Government agencies and departments are learning to live with travel restrictions and discovering innovative alternatives amid an anti-conference trend brought on by budget restrictions and well-publicized abuses.
But some managers fear the trend will inhibit federal workers’ ability to stay current with new technology field advancements or to consult with experts in the private sector via site visits, professional seminars and annual conferences. Keep reading →
“If people do not emit or discuss their behavior, it’s hard to find out what they are going to do,” declared Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, speaking recently at the huge annual conference of intelligence professionals called Geoint.
The U.S., he made clear, did not have tactical warning of the Benghazi attacks. He also noted that anti-American protests were taking place in 54 countries when the attacks occurred, clearly implying the intelligence community was hearing a lot of noise that day.
While it’s true, it’s hard to predict what people will do, it’s also increasingly true that people worldwide do emit and discuss their behavior through online social media and that can be monitored and analyzed in nearly real-time.
Companies such as intelligence analysis contractor Recorded Future, which is backed by Google, the CIA, and others for this very reason, offer examples of that on a routine basis. Recorded Future, for instance, tracks protests occurring around the world by extracting references to those events and their locations from online media.
One of their measurements records “intensity” of references to protests in online media and social media, with color coded indicators signifying heavy discussion of protests, little or no discussion at all. One can also see the list of terms associated with protests in a selected country during the selected week and protests planned for the future.
There are certainly caveats to be kept in mind with these data sets and visualizations. The protest metric is not perfect, and not all protests are comparable. Much has been made of the role of social media in facilitating protest movements in the Middle East and China, but it could also be amplifying their impact.
Dr. Melissa Flagg, a senior Department of Defense manager at the RFUN event noted how analysts are starting to use Recorded Future to guide future DoD science and technology investments by tweeting: “We have to tell the story of the long term to the people who only care about the next three minutes.”
Recorded Future CEO Chris Ahlberg and inventor of Spotfire, says that Recorded Future is the only comprehensive source of past, planned and predicted events on the web and the world’s first Temporal Analytics Engine. His goal is to eventually provide access to everything on the Web in nearly real-time. This of course would be an example of really big data analysis, using the cloud like the National Security Agency has talked about.
Recorded Future is also stressing the importance of data science and data scientists in all of this. Their event featured Drew Conway (@drewconway) speaking about the joys, challenges, and power of data science. Among other insights, Conway showed some results that suggest the peaks in country protests are related to food shortages.
As a data scientists having also worked with Recorded Future on things like Visualization Of The Osama Bin Laden Letters, I could not resist checking and building on their analysis of trends in global protests (see table below.)
It shows, for instance among the top 10 countries for protest intensity, registered in the Recorded Future data set for October 1, 2011, to October 11, 2012, the United States is the most frequently mentioned term – showing up in five of the top 10 instances.
The chart also includes comments worth noting.
Keep reading →
Getting better performance out of supply chain and operations activities is not at the top of everyone’s priority list, but it should be. In today’s world, moving things smartly and efficiently – regardless of whether they are people, product or petabytes – is paramount to success.
This challenge is not a new one. But, the pressures of meeting customer demands, fulfilling their mission requirements, and maintaining high service levels is significantly complicated at a time of diminishing budgets. Even though government organizations recognize the importance of making their operations more efficient, leaders must prove the benefit of the change before investing time, people, and money in system and process improvements. Keep reading →
Big data can drive big capabilities. But it takes day-to-day practices that can help build and sustain an analytics culture.
A report released today by the Partnership for Public Service aims to educate federal managers on how agencies can do just that. The report, From Data to Decisions II: Building an Analytics Culture, examines how to best use data – not anecdotes – to base decisions. Keep reading →
A top National Security Agency executive argued today that if the nation is to defend against escalating cyber threats, it will be increasingly important for individuals, corporations and institutions, including government, to be held more accountable for their contributions to, and their actions within, cyber space.
At the same time, there are limits to what actions private enterprises can take in protecting their networks, said NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis, speaking at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance forum in Washington. Keep reading →
With the savings on real estate, energy costs and travel expenses along with improved productivity and worker satisfaction, some might think managers and employees would embrace the transition to a telework culture. But that hasn’t been the case for many in the federal workforce.
Still, telework comes with too many benefits to ignore, said panelists at the Telework Exchange Town Hall meeting Tuesday in Washington, D.C. Strong business cases, capable technology, improved employee performance (see GSA performance tracking dashboard video, above) and mandates to reduce greenhouse gases and federal real estate space make telework worth the culture change effort. Keep reading →
Henry Wei was selected as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the Blue Button program as part of the new White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program. The program pairs top innovators from the private sector, nonprofits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in six months.
The Blue Button program is aimed at providing easy access to health records by enabling individuals to securely download their own health information via a simple text file, such as current medications and drug allergies, claims and treatment data, and lab reports. The Department of Veterans Affairs – working with the Department of Health & Human Services, the Department of Defense, and others – are collaborating on the project.
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This is one in a series introducing 18 Fellows working on five initiatives that are part of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program.
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This is one in a series of profiles on the 2012 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal finalists. The awards, presented by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, recognize outstanding federal employees whose important, behind-the-scenes work is advancing the health, safety and well-being of Americans and are among the most prestigious honors given to civil servants. This profile features a finalist for the National Security and International Affairs medal, Joyce Connery, director for Nuclear Energy Policy at the National Security Council in Washington, D.C.
A summit of 50 world leaders hosted by President Obama in 2010 resulted in important steps to prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear materials such as plutonium and highly enriched uranium that could be used to make radiological bombs. Keep reading →
This is one in a series of profiles on the 2012 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal finalists. The awards, presented by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, recognize outstanding federal employees whose important, behind-the-scenes work is advancing the health, safety and well-being of Americans and are among the most prestigious honors given to civil servants. This profile features a finalist for the Management Excellence medal Elliott B. Branch, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for acquisition and procurement.
The Navy and the Marine Corps each year award about $90 billion dollars in contracts for everything from submarines and battleships to fighter jets, helicopters, complex weapons systems, trucks, uniforms and body armor. Keep reading →
If the Department of Defense couldn’t account for the tanks, planes and weapons it purchased, there would be hearings and heads would roll. If the Social Security Administration didn’t track who paid into the system and who is eligible for benefits, the system would collapse. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission didn’t have systems in place to track the nation’s fissionable material…the public outcry would be deafening.
In truth, no government agency can function without the ability to see, manage and account for the core assets critical to its mission. But in essence, that’s what’s happening right now with the federal government’s software assets. And legislators are getting wind of this disconcerting fact, and they’re taking action.
It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who knows their way around an iPhone that apps have infiltrated how we live, work and govern. “There’s an app for that” applies to every aspect of our lives, our jobs, and our federal government. Without software, the very cogs of government would not function.
And the government buys a lot of software. According to research firm IDC the federal government will spend more than $9 billion on software this year. And much of that spend will be wasted.
Most organizations spend too much – anywhere from 10% to 30% too much – on software, based on experience. It’s wasted when organizations purchase too much software that they don’t need – turning software into “shelfware.” It’s also wasted when organizations don’t understand and apply their license entitlements, such as vendor-specific product use rights, and when enterprises don’t purchase the right license types for their users.
The problem is so pervasive mainly due to the complexity involved in tracking and managing software licensing and usage.
“It sounds counter intuitive, but it’s very difficult to know how much software an organization actually has versus how much it actually uses. And if you don’t know this, you can’t accurately determine how much you need to buy,” said Amy Konary, research vice president, Software Licensing at IDC.
“License agreements are enormously complex and can be hundreds of pages long and contain very detailed rules around installation and usage that must be adhered to. When you consider that the federal government runs at least thousands of different software applications, managing this asset becomes extremely complex,” she said.
But increasingly, federal agencies are becoming bolder about tackling the problem – because the payoff can be so substantial.
For instance, one US military agency we’ve worked with was facing budget cuts of one third, or $15 million, in its IT operational costs for fiscal year 2012. In order to avoid slashing mission-critical services, the agency got creative in looking for new pools of waste – and discovered that software license optimization was an untapped resource for significant cost reduction.
The agency piloted the concept, by focusing on optimizing just one of the hundreds of applications that it runs – in its case, Autodesk design software. In the process, it slashed the number of licenses it needed by three quarters, and reduced its annual software maintenance bill by more than $3 million, for a total 6-year realized savings of more than $17 million in maintenance costs – for just this one piece of software.
The agency now believes that it can achieve its budget cut objective solely through centralized software license optimization.
Once an organization arms itself with visibility into how much software it actually needs, how much it uses, how much it owns and what its usage rights are, the potential savings are often staggering. The magnitude of this agency’s cost-savings is typical for what we see in both private enterprise as well as the federal government.
Feds Are Getting the Message
Government officials are waking up to the opportunity. With acrimony in Congress at an all-time high, the appetite for compromise at an all time low, and the drumbeat for budget reductions relentless, the lure of cutting billions of dollars in unnecessary waste from the federal budget – without controversy or the need for political brinkmanship – is irresistible.
On September 21, 2011, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved its version of the DHS Authorization Bill (S. 1546). The bill included language that requires the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Department to achieve the greatest possible economies of scale and cost-savings in the procurement of software licenses.
Congressman Joe Walsh (R-IL) also connected the dots between federal spending waste and software licenses. In October, 2011, he announced the successful introduction of an amendment to H.R. 3116 in the House version of the Department of Homeland Security authorization bill to eliminate wasteful software license spending.
Agency and department heads are also getting the message. In April, 2012, Department of Defense CIO Teri Takai, as part of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing examining efforts to reduce waste in IT spending, was asked about the department’s efforts to improve software license optimization.
Takai’s response:
“The department understands the importance of effective IT asset management in order to avoid over buying or over deployment of commercial software… To this end, the department proactively shares best practices, such as the Navy Facilities Engineering Command’s enterprise license optimization approach, with and among Defense Components. Establishing and enhancing an IT asset management framework for use in the department that includes software license management optimized at the enterprise level is an element of the emerging DoD Joint Information Environment.”
And more recently the Senate Committee on Armed Services took notice and has proposed language to ferret out waste in federal software procurement. In Section 931 of National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, the senate version of the bill text directs the CIO of the Department of Defense to conduct an inventory of software licenses and consolidate the department’s software spend.
Similar reforms in software procurement are being considered in other legislation, and will be watched closely by budget hawks this fall when Congress convenes after recess.
Perhaps the momentum behind software license optimization is building because it is so fruitful and yet non-controversial.
“Businesses and governments are now awakening to the extent of the waste that exists in most software procurement processes,” said Konary. “If you can apply some best practices and technology to solve an expensive problem that at one time was unknown or appeared intractable – why wouldn’t you?”