Sean M. Gallagher

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.

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….

Today was the deadline for agencies to conduct their own TechStat review of their IT project portfolio.  And based on the data available from the Federal IT Dashboard, there’s some ‘splaining to be done.

On the whole, things don’t look so bad. While IT Dashboard tracks 805 portfolio programs in the Federal government, only 40  of those programs fall into the Dashboard’s red zone with a rating of 3.o (out of 10) or below.  And those programs amount to 5% of the federal government’s 2011 continuing resolution IT spending.

But that 5% is 2 billion dollars. And when Admiral Mullen is saying he’s reluctant to deploy ships because money is too tight, that’s $2 billion that might be useful someplace else.

The bottom 10 have the distinction of having a rating of less than 2.5 — and seven of them actually have a rating of 0.0.  That’s right–these programs are in such bad shape they don’t even push the needle off the pin at the end of the scale.  And here, in descending order, are the ignoble 10:

One of these programs, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs’ Medical 21st Century  Revenue Improvement and Systems Enhancements – 2012 (RISE), isn’t out of the starting blocks yet–it’s still in pre-procurement phase, but has already been singled out by Vivek Kundra and VA CIO Roger Baker.  The worst of the lot, however, is the FAA’s En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) program, the next-generation flight routing system that has fallen far behind its deployment schedule.  In the words of the Department of Transportation’s own assessment:

“Due to operational issues ERAM deployment is behind schedule and the ERAM Improvement Plan has been developed. This Plan describes what FAA has completed to date to achieve sustained operations at the two key sites and what approach will be taken to resume the schedule for deployment of the remaining 18 sites. The plan is to achieve Initial Operational Capability Operations (IOC) at 7 sites during FY2011, 6 sites during FY2012 and the remaining 7 sites by the end of FY2013. The investment will go to the Joint Resources Council in June 2011 to rebaseline to extend the current program segment from 2011-2014 and establish the next useful segment.”

Under the continuing resolutions, FAA has spent over $200 million thus far on the program, which is projected to extend out now to until 2020.  Sure, it’s a high-value program, and high value programs carry with them a certain amount of additional allowances for overcoming risks and overruns. But just where ERAM is en route to right now is anybody’s guess.

The infrastructure challenges created by the drive to achieve meaningful use of electronic medical records can be substantial, even for a relatively small facility. Take, for example, York Hospital , a 79-bed hospital in southeastern Maine, where moving toward meaningful use has resulted in a more-than-meaningful jump in infrastructure.

Kevin Foster, the network administrator for York Hospital’s patient information systems department, told me recently that the hospital has seen a spike in its in-house data center hardware. In 2009, the hospital standardized on McKesson’s Paragon software as its primary patient information system. “Over the course of the last year, we’ve been in the process of upgrading those systems to the latest versions to accommodate meaningful use requirements,” Foster said. “As far as the infrastructure goes, those applications have required a significant hardware increase.”

Foster explained that the hospital has replaced close to 60 percent of its servers since 2009. “We only have a handful of legacy servers that are over 5 or 6 years old running,” he told me. “That’s been a pretty positive move.” But the number of new servers required has also grown quickly, as new software has been added and the rollout has moved forward. To manage the expanding fleet, Foster said that York Hospital has begun to deploy VMware virtualization to consolidate servers.

Currently, the hospital’s servers are about 15 percent virtualized, but Foster said the goal is to reach 60 to 70 percent virtualization of server workloads. “Obviously, we look at things like extremely intense SQL Server sols, fax servers, and anything else with modems as not going to virtualization,” he said.

Foster also said that there are a number of legacy applications that won’t work in a virtual environment. He hopes that in the next two to three years, those applications will be phased out, as their data is migrated to virtualization-friendly software.

One barrier to pushing virtualization forward is software vendor support. But Foster told me that’s quickly changing. “[We] still have some applications from McKesson that aren’t officially supported on virtual servers,” he said. That means the vendor will only help troubleshoot a problem if it occurs on physical servers. “That’s been an ongoing battle with them,” he said. “But luckily, over the past year, they’ve started to approve virtualization (on more apps) and see the light, as it were. They’re running this in their own labs and seeing it work, so there’s no reason that their customers can’t run the applications on virtual servers.”

When it comes to storage, the impact is even more significant: Foster said that since the implementation of York’s electronic health records system, storage requirements are up nearly 500 percent. “Right now, we’re running about 96 terabytes of tier-one storage, whereas this time two years ago, we were probably at 20 terabytes,” he said. “And we’re just looking at adding more. For the next release of the Paragon software (to meet meaningful use requirements), they’re telling us that the audit log we’re going to have to maintain is upwards of 1terabyte a month of data change, and that we’re going to have to potentially retain for upwards of 7 years. It has us freaked out a little bit right now.”

originally posted by me on Virtual Integrated System Blog.

I wasn’t sure that I’d ever willfully return to a full-time journalism gig after I parted ways with 1105 Government Information Group.  I had been lured away from what at the time had been a burgeoning freelance career to run Defense Systems magazine, only to be cast out as part of a staff purge at 1105 13 months later, and I was pretty sure that the right editorial job wouldn’t ever come along.  So, I went back to the precarious life, and aside from some rather insane hours and juggling a host of projects (some, that in retrospect, were quixotic at best), things have been okay.

Then I got a call out of the blue: was I interested in running a Federal government technology newsletter?

So, after a few weeks of discussion, I’ve made the decision to return to a full-time job covering the Federal market. But this time, it’s different.  Mostly, that’s because the company that came calling is Mark Bisnow’s outfit, his eponymous almost-always-B2B newsletter company. Also, I’ll be putting out a daily, hopefully with the assistance of a reporter to be named later.

The approach of Bisnow’s FedTech newsletter is to cram a lot of information into a small package, leavening it with a look at the people who make up the Fed technology community.  That means reaching out–a lot–to the community.   As a former Navy officer and former government contractor,  and someone who’s covered the government sector on and off for over 20 years now as a journalist, it’s a great deal for me–I get to talk to people I’ve always had a great deal of admiration and respect for (even if it didn’t always seem that way while I was writing The Packet Rat column for GCN).

So, once more into the breach, and all that.  I’m looking forward to a long, wild ride.

From the Department of Labor (tip of the tail to @craignewmark) :

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service today announced the availability of $600,000 in “Stand Down” grants that will provide an estimated 10,000 homeless veterans with opportunities to reintegrate into society. The grants are being awarded under the department’s Homeless Veterans’ Reintegration Program.

“Stand Down events across the country will reach thousands of homeless veterans — including homeless female veterans — with opportunities to re-enter America’s workforce,” said Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis, who is also chair of the Interagency Council on Homelessness. “Through these grants, the federal government will engage states and local communities as active partners in readying those who have served our nation for civilian jobs.”

via VETS News Release: US Department of Labor announces ‘Stand Down’ grants to assist about 10,000 homeless veterans [03/09/2011].

DoL is going to offer ip to $10,000 in funding to each applicant.  One-day events get a maximum of $7,000.

It’s too bad they’re not taking the grant applications online, or creating a way to connect organizations seeking grants to maximize their effectiveness in staging events (and help magnify the value of the grant money spent).

Here’s one I’ll be writing about more later:

Taxpayers’ Social Security Numbers Found On Junked New Jersey ComputersCBS Philly.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a preliminary set of guidelines for cloud computing security. The draft version of Special Publication 800-144, “Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing,” offers recommended precautions and policies that federal agencies should follow if they plan to use public cloud resources.The document does not dismiss public clouds as an option for government systems. But the authors of the document, NIST computer scientists Wayne Jansen and Timothy Grance, were clear about the many hazards of outsourcing systems to a public cloud provider. Much of what makes cloud computing an attractive option for government agencies is also at odds with the way agencies have traditionally applied governance and security to information systems, Jansen and Grance wrote”

Several critical pieces of technology, such as a solution for federated trust, are not yet fully realized, impinging on successful cloud computing deployments. Determining the security of complex computer systems composed together is also a long-standing security issue that plagues large-scale computing in general, and cloud computing in particular. Attaining high-assurance qualities in implementations has been an elusive goal of computer security researchers and practitioners and…is also a work in progress for cloud computing.

The rest of this post is at: Virtual Integrated System Blog – Government – NISTs Guidelines for Public Cloud Security Emphasize Risk Management.

On February 17, I spent the day at Cloud/Gov, a conference on government use of cloud computing hosted by the Software and Information Industry Association and INPUT. One of the things I heard consistently from the federal IT leaders who presented and from those I met during networking breaks was that one of the biggest motivators for a move to the cloud is the financial transparency it provides. In other words, cloud services show exactly what agencies are actually paying for with their IT budgets.

Read the rest of this post at: Virtual Integrated System Blog – Government – Private Clouds, Self-Service IT, and the Power of Transparency.

I was a digital music early adopter.  Back when iTunes first came out, I started the process of converting my collection of CDs—which filled several CD towers, my entertainment center, and some spare closet space—over to digital, "ripping" them  and storing them on my hard drive.  The reason was simple: the computer had become the center of my "man cave".

read more