








I am humbled and more than pleased to serve as the Technical Chair of SYS-CON’s 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo.
To highlight the importance of this conference, I only need to repeat the guiding principles driving President Obama’s technology agenda:
· I Innovation in the Economy: Drive Economic Growth and Solve National Problems By Deploying a 21st Century Information Infrastructure
o The President believes that modernized infrastructure is a necessary part of the foundation for long term economic stability and prosperity. That includes everything from a comprehensive national broadband plan, to new health care information technology, to a modernized electrical grid.
Within a few short months, we have seen a whirlwind of change across the government IT industry landscape. The appropriation of $7.2B for broadband internet access nationwide, the launching of USASpending.gov, the appointment of Mr. Vivek Kundra as the nation’s first ever Federal Chief Information Officer and the rapid adoption of cloud computing are only a few examples of this historic change. As government IT professionals, we all share in the duty and responsibility of making this change work. This means balancing implementation speed with the need for ironclad security. It means fighting for that additional budget item in a time of economic collapse and fiscal crisis. It means dealing with sometimes archaic procurement regulations while simultaneously struggling to meet even more stringent IT governance deadlines.
To assist you in this challenge, the 2009 Government IT Conference & Expo is specifically designed to address many unique aspects of government information technology. Specialized tracks will cover cloud computing, virtualization, service oriented architecture (SOA), security and compliance. There will also be breakout sessions on the unique issues surrounding cloud security, including the important distinctions between private and public clouds. Join us in an informative and collaborative environment where expert speakers from government and the software industry alike will look at the unique issues involved with handling and sharing government information.
I look forward to meeting you at this important event, October 6, 2009 in Washington, DC. Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any service.
"To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative."
-President Obama, April 25, 2009
Have you ever been given the task of building and executing an aggressive customer outreach program? Well I received my assignment about a year ago and trust me; the budget was not commensurate with the assigned goal. My particular need was to educate prospective Federal government customers on a new information technology trend. Known as cloud computing, this new approach blends service oriented architecture (SOA), virtualization technologies and a "pay-by-the-use" sales approach into a new IT delivery business model.
Although this new approach promised the delivery of better constituent service at a reduced cost, risk adverse Federal agency decision makers needed to know much more before they would even consider cloud computing as an option. During a time of economic collapse and fiscal crisis, competing security, governance and procurement requirements would also need to be adequately addressed. Unfortunately, "elastic computing" still needed an "elastic federal procurement" companion.
Our initial approach to this challenge was to rely on traditional media outlet tools. After first securing prominent positioning and ad space in an industry leading print magazine, we aggressively sought opportunities to also publish related print articles. Although we were very frugal in our negotiations during this initial campaign, creative development cost, content review timelines and limited publication frequencies all contributed to making this an untenable budgetary option. Attempts to salvage this traditional approach with parallel email campaigns were also less than satisfactory. High list acquisition cost, weak channel linkage and an inability to gauge our relevance to targeted readers led to very low click through rates.
After this dismal start, we finally made the jump into new media with the launch of a customer focused blog. This shift began to deliver results almost immediately. From a budget point of view, our burn rate reduced significantly. For the first time, we were also able to directly measure the efficiency of our outreach program (blog visitors per dollar spent). Creative development cost plummeted, content review times shortened and our publication frequencies increased dramatically. Since our visitors were self-selected, blog post relevance was also directly measureable. Even with this enhanced flexibility, however, the one obvious shortfall was distribution. Without an established readership or broad web presence our industry impact was minimal. That's when we turned to Ulitizer.
We first linked up with Ulitzer through an author site. With Really Simple Syndication (RSS), blog post were automatically published on selected Ulitzer topic sites. This single move increase blog post readership from ~150 per week to over 150 per day!! These rapid results emboldened us to tackle the editorship of a couple of topics. This move doubled our readership yet again! With these two simple moves, we quickly addressed our distribution shortfall while maintaining high flexibility and a low budgetary burn rate. Recently, we've extended our foray into new media by "tweeting" links to our newest blog post and Ulitzer articles. Although detailed topic statistic are not routinely made available by Uliizer, they have told me that our two topics have a combined 1.2M views per month, 80,000 of which are from unique visitors.
In the six months we've been using Ulitzer, the platform has definitely demonstrated its value in the delivery of true publishing synergy with new media. Through it, we have built an effective, responsive and fiscally conservative customer outreach program. Industry thought leadership, as measured by article readership, has exceeded all expectations. We look forward to future enhancements and will certainly leverage the many other related offerings.
Follow me on http://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

Today, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC™) announced an agreement to work together to advance the Enterprise Architecture of NextGen, FAA’s national airspace (NAS) transformation program.
The NCOIC will analyze and evaluate NextGen’s enterprise architecture views, products, plans, net-centric patterns and operational concepts. Working collaboratively, its members will develop “voice of industry” recommendations about applying net-centric standards to the NextGen procurement, as a way to achieve interoperability in the NAS and, potentially, the skies beyond U.S. borders.
According to Terry Morgan, NCOIC executive chairman, the standards recommendations, best practices and net-centric pattern development derived from this collaboration is expected to strengthen NextGen’s requirements. “Our recommendations will be founded on the thoughts of multi-national, multi-industry leaders in net-centricity.”
The NextGen enterprise architecture will be based on open standards and designed to enable network-centric operations—includes the following: delivering vital information to those who operate the NAS; speeding system development and reducing procurement cost through re-use of software, patterns and best practices; effectively bringing legacy systems into an interoperable enterprise; and supporting the seamless integration of rapidly emerging commercial technology into NextGen.
FAA Q & A: https://www.ncoic.org/apps/org/workgroup/ext_engagements/download.php/12983/FAA_Q_%26_A_Posted2.doc
NCOIC member roles for FAA OTA:
July 13-15, 2009, in Arlington, VA, the Object Management Group, is holding a Standards in Government & NGO's Workshop. During the first day, the Cloud Computing Standards Summit will focus on cloud computing standards for government clouds. Participants include:
Recommendations from this summit will be made available to the July 15th, NDU IRM Cloud Computing Symposium attendees.
The establishment of compatible industry and government standards are crucial to the broad adoption of cloud computing. Just as standards allowed the global spread and enhanced the utility of the Internet, standards will drive the utility of the cloud computing paradigm.
Registration for this seminal event is available at http://www.omg.org/registration/GOV-WS/css/index.htm
The Federal Executive Forum panel participants are:
The complete panel discussion will be available via a Federal News Radio webcast starting today, Thursday, June 25th at 2pm (http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?sid=1692826&nid=50). There is no charge for this event. To receive an email reminder two hours before the webcast starts, please register.
Follow me on http://Twitter.com/Kevin_JacksonDuring this week's Federal News Radio Federal Executive Forum pre-recording, Dr. Leslie Lenert, Director, National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), shared some of his thoughts on the future of health care information technology. His comments included the following:
The complete panel discussion will be available via a Federal News Radio webcast starting Thursday, June 25th at 2pm (http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?sid=1692826&nid=50). There is no charge for this event. To receive an email reminder two hours before the webcast starts, please register.
Follow me on http://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson
This week pre-recording of Federal News Radio Federal Executive Forum featured Linda Fischetti , Health Informatics Architect at the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). During a panel discussion, her comments on VHA accomplishments and plans included:
The Federal Executive Forum panel participants were:
The complete panel discussion will be available via a Federal News Radio webcast starting Thursday, June 25th at 2pm (http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?sid=1692826&nid=50). There is no charge for this event. To receive an email reminder two hours before the webcast starts, please register.
9/9/08 The Cloud Wins in Minneapolis at the RNC!