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October 28, 2002

Information Security Coordination

Matt DeZee from AMS (and a former state CIO) is talking about the desirability of the creation of a center for coordinating information security information among the states.  Apparently there is a plan to do this.  The theory, of course, is that we all see the same kind of attacks and could help each other by cooperating.  He tells the story of getting a report from his CISO that his state was getting scanned and then showing up the next day at a NASCIO event and finding that 4 other CIOs he talked to had had the same scan the day before.  One could argue that there's nothing special about the states and that we should just throw in with other private and public entities. Nancy Wong from the Commerce's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office says, however, that its common for different industry sectors set up independent efforts and then create bi-lateral agreements to share information so that each office can respond to the unique nature of the sector.     

04:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This

NASCIO Blogs

My number two referrer on my blog today is a google search on "nascio blog."  I'm apparently the only one, but there are at least a dozen people looking for them.   I've run into a few people here who read my blog regularly, including other CIOs, but no one who is writing except for me.  As an aside, there's no WiFi access here, so without my Sprint wireless network card, I'd be out of luck.  

03:48 PM | Recommend This | Print This

Chartered Projects

I'm listening to the Homeland Security panel:   Robert Clerman is speaking and talked about Gov. Leavitt's role in homepland security.  He specifically talked about "chartered projects" in speaking of Gov Leavitt's proposal.   So, while I get asked over and over again in Utah what a "charter" is, it is apparently getting some traction on a national level. 

03:43 PM | Recommend This | Print This

Autonomy: Using Unstructured Data

I was going to go to the session on finance, but ended up not making it because I stopped to spend some time with some folks from Autonomy Systems and by the time I got to the session, it was beyond full.  Oh well, Autonomy was probably more aligned with my interests anyway.   

Autonomy allows one to find information by concept in unstructured data using a combination of "bayesian inference and Shannon's information theory."  Its been a long time since I studied either one of those, so that didn't mean much to me.  I found this document on their site which was much more helpful.    Autonomy is a British company and it shows when you see stuff like this.   I've often joked that British universities couldn't afford computers so they actually studied Computer Science.    

The reason for my initial interest is that Autonomy Systems recently signed a deal with the Office of Homeland Security as reported recently by the Wall Street Journal (and a company press release).  We have a project to create a first responder portal as part of our homeland security project and we need a way link information so that they can see what's relevant, not just by job function or location, but stuff that's related to what they're interested in right now.   My first thought is to throw a Google appliance at the problem, but Google's method of determining relevance may not be relevant in this case.  Something like what Autonomy has to offer might be just the ticket.

The same could be true of indexing internal data as well.  For indexing public data Google's algorithm works pretty well: I'll find interesting what most other people found interesting.  For private data or data that doesn't have a lot of interest but may be very relevant to the current problem, that algorithm doesn't work as well.  Google relies on the fact that there are lots of sites linking to lots of other sites to create relevance data.  That's not necessarily a good basis in some cases. 

Maybe we should do a bake-off: get a Google appliance, an Autonomy DR engine, and any other interesting technologies and run them against our data and study the effectiveness of the results.  I'd bet we could get the companies to donate the systems (maybe not) but we'd have to get a grant or something to pay for the set up, research, etc.   Any takers?

02:13 PM | Recommend This | Print This

Statewide Networking for Government and Education Panel

Moderator: Laura Larimer, Chief Information Officer, State of Indiana
Panelists: Shaun Abshere, WiscNet, State of Wisconsin
David King, Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System
Bill Mitchell, MOREnet, State of Missouri

Shaun Abshere is talking about an organization that I'd never heard of called StateNets.  StateNets is an organization of non-profit and public groups that manage state K-20 networks.  Our own UEN, for which I'm on the steering committee, is a member.  He is giving some impressive composite statistics about the member networks.  Our state uses our education network as our ISP.  This is just one form of cooperation that exists between UEN and the state network managed by ITS that saves costs.  There's probably other avenues we should pursue as well.   

Bill Mitchell is showing a video on Missouri's state education network.  A few things on the technology side that look enviable include smart boards in each class room and one PC for every two students.  The video also shows how technology is being used in the classroom and I think is quite compelling.  It makes the case, through several examples, about how teaching styles can change to one that encourages students to explore the information themselves in ways that they can't in a traditional classroom.  For example, gather data, graph it several ways, and then make a judgment as to which presentation is more meaningful and what conclusions can be reached.  I've seen this in my own children's as I watch them use Google to do homework.  I wish I'd had the web when I was a kid.  I can remember spending hours at the public library trying to find information about electronics and being sorely disappointed. 

Apparently, state education networks are now allowed to join Internet 2 and 25 states have done so.  Utah is not among them even though I know that the University of Utah is a participant.  I wonder why that is?  They are discussing the speed of the network and the kinds of things that it enables in education.  Of course, the other side of that is that it put incredible pressure on the state's internal network to keep up.  I hear, from time to time, laments from UEN steering committee members and others (including the legislature, I'm sure) about the bandwidth increases and the costs of carrying the traffic that results from people using the network.  Its clear to me from watching technology trends that we're really just getting started.  At some point we'll see MP3 file sharing (at least from the bandwidth viewpoint) as a non-issue because students will be sharing DVDs.  Reminds me of when the University of Idaho tried to shut down online interactive games because of the bandwidth it required (at the time Idaho had a 56K line that we shared with Washington State University).  Now, I'm sure interactive games are not even a blip on the network. 

12:22 PM | Recommend This | Print This

Privacy: Good and Bad

I did a little reading at lunch in The Transparent Society by David Brin.  Brin sets forth the following and calls it an "accountability matrix:"

His contention is that people see boxes (1) and (2) and good and boxes (3) and (4) as bad.  What what society needs is boxes (1) and (3) since that creates accountability.  Further, society should eschew boxes (2) and (4) since that pits citizens against each other in "an arms race of masks, secrets, and indignation. 

12:13 PM | Recommend This | Print This

Enterprise Architecture Panel

Moderator: Gerry Wethington, Chief Information Officer, State of Missouri
Panelists: Carey Brown, Information Resources Manager, Kansas Information Technology Office
Theresa Lynn Hadden, Senior Internet Architect, Fairfax County, Virginia
Venkatapathi Puvvada, Chief Technology Officer, Unisys 

Carey Brown talked about the implementation of the Kansas Criminal Justice Information System.  I think the idea was that it was a successful implementation based on an enterprise architecture toolkit, although somehow that point didn't seem to come out in the talk.  Still, the recitation of the project was interesting---if nothing else it emphasizes the nature os projects in the public sector: wide range of clients, wide range of sizes, multiple legacy systems, processes that must keep going, and few resources.  

Theresa Hadden is talking about Fairfax County's efforts in the Information Domain (part of an enterprise architecture).  She says 80% of her data is unstructured (not in databases).  I'm surprised its that low.  They are using a content management system to help manage all this data and moving all HTML pages onto the CMS.  Metadata plays an key role in repurposing unstructured data for other uses.  She wants a call center person to be able to access structured and unstructured data in answering citizen questions.  For example, if someone calls up with a tax question, can the call center people have access to emails that have been sent regarding that citizen's taxes?  This rings some bells with me.  First, we're in the middle of deciding policy questions regarding the status of email as a public document.  Second, I'd love to be able to google my own email.  Wy not my co-worker's email as well---at least that related to work.  That's a big challenge with some interesting payoffs since much of the information we've got is now tied up in email messages that are unavailable as a data source. 

Venkatapathi Puvvada, who goes by "PV". is talking about business architecture and makes the statement that it is the key to business process integration.  Central to this concept is that that we must become citizen centered, not agency centered.  I think this is a concept that is lost sometimes.  Frequently, when we talk about driving IT from "the business" too many think we're talking about agencies.  The problem is that that just perpetuates the old stovepipes.  The federal government found, for example, that there were, on average, 10 cabinet agencies involved in each "line of business" that the federal government is involved in.  That's largely true of the states as well, although the numbers may change.  A good example of where we're overcome this to some degree is criminal justice.  When we view criminal justice as a line of business and then bring agencies to the table who are involved with criminal justice we're getting closer to building a business architecture that is correctly focused.  

10:07 AM | Recommend This | Print This

Steve Cooper on Homeland Security

Steve Cooper, from the Office of Homeland Security (OHS), is the keynote speaker this morning.  I blogged his talk at the Western CIO Summit in Breckenridge this summer. 

Steve is discussing the OHS national strategy for homeland security---not necessarily the particulars of the strategy, but how it serves as the primary driver for an enterprise architecture. 

Interstate System for Sharing Information

Steve talks about using the word "interstate" instead of "national" to describe an information sharing infrastructure.  I think its important to remember that the interstate highway system (Steve's analogy) was built by the states with federal dollars to federal specifications.  I think that would work here as well, but the feds need to recognize that.  Steve talks about linking money to

1. Compliance with enterprise architecture
2. Performance metrics
3. Standards

and having state CIO's responsible for these.  I agree. 

Specific Focus Areas

Steve talks about the following focus areas for what his office is working on:

1. Wireless data
2. Public health
3. Geospatial data
4. Pilot projects
   1. 3-6 months duration
   2. less than $1M
   3. cross agency (different functional areas and different levels of government)

[As an aside, I had a much better set of notes on this and accidentally deleted them before they got posted.  One of the few real complaints I have about radio (and one that's not easily addressed except by user vigilance) is that the browser based editor has some quirks---one of them is that if the browser gets sent somewhere else accidentally, the contents of the window are lost.  Oh well...]

09:01 AM | Recommend This | Print This