Today is my last day at BusinessWeek, and I got shut out of the corporate Intranet when I was in the middle of posting the last blog item. Seems fitting. (I got back in via a friend's log-in.) I'm going to continue blogging on my own at Globespotting.net. I hope to see you there.
The most successful companies in the tech industry learned long ago that they would be far stronger if they created an ecosystem of allies who build businesses on top of theirs. They designed their technology as platforms, or foundations, for others to build upon. (Think Microsoft's Windows and the hundreds of thousands of applications created to run on top of it.)
Now governments are following the same path--most notably the Obama administration. It's attempting to create an innovation platform that organizations and businesses can use to make themselves stronger and/or help improve the performance of government. Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media and promoter of the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 phenomena, calls this the Obama administration's most important technology initiative. "The government is starting to think like a platform provider rather than an application provider," he wrote me in an e-mail.
The most significant step so far has been Federal CIO Vivek Kundra's Data.gov project. Launched on May 21, Data.gov is a collection of federal data housed on the www.data.gov Web site that's open to public access. It's not just a bunch of impenetrable databases, through. Kundra and his team has provided easy-to-use tools that people can use to make use of the data--and they welcome suggestions on additional data sets and tools that people would find useful. The project launched with 47 data sets and now hosts over 118.000 of them.
A couple of examples of how Data.gov has been put to use:
Datamasher: Allows people to compare vital economic and demographic data by state, and view it graphically. There are more than 1,500 mashups of data available so far.
FlyOnTime.us: Allows travelers to see the on-time records of specific flights between cities.
One unintended effect: In an era when traditional media is short of people and resources, non-journalists can do their own investigating and data mining.
This notion of providing an innovation platform is central to the national innovation strategy being developed by the federal Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. He's in the final stages of working up his platform for consumer e-health, and says he'll reveal the details soon. For now, here's a high-level teaser: "The government doesn't have to run everything. We can create the conditions whereby we improve our collective well-being."
I have a feeling that Big Government, Obama-style, is going to be a new sort of Big Government. Likely better, too.
The Obama administration has mapped out an incredibly ambitious set of objectives: stimulate the economy; reform the health care system; save the planet; and combat terrorists. But all of this saving, stimulating, reforming, and combating is making government ever larger and more expensive. So another task looms large: Obama has to make government run better--meaning more efficiently and effectively. If he fails to do so, he'll lose the support of the people and will have no chance of completing his agenda.
I spent the last few weeks working on a story about this effort. My conclusion: Despite the immense difficulty of the job, Obama's team has the potential for making real progress. However, given the hysterical tone of the national debate, I fear that it's unlikely that improvements in government operations will register and will sway public opinion. In scoundrel times like these, fear and loathing trump rationality and earnest hard work.
The government efficiency team is captained by Jeff Zients, a private sector efficiency expert. For details of what Zients and his team are up to, read the story. But there were a couple of themes I couldn't get into, for space-shortage reasons, so I'm going to explore them here:
1) I was impressed by the Obamans respect for the people who work in government. The Bush administration treated government workers like lazy dolts--setting rigid goals for them and outsourcing government functions to private industry as much as possible. (Do a Google search on "Halliburton" to see how well that worked out for the taxpayer.) In contrast, Zients helps government people set their own goals and provides some of the essential tools they need to accomplish them. Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and good-government maven, explains the shift: "In the past, government workers were told that government is the problem and nothing was expected of them. Now there's a new message: You do matter. Now, get stuff done."
2) One of the major debates that came up while I was developing the story was whether the Obama administration is being ambitious enough in its good-government efforts. This is tricky stuff. Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at the conservative Cato Institute, says the efforts by successive administrations to make government work more efficiently are laudable, but insufficient. "I think you can make marginal improvements around the edges but you don't get at the core problem." Which, in his view, is that government bureaucrats don't have the proper motivation and legislators are interested in getting credit from their constituents for bringing home the pork--regardless of whether the money is well spent. His prescription is do something big with government by making it smaller.
Don Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy (and author of the new book, The Next Government of the United States), also faults the Obama administration--but for different reasons. He says its vitally important for Obama to make a big splash with the performance initiative so everybody involved understands how important it is and is highly motivated to make improvements. Also, he says, the administration needs to come up with a fundamentally new idea to build momentum around. "Unlike in the previous administrations, there isn't an obvious "new thing" that the administration has embraced," he wrote me in an e-mail. "There just isn't a large stock of intellectual capital that the administration is tapping--no 'big idea' to drive the effort."
Jeff Zients insists that Obama has made it clear within government that performance improvements are a top priority. But Zients doesn't believe a radical restructuring of government is needed. His model for the task at hand is Louis Gerstner, who was hired by IBM's board to turn around the company when it was on the rocks in 1993. The previous leaders had planned on breaking IBM into parts. Gerstner took an opposite approach: He would re-integrate the company and focus on making it run better. "He came in and started to change the culture," says Zients. "He delivered the message that IBM needed to turn around or it could go out of business. In the end, it was the greatest turnaround in modern business history. It was all about execution. It wasn't about vision or grand strategy."
There have been other corporate turnarounds that followed a similar path. Mark Hurd's work at Hewlett-Packard is another instance of execution being more important than vision. But the countervailing example is a powerful one: Steve Jobs' transformation of Apple. The difference is that HP and IBM had vast resources that could, if harnessed properly, produce very successful businesses. Apple, when Jobs returned from banishment, was in a very different situation. It was on the verge of irrelevancy. To me, the government's situation is closer to that of IBM and HP, so Zients' execution-oriented strategy seems more likely to be the right one.
Then again, given the rotten temper of these times, successful execution may not matter as much as it should.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has been in existence since 1901--responsible for promoting economic development via standards setting and measuring. Vital work, to be sure, but seemingly dull, at least to the non-measurement scientists among us. But now something really intriguing his happening. The onrush of the smart grid, cloud computing, green energy, sustainable manufacturing, e-health, and a new wave of cybersecurity threats has suddenly placed NIST in the middle of some of the most crucial technology advances of our era. One result: it's a great time to be Pat Gallagher, the newly appointed NIST director. "NIST has never been asked to perform such significant, high-visibility roles as it is now. Its day has come," he says.
Think about it this way. NIST is responsible for making sure the physical and technical interfaces in the nation's infrastructure fit together well. In the past, it concentrated on things like fire hydrant connections, so any fire hose could connect to any hydrant. Now it's handling digital systems of all types. Its role is becoming ever more vital as the world is increasingly networked.
The smart electrical grid is an example of the kind of role NIST is playing these days. Gallagher and his colleagues have come up with a three-phase approach that they hope will hasten the adoption of smart grid technologies and the energy savings they promise.
Phase I: NIST has been convening all of the parties with economic or business interests in transitioning to smart grids. In the past, most of the players in any standards discussions were in a single industry, but because of the importance of info tech in these initiatives, new players are coming to the table. So NIST's role as a convener is important. It's bringing people together and helping them identify the standards that already exist that can be used or adapted. Then it's working to identify the gaps and help to define the system architecture that needs to be put into place. This phase has been underway for 6 months.
Phase II: It's putting together a permanent governance model for ongoing standards and measurement deliberations. Last week it announced the formation of a panel to oversee the development of standards--with 20 members elected by companies, trade groups, and government agencies. Members include Google's Vint Cerf, Intel's Matthew Theall, and the Consumer Electronics Association's Brian Markwalter.
Phase III: Getting the participants in smart grid initiatives to agree on measurement techniques and testing procedures. You want to make sure that devices and digital systems really do interoperate--that the interfaces really work. This is key, says Gallagher: "The real challenge isn't mal intent; it's the complexity of the system. When you put three and four devices on a network that have to talk to each other, with different ways of talking to each other, the complexity increases so fast that you can have 'emergent behaviors'--new behaviors you didn't anticipate when you look at the components in the system piece by piece." This phase also starts now.
Gallaher's approach points to one of the big challenges emerging in the 21st Century. Because of the application of digital networks to most every physical and electronic system, everything is increasingly connecting with everything else. And all those systems have to interoperate. So you don't just have to understand the inner workings of an individual system; you have to understand the inter workings of intersecting systems. So I'm talking about systems of systems.
This stuff is crazy complex.
But I'll predict this: The nations and companies and individuals that come to understand the interrelatedness of systems and take problems on holistically will be thriving a couple of decades from now. The ones who try to handle things the old fashioned way will lose out.
...... and brings plenty of bugs with it.
The trend has been a long time coming, but corporations are finally caving in and okaying the use of free or mostly-free social networking Web sites as in-the-office software applications. Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, Google Apps, etc. are becoming the everyday tools of the knowledge worker--elbowing aside stodgy programs like Microsoft Outlook and the like. Corporate IT managers have been forced to accept the inevitable and lower their guards. Unfortunately, though, allowing workers unfettered use of social networking and Web 2.0 sites is like leaving the back door open on a restaurant. A lot of bugs are coming in.
Here's the problem: Traditional firewalls are fairly good at filtering out ordinary Web threats, but they're not good at managing Web 2.0 stuff. Enter Palo Alto Networks. The three-year-old Silicon Valley startup has leapfrogged legacy firewall makers such as CheckPoint and Cisco with its next-generation firewall technology. It inspects digital traffic coming from the Web into a corporate network and not only understands what's in the data flow but also recognizes the applications associated with it. This level of penetration allows corporate tech managers to set policies that block certain risky Web 2.0 activities, such as Facebook Chat, and limit other activities to people in the organization who need to do them. For instance, programmers who use the BitTorrent program to download software code can be permitted to do so while other employees can be blocked from using the program. "This is about dealing with the negatives of companies opening up to social media," says Rene Bonvanie, who heads worldwide marketing at Palo Alto Networks.
Bonvanie knows all about the risks and rewards of social media. Until a couple of months ago, he headed marketing at Serena Software, where he helped lead a major shift in software strategy. Over the past couple of years, the company has dropped most of its traditional software and is using Facebook, Google Apps, and other Web services instead. When Serena began the switchover, there wasn't much in the way of malicious code in the social media world. That's not true anymore. A prime example is Koobface, which targets the users of Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and Twitter. Another is the spam program being run by My Mafia Family, an online game, which gets its tentacles into people's Twitter accounts and the won't let got. At one point, the company had to close off all external file sharing via Google.
There are lots of Web 2.0 services that are vulnerable to being abused by Black Hat hackers and other unscrupulous operators. Palo Alto Networks does occasional studies of the aggregate traffic of its 600 corporate customers, and the survey done in September found 202 Web 2.0 services inside corporations, 70% of them capable of transferring files and 28% of them known to propagate malware.
As employees use more and more Web 2.0 stuff, the threats will get worse and worse. It just goes to show once again: Free software doesn't necessarily come without costs.
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The Race for Perfect is available at Barnes&Noble, Amazon, and Borders. Selected chapters are available online.
Bangalore Tiger is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble
