Attendance at today's Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) Bethesda Chapter Breakfast Series entitled "Federal Cloud Computing Environments – Modernizing IT Systems" was very heavy, as viewed from the Blackstone Technology Group sponsored table. The panel discussion and DC Federal IT community networking conversation revolved around the push to promote and adopt cloud computing as part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems, and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for Federal IT in the process. The event panelists held an informative and rigorous discussion about how cloud computing is enabling IT professionals (government and industry) to rethink the packaging, delivery and operation of government services, and is changing the landscape of government IT infrastructure management and streamlining system, network and storage management. Panelists included Casey Coleman (Moderat...

Important DC and Northern Virginia Regional Business and Marketing Networking Announcement: by KME Internet Marketing Learn Integrated Online Marketing /Advertising, Branding, Web Design, SEO, Social Media, Analytics and Internet Video - in Northern Virginia, DC metro area. As 2009 draws to a close, it’s become very apparent that 2010 will continue to be an extremely challenging year for businesses seeking new customers, and new ways to market and advertise their brand and services. As well, the ability of Northern Virginia and DC-area professionals to effectively learn and leverage new Online Marketing and Internet New Media/Web 2.0 skills is hampered by the current lack of expert yet cost-effective, local and hands-on Internet Marketing/SEO training. Add to this the dizzying proliferation of Social Media publishing and analytic tools, the rapid change in the search engine technologies and video media industries, and the quickly-growing competition for eyeballs and click-throughs from...

Data.gov is a fairly recent Federal initiative with respect to data and information sharing and transparency; i.e. encouraging and facilitating the exposure (by all Government agencies) of verifiable, raw government data/geodata and data tools/visualization techniques to the public. Data can be accessed and downloaded in many formats, for any purpose - including datasets in XML, CSV, Text, KML, KMZ, or ESRI Shapefile formats. Recently the Data.gov CONOPS was released by the Federal CIO Council, together with OMB, along with a very interesting method and means to encourage public dialogue and input. To help stakeholders "join the dialogue", per se, the " http://www.datagov.ideascale.com " site was developed - essentially a blog with social media hooks (i.e. facebook, twitter, RSS). I went ahead and submitted an idea recently (to be moderated); as follows - be sure to review and submit your own, and/or comment on mine! "The Data.gov CONOPS provides a great deal...

Here's a very good article concerning the various types of strong identity management, multifactor and two-factor authentication solutions that are necessary for healthcare system and process identity enforcement - recently written by John D. Halamka MD, a self-described Healthcare CIO. Strong Identity Management In this article, Dr. Halamka states that he's had a wide range of experience with many of these token-based and tokenless two-factor authentication methods, including security tokens, smart cards, biometrics, certificates, soft tokens, and cell phone-based approaches. His summarized findings include: Security Tokens - many challenges and prohibitive expenses. Smart cards - a good consideration, though requires installation of many readers. Biometrics - great results, but still requires major technology upgrade for existing PC/LAN infrastructure (this is especially challenging in government and healthcare institutions with extremely diverse and aged personal computer...

In his October 2009 Newsletter , James Bowles, Washington DC’s leading Executive Business Coach and career transition consultant, outlines the facets of your personal “brand” and reputation – that stand to scrutiny when you’re not around. What do people say about you when you aren't around? Or more importantly, what does your boss, current (or future) client, or other key stakeholders and partners say about you when you aren't around? For example, in a compensation review meeting (when promotions to key positions are being discussed) or simply when your work and additional opportunities to hire (or fire) you are being considered? The things that people say about you when you are not around is usually called your reputation. A better way to think about it is that it's your personal "brand" – and this is one of the biggest factors in your ultimate success on the job, with clients and around your community. Here's the good news: for the most part, YOU complete...

All well-known systems engineering methodologies and enterprise system development programs leverage testing environments. Testing environments can be built and operated for very different purposes, ranging from prototyping and simulation, to pre-production load testing and usability or “Section 508 Accessibility” checks. Specialized SOA testing frameworks are sometimes required, for difficult infrastructure integration challenges. Most major systems that get deployed to large numbers of users also feature a training environment. This working copy of the “real” or “production” environment affords the user and company a lot of protection against mistakes, mis-operation of system functions, and basically allows you to test-drive a system, but reset and try again if something doesn’t work right or mistakes are made. Play around, learn and mess up - no harm, no foul, and the system assets, data and reputation of you, the system owner and others are all protected. That’s one very difficult...

Quite a lot of news, analysis and conferencing has been going on lately about the challenges of the traditional news community, both online and in print. The advances of “citizen journalism” catalyzed by Internet social media tools like Twitter and real-time search are contributing to far-reaching outcomes - from the demise of long-lived newspapers like Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News and the shuttering of the Washington Post’s hyperlocal LoudounExtra.com experiment, to interesting conversations at the recent Blogworld Expo and DC Twitter Conference regarding both opportunities and competitive animosities between journalists and bloggers competing for online “eyeballs”. When we first moved to Loudoun County in the late 90’s, comprehensive local news was an afterthought to the large newspapers and regional broadcast media, and seemed mostly relegated to the entrenched local papers like Leesburg Today and the Loudoun Times. Of course, the citizen and business population was quite lower, t...

Experimenting a bit with Pipes, Twitter, RSS feeds to LinkedIn, etc....follow a nicely "curated" Internet Media collection of Homeland Security/DHS information and tweeting at @dhsinfosharing - and find it under news in the similarly-named Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media LinkedIn group.

The jury’s still out for most businesses on whether or not significant effort is made in “tweeting” information via Twitter.com – but the evidence is IN regarding whether or not to simply sign up and prepare to do so. Your company’s online popularity, reputation and ultimately success is derived from two core things – what you say, and what others say about you. Let’s address these communication elements as “attributed source information” (ASI). “Attributed” from the perspective that there is in fact a known source (though it may be an anonymous ID), “source” from the perspective that it’s the very first sincere representation of the communication or concept actually published online, and “information” in that it’s not just some data or graphic fragments, it’s actually a message or concept with enough context to drive interest. If it’s non-attributed, non-source or just bits n’ pieces (i.e. not “information”), there’s not much you can do about it as “evidence” – but, just like any good...

There's been a lot published and dissected over the value and methods for successful corporate blogging, and the intersections between corporate and employee use of social media. What's not been discussed much is the application of Systems Engineering Methodology, within the Information Management Architecture Domain, to implementation of corporate blogging. Being that a corporate blogging program is essentially part of a corporation's "Information-Sharing Line of Business", integrated with and supported by other corporate operational domains (like Marketing & Communications, IT Operations, and Organizational Change Management), it's therefore an IT program -and IT programs are best managed through standardized IT Investment and Systems Engineering Lifecycle methods. To start, therefore, a corporate blogging program, a framework should be established for program planning, resource scheduling and alignment. This framework will help generate a program CONOPS...

Here's a great posting by Sara over at Blackstone Technology Group's SOA and Integration Practice , regarding a "flexible, scalable SOA infrastructure testing framework" she and others developed on their Homeland Security Information-Sharing program. She relates "We’ve implemented a highly-efficient and data-driven framework to test an enterprise-scale, highly available SOA infrastructure environment. In the same amount of time that it took to previously build a single test scenario, we were able to develop the initial framework implementation that can quickly support multiple scenarios that include any permutation of components and transports." In other words, look to new SOA-driven testing frameworks and approaches like these, to most thoroughly and efficiently test new SOA/ESB infrastructure deployments. The "old ways" won't work.

Social Media’s a scary animal, especially for companies or organizations that are accountable to stakeholders, policy, law or any other governing entity that exists to mitigate risk. Also, social media is an online collaboration channel and tools domain that’s most appropriately and effectively utilized by humans, i.e. individual personalities (preferably employees) – vs. corporate personas or third-party services. So how does a company begin to use social media, break into and contribute to the online dialogue, and avoid reputation issues while maintaining appropriate accountability? Find, identify, nurture, coach and ultimately unleash your employee social media stars – they’ll be the face of the company, the purveyors of online dialogue, and will most likely do a great job at it. Why and how? First of all, the social media platforms and tools are the dominion of the Internet-literate, the digerati, typically those more inclined and interested to communicate online at least as often...

During this morning’s IAC breakfast, discussing “Transparency, Collaboration and Web 2.0”, a panelist made a very interesting point. While the US Federal Government’s use of Internet social media services and cloud-based information-sharing applications is well underway, albeit at the very earliest of stages (mainly due to significant policy, privacy, security and simple “newness” issues), by far one of the major risks lies with accountability. Accountability in collaboration and information-sharing environments is typically achieved to some degree by association of metadata with the information packages being exchanged, or with the “containers” of online events and the trusted identities of those participating in the dialogue. With social media applications and contexts like Twitter or Facebook, however, there are far too many ways that the “information packages” (i.e. unmanaged conversation bites) get exposed, syndicated and shared – disassociated from what I’ll call the “accountabi...

(Warning – hyper-theoretical stream of probably uninformed semi-consciousness to follow…) In considering the possible types of information that might need to included in Enterprise Information-Sharing programs, while sifting through my TweetDeck, something’s become quite clear – most of our Government information-sharing exercises are all about “Signals”, “Data”, and “Information” that are already known (at some level) to be “required”, “useful”, or “possibly interesting” – judged as so by existing processes, policies, roles, business rules and perhaps knowledgebase ontologies. I’d like to, however, receive and share more information from the government that’s “probably interesting”, but that hasn’t yet been confirmed as so by them, or me and my community. This happens all the time in social media, where I’ve subscribed to or participate in an information-exchange forum based on a particular knowledge context (and within my own agenda), and routinely view information that’s been posted...

Quite a mouthful, the title of this post. However, this language is becoming more and more critical to the objective of cross-domain information-sharing, and is becoming more and more easy to actually use (by the public!) in building information search, discovery, fusion and correlation/analytical applications. A while ago, I was introduced to the semantic wiki technologies and communities of Knoodl (knoodl.com), which is a mechanism for like-minded persons to collaborate on building semantic vocabularies, using open standards like RDF and OWL. Basically describing the terms and language of a topic area in a manner that can be expressed, via XML, for consumption by computer applications. So when a message arrives in your system with information labeled "SAR", or a query is sent forth with the same acronym, a test of this word against the machine-readable vocabulary can determine what the likely meaning really is - "suspicious activity report", "suspect action r...

Secretary Napolitano requested that this sidebar, from an article PARADE Magazine published about the department in the Sunday, May 24, 2009 issue titled “We Are Prepared and Resilient,” be sent to all employees. In it, she describes the department’s top priority: to “help keep the nation in a state of readiness and help assure the American people that we are prepared and resilient.” The sidebar is available on PARADE’s Web site at http://www.parade.com/news/2009/05/10-ways-homeland-security-is-keeping-you-safe.html . The full article is available at http://www.parade.com/news/2009/05/we-are-prepared-and-resilient.html . TOP TEN WAYS HOMELAND SECURITY KEEPS YOU SAFE - within this list, are these two social media nuggets: 1) In a sign that they are keeping up with the times, DHS and FEMA now have their own Twitter pages. The agencies post important updates including travel alerts, security threats, weather warnings and other alerts. 2) The U.S. Coast Guard, whose expanding role in nati...

Heard a great segment today on NPR's "All Tech Considered" - when you die, what happens to your Internet-hosted digital assets? For example your Facebook wall, your Twitter account, your gmail emails...Most providers of these services have policies from their perspective, and essentially won't turn over any information without proper legal intervention, but have you personally prepared for this? Who specifically do you want managing your domain names, your social IDs, reading your emails, changing your passwords? It turns out this is quite a quickly-developing "sticky wicket" - mainly because of the diversity of digital assets you may have, the different reasons or causes you only know for maintaining them, and the different circles of friends or business partners who collaborate with you, through one or another online identity. "Legacy Locker" was the first business out of the gate mentioned to be dealing with this, and they are "a safe, sec...

A very timely and interesting element of a set of marketing principles delivered to IBM business partners at this week’s IBM Impact 2009 conference included this recommendation listed as #1 – attend to your SEO (Search Engine Marketing), and definitely be social about it. While this isn’t obviously news to most larger companies, and perhaps smaller, who are already rapidly finding Internet marketing as a very cost-effective and valuable outlay of advertising budget, it is interesting to see one of the world's largest marketing engines as IBM promoting SEO to all of their partners. This promotion of online marketing tactics is primarily geared to helping build and extend their own sales channels, but IBM is explicitly noting that Internet Marketing and SEO is an absolute essential activity with clear and significant ROI for everyone. Although the advice and guidance provided was basic (and promoted services that could be purchased from a key marketing partner), the message was clear...

Most large IT Investments in Federal and State governments require a Program Management Office (PMO) function to help the buyer (i.e. the Government) manage the IT planning and implementation activities from cost, schedule and compliance perspectives. PMO’s are most often the domain of project managers and cost-management specialists, “running the numbers” according to contract language, quality and risk management protocol, “Earned Value Metrics” and other compliance or oversight controls. More and more frequently, however, the PMO is tasked with understanding, advising and managing spending or compliance concerning very technical facets of the program, ranging from strategic Enterprise Architecture and SOA alignment, to more tactical preparation or review of technical standards, models and engineering methods. In essence, the PMO’s responsibilities begin to overlap more frequently with and require close coordination with programs domains historically more organizationally-distinct – ...

With the proliferation of Internet-based tools and forums to share information, deliver announcements or warnings and create collaborative networks, it’s become apparent that “self-policing” strategies for controlling and managing the risks involved in delivering content through the corporate firewall can’t mitigate most risks. Most corporations and government agencies do indeed require, as terms of employment and various legislation, that care be taken and policies or procedures followed when engaging in online public discourse or otherwise moving content from the corporate-controlled environment to the public Internet. Over the past years, many good tools and governance frameworks have been developed as a routine matter of enabling Internet content posting, distribution and syndication – but these have mostly focused on automation, protection and monitoring procedures associated with corporate-managed content. “Corporate-managed content” is defined as information products or artifact...

From the tweetdeck: RSS to @blackstone ’s microblog pings from #gov20camp 3/27/2009 complete w/tarpiped flickrs , tumblr ’d friendsters, LinkedIn group comments and delicious GovLoop tags – maybe Ustream, Youtube or Podcast, too. Or just read our blog , or my blog . Socialize - it's the new granite.

The outlook for continuation of difficult economic situations around the world certainly doesn't bode well for nonprofit organizations looking for new donors. What's interesting and provides some hope, however, is the confluence of new social media open source tools and mashups, the awareness of these new information sharing and collaboration sources on the Internet across multiple generations, and the transition in intent to use these tools from last year's political campaigns to the new Obama administration . One experiment underway that deserves close watch is a Loudoun-based nonprofit organization called " paws4people(TM) ". In the midst of a full-on social media and internet marketing campaign, that I'm helping to coordinate, this assistance dog foundation is poised to demonstrate maximum utilization of any and all social media capabilities available - in the face of rapidly deteriorating donor funding. They're calling the campaign their " 2009 N...

(As also published this month in the Loudoun Chamber of Commerce Biz Connect newsletter). As the Obama administration settles into office this year, what’s described as the “most connected ever” group of leaders are quickly focusing on how to leverage the groundswell of “social media” use and expertise demonstrated by the campaigns. Social media, proven useful in politics, is rapidly being adopted by students and families, and is dramatically changing the landscape of traditional news reporting. But is it good for business, here in Loudoun and Northern Virginia? Social media may be difficult to define, but you’ll know it when you see it. It’s about talking back to the web, sharing your opinion, and participating in a multimedia dialogue among interested people in public – anonymously or not. There are many styles of online conversation and tools – from those focusing on photos or videos (like “Flickr” and “YouTube”), to reviews (like Yelp”), to those focusing on profiles, expertise o...

Planning to Attend Government 2.0 Camp this March..."Convening the Tribe of Government 2.0". Follow my Twitters at http://www.twitter.com/tedmclaughlan .

Here's a great video on why linking is an essential part of digital writing, found over at Debbie Weil's Blog

The practice of leveraging digital asset management and exploitation techniques combined with social media tools to provide new ROI opportunities from existing corporate information assets. Socialize your digital assets (but still treat and manage them as information, that has both explicit and implicit value). That's right - another new mashonym - i.e. mashing up some key terms and acronyms pulled from the swirl of Web 2.0 to come up with a new one.... Fun with terms I've invented so far: - Mashonym - Web 2.0-driven mashups of social media acronyms - Avonym - DAS - Digital Asset Socialization - see above - Ecovent - Ecosystemic (i.e. ecologically perceived and managed) events - i.e. the cause-effect context of a temporal, geospatial event to faceted ecosytems.

I had the privilege of spending many hours over the past several days immersed in expert discussion about Information Sharing, from several different perspectives. In the "open source" Web 2.0 community (at last week's Potomac Techwire Internet Outlook 2009 event), the consensus seems to be that there's a short period of "wait and see" ahead of us, to find out which online information-sharing social media capabilities will become the next big thing...Twitter's very much wait and see, Facebook has excellent fundamentals and a strong core framework, and 20-somethings on Myspace are increasingly "icked out" by the quickly growing population of 40-somethings. Everyone in the room raised their hands when asked if they were on LinkedIn . Regardless of the platform and tool, one thing was certain; online information-sharing and user-defined data aggregation (i.e. mashups) is in full-blown growth mode, and privacy is dead. That's right, according t...