Quoting IT: Call for Reform in Federal IT Management

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"Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. But despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the Federal Government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, Federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver promised functionality. Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters. In addition, the Federal Government too often relies on large, custom, proprietary systems when “light technologies” or shared services exist.

Government officials have been trying to adopt best practices for years – from the Raines Rules of the 1990s through the Clinger Cohen Act and the acquisition regulations that followed. But obstacles have always gotten in the way. This plan attempts to clear these obstacles, allowing agencies to leverage information technology to create a more efficient and effective government."

-Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer, 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management, December 9, 2010

Crossroads: Determining the future of CMSReport.com

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Slowly but surely, CMSReport.com has turned into a nice side business for me. The problem is that this site has grown to a point that it demands more of my time than I can currently offer it. The future of CMS Report is now sitting at crossroad. I plan to be spending the next few months deciding where this site should go from here.

Some of the options I am considering for this site include:

  • Partnering with others to build a bigger and better CMSReport.com. I wouldn't mind seeing this site become more of a community driven site.
  • Selling CMSReport.com, both domain and site, to a company or someone whom can take this site to the next level.
  • Returning CMSReport.com back to its roots as a personal blog.

Five years ago, I started CMS Report by wanting to build a website focused on reporting today's news in the world of content management systems (CMS). At the time, I was obsessed with information systems and realized that a CMS is one of the best vehicles to putting the ideals of information systems into practice. My goal was to either blog here at the site about content management or to refer others to CMS stories posted elsewhere. My strategy was to make this site my personal bookmark for stories that would interest me and perhaps a few others that might share my interest in this emerging market of Web content management.

Microsoft's Silverlight developers are angry

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A few days ago, I read Mary Jo Foley's article titled Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted. According to an interview with the President of the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, the company will be shifting support for Silverlight away from the PC and Mac desktop and toward the phone market.

So what’s a developer to make of Microsoft’s messaging (or lack thereof) about Silverlight at its premiere developer conference?

I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.

But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.

Microsoft plans to be using HTML 5 to replace the functions currently being provided by Silverlight 5.

It is not the point of this post to debate the merits of HTML 5, Silverlight and even Flash. What is my point though, is that Microsoft appears to me to be desperate. Desperate to come up with a strategic plan that will carry them beyond the day of Windows PCs. Microsoft is desperate to become innovative for the sake of innovation that they're really confusing a lot of their developers. If only after a few years of support, Microsoft is shifting focus of it's Silverlight platform...what potential developer in his or her right mind would support another future Microsoft endeavor? Just take a look at the comments to Bob Muglia's blog post discussing this topic and I think you'll see my point.

Strategic Content Management

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A List Apart: Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

Managing IT to Win in the Recovery

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BusinessWeek: "When the U.S. economy tanked in 2008, companies were quick to rein in information technology spending. Now, amid signs of recovery, they risk problems by ramping up IT budgets too quickly to compensate. Market researcher Gartner (IT) forecasts that global IT spending will swing from a 4.6 percent decline in 2009 to a 4.6 percent increase this year, to $3.4 trillion.

When You Think the Strategy is Wrong

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Harvard Business Review: Chances are that at some point in your career you've been asked to implement a strategy that was developed by someone other than yourself. A manager's job is to implement that strategy, and to be sure that her team, unit, or department executes well. But what if you believe the strategy you've been asked to implement is flawed?

Complete Story

Quoting: Committees and Group Decisions

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"All too often, however, committees don't work well at all -- resulting in a relentlessly short-term outlook, an inability to stick to strategic plans, a slapdash pursuit of the latest fad and a tendency to blame mistakes on somebody else."

-Jason Zweig, "The Intelligent Investor: How Group Decisions End Up Wrong-Footed", The Wall Street Journal, April 25-26, 2009

 

Two SilverStripe Websites

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Sigurd Magnusson sent us an email to let us know that "SilverStripe has now split its company and open source projects into two totally revamped and beautiful websites".  The two SilverStripe websites will of course have different purposes.

Head on over to the SilverStripe.com
site if you want to know more about our company and the business side
of things. But if you're looking for the SilverStripe community,
developer documentation, or the roadmap for the future of the product,
you're in the right place [SilverStripe.org].

Explanation for the split was given at SilverStripe.org stating that the changes were made to "make navigation and discovery easier" for SilverStripe's customers and developers.  However, I suspect the purpose of splitting the site had to also do with the fact that SilverStripe as a commercial entity needed to have its business side become less visible in its own open source project. 

SilverStripe's decision to separate the commercial side and the open source side of their business is a strategic business decision.  I have observed that it is very difficult for open source projects to
flourish without a strong open source community supporting the
project.  Most open source communities become quite distracted when
commercial interests tries to circumvent control and direction away from the community.  By giving SilverStripe the open source community a chance to
flourish more on its own via a community website, SilverStripe the company
can spend more time focusing on the needs of their business customers
at SilverStripe.com.  Strategic moves such as this usually result in a win-win situation for both parties involved.

IT User Support: Author Background/Organization's IT History

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Analysis and Recommendations for Information Technology User Support Provided to a Government Field Office

Chapter 1 (continued)

Author's Role and Position in the Organization

The author has been employed by the Organization for nearly 15 years, with the first 10 years working in the Operations Unit of the Organization's field offices. During this tenure, the author was also given IT related responsibilities that include software configuration of a Doppler radar system and management of the office's Internet Homepage. During the last five years, the author has been employed as the Information Technology Officer at his current field office.

The position of Information Technology Officer (ITO) is a relatively new position for the Emergency Field Office with responsibilities encompassing the operations, management, and administrative computer systems of the field office. The Information Technology Officer has been given responsibility for five critical IT elements at the field office (see "Performance Plan" in the Appendixes). Those elements include: (a) user support, (b) software development, (c) information systems analysis, (d) information technology program management, and (e) quality assurance and professional development. When a previous Assistant Administrator for Emergency Services was asked to describe, from his perspective, the role the Information Technology Officer position should play in the field office, he responded by saying:

The ITO [Information Technology Officer] is expected to focus on information technology needs of the EFO [Emergency Field Office], working closely with the Science and Operations Officer, Electronics Systems Analyst, and appropriate program leaders, under supervision of the [Manager]-In-Charge. The ITO's primary function is to optimize the performance of EFO system software and applications that contribute to accomplishing our mission. (Smith, 2003, Director's Dialogue, ¶ 6)

IT User Support: Introduction and Historical Background

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Analysis and Recommendations for Information Technology User Support Provided to a Government Field Office

Chapter 1

Author's Note: Organizational Anonymity in this professional report was a requirement for submission to the Master of Science Administrative Studies program at the University of South Dakota. The word "Organization" is used as a label for the actual name of the government organization in review. The Organization is a municipal, county, state, or federal government entity responsible for emergency management services and the protection of life and property. Other labels are also used to replace true names and some content has been removed from the original paper to also protect the organization's anonymity.

Introduction

Through the history of the Organization, improvements in emergency services to the public were, in part, accomplished by the implementation of advanced information technology (IT) at the Organization's field offices. In the forward of the Organization Strategic Plan for 2005 - 2010, the Assistant Administrator for Emergency Services reiterates that "from our beginnings in the 19th century, the Organization has depended on our employees, partnerships, advances in scientific understanding, and improvements in technology to carry out our core mission of protection of life and property and enhancing the economy." The Organization also expects that the advances in emergency services will continue, as the 21st century "promises significant improvements to public safety and economic well being" through the utilization of "rapid science and technological advances" (Organization, 2005, p. 5).

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