Ellen just called and told me she was catching the noon bus instead of the 4:00 bus, so I guess I need to straighten up earlier than I had planned.
I spent my last night of my out-of-control week having salmon burgers cooked in the microwave and watching the Nationals on TV (they won), followed by going to bed early.
I take solace from the fact that I was able to leave all of the televisions set to Fox News, which was at least a temporary rearrangement of my living environment.
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Each year Ellen spends a week in NYC attending a (the?) book festival, this year she left Tuesday morning and will return Saturday night.
This, obviously, gives me the opportunity to have a completely out-of-control week in her absence. I have noticed however that as the years have gone by my definition of out-of-control, which frankly was never very high has gotten more and more, well, mild. I mentioned a few years ago that my idea of inappropriate behavior when Ellen was absent was to go buy ice cream, then it became buying a liter of diet coke (or pepsi) – though I got lectured on doing this latter thing, now since I mostly drink home-made seltzer even that much is a bridge too far.
My first thought was to go see movies that Ellen would not like to also see, something normally limited to early Sunday morning when she is not going to book festivals. So Tuesday mid-day I went to see Godzilla in 3D IMAX (it was okay, lots of special effects and loud explosions and stuff, but not remarkable). Unfortunately there really are not any other movies out that I actually want to see that Ellen does not want to also see. I suppose I could see XMen twice (once with and once without), but I am not convinced that is a good use of time.
Tuesday night I went to the Nationals game rainout. Since I assumed it would rain and that there would be a delay, I actually got a parking pass so I could stay late even after the metro stopped. However they canceled the game by 7:30pm so that didn’t work out so well either.
Wednesday night I went to Clyde’s Tower Oaks with two friends I used to work with. Tonight I am attending the UMUC Scholarship appreciation dinner (I will be serving as the AFFIRM Educational Chair this coming year for Barry West, the incoming AFFIRM President, CIO Of PBGC, and a long-time friend). So that leaves Friday evening and Saturday daytime. I likely will not go to synagogue Saturday, sleeping in – showing once again the Ellen’s presence serves as a civilizing influence and whose absence removes that influence. As Ellen pointed out once that when I go to services without Ellen, the Rabbi gets worried that something awful happened; I am to call or email ahead of time when that is likely to occur.
On the positive side it looks like my panel at the AMARC hosted Big Data Summit June 19-20 is now complete with professors from Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Tech and Lincoln Labs, MIT.
Daytime is otherwise devoted to UMUC class work and AMARC emails and calls.
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The link to the show is here: http://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/another-one-bites-the-dust-cybersecurity-done-right-on-dorobekins
There are a few quotes from me in the printed material plus there is a link there to the show.
Participants included (copied from the web page):
Rob Carey, former Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer Defense Department; he is now Vice President and General Manager CSC Global Cybersecurity – Public Sector
Shawn Kingsberry, CIO, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board
Ira Hobbs, former Treasury Department CIO; the founder of Hobbs and Hobbs Consulting
Dan Mintz, former Transportation Department CIO; now he is President & Principal Consultant, ESEM Consulting; President & Executive Director, Advanced Mobility Academic Research Center
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Chris is doing a broadcast about Cybersecurity tomorrow, Wednesday, May 21st, at 3pm about Cybersecurity.
His panel consists of Rob Carey, the recently retired Deputy CIO at DoD, now at CSC; Ira Hobbs, retired from a distinguished career as an IT executive at a number of Govenment agencies including USDA and the Department of Commerce, now active at ACT-IAC and running his own LLC, and, well, me.
The topic is: Why HeartBleed is Not Your Only Cybersecurity Concern.
You can register to listen in at:
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The impact of mobile computing devices on Government can be divided into three areas of focus:
It is this last issue that I want to briefly touch upon while discussing the term co-creation.
The term co-creation, mostly used in commercial environments, focuses on a firm and customer, together, generating value.
In a sense, this has always been true conceptually. If a company manufactures a tractor, the resulting value is not just the tractor but also the combination of some farmer using the tractor.
In the same way the Internet has influenced many transactional activities, it has done so here also. It was not possible to receive customer input during the design and manufacturing process very easily before the existence of the Internet.
Companies would at least potentially pay attention to customer complaints or comments. They would often do market research and/or conduct polling to attempt an understanding of what customers wanted. They might form customer advisory boards to get input. In all of these cases, the feedback was often after the fact and passive.
With the Internet and the rise of social networking, these relationships changed. At first, this merely meant that customers would react more aggressively and more quickly. The bigger change started when the customer created content started to become part of the offering. For example, while letters to the editor were something that had existed for many years, the comments added to news stories have become part of the news story. These days what customers write on Facebook or tweet about something is often included as part of a news report.
Internet based offerings allowed customers to participate in a more aggressive fashion. The YouTube offering is, in a sense, just a warehouse or display cabinet that allows users to easily showcase their own created videos. Customers create all of the content. Facebook follows a similar model.
Government is just starting to dip its toe into these waters. For example, a number of Government organizations are using crowd sourcing to supplement their offerings. NASA has asked citizens to provide input on Mars exploration; NOAA has an app to crowd source weather reporting where they do not have weather instruments in place or to help differentiate types of weather that instruments have difficulty with (e.g. sleet versus rain).
There is an interesting report relating to this subject produced by the IBM Center for The Business of Government about Engaging Citizens in Co-Creation in Public Services, http://www.businessofgovernment.org/sites/default/files/Engaging%20Citizens%20in%20Co-Creation%20in%20Public%20Service.pdf, which is worth reading.
It the long run, it is this last impact of mobile technology, empowering citizens to be co-creators of Government services, in partnership with Government entities that I find most interesting.
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Ellen and I try to visit Ellen’s parents in Hilton Head on a regular basis. They are really wonderful people, I am lucky to know them, and they are fun to be with (and visiting Hilton Head even if one does not play golf is pretty good also).
Lately we have switched back to driving from flying down taking the opportunity to see sights on the way that in the past we either drove by or flew over.
When we go next in June, we plan to see minor league baseball games both going there and coming home.
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On with Francis Rose on WFED, on your AM radio dial at 1500 (for those of you who still realize you can get AM radio) today at 3pm.
The format for the show is two people select three stories for the week which they feel are the most important impacting on the Federal Government. As usual I tend to focus on IT related stories.
As usual I plan to write up a brief summary of the three articles afterwards and post that here.
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I am excited to have been invited to serve on a panel at the Data Transparency Summit tomorrow, April 29th, at Union Market.
The panel which starts at 10:15 is an Industry Panel focusing on “Industry Implements the Data Transparency Transformation”. The other panelists will be Dan Chenok and Trey Hodgkins, the moderator will be Jason Miller of WFED radio.
Our focus will be how industry is dealing with the President’s Open Data Policy and the potential impact of the soon-to-be-passed Data Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) which will standardize data and reporting associated with Federal financial management, procurement and assistance.
The Summit is being held from 8am – 3:30pm at Union Market at 1309 5th Street NE near the NoMA metro stop.
You can:
And of course, catch up on AMARC at http://www.amarcedu.org/.
Hope to see you there.
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I teach a graduate Capstone class at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) which focuses on the Strategic Management of Innovation & Technology.
We look at what exactly strategic management is and then spend most of the semester looking at how an organization can optimize developing Technology internally and also looking at the implications of acquiring from external sources.
In addition, we look at three or four ‘edge-of-the-art’ technologies and discuss their implications.
One of the issues we deal with is how technology impacts on the culture of an organization and the marketplace.
Recently there was an interesting column about the impact of technology dispersion on the US in a blog I frequently look at called the Conversable Economist. In addition to posting it in class I thought others might find it an easy and interesting read:
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2014/04/when-technology-spreads-slowly.html
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