August 17, 2007 • Volume 5 • Number 7

FEDERAL EXECUTIVE FORUM TRANSCRIPT

Government Infrastructure

Broadcast on WFED 1050 AM Washington DC - www.FederalNewsRadio.com
Date: July 31, 2007

Moderator

·         Jim Flyzik – The Flyzik Group

Panelists

·         John Johnson, Assistant Commissioner at GSA

·         Barry West, CIO at the Department of Commerce

·         Bob Suda, Acting Deputy CIO, Department of Agriculture

·         Von Harrison, Infrastructure Optimization Line of Business Program Manager, GSA

·         Tom Simmons, Area VP for Federal Systems at Citrix Systems,

·         Ed Vacaro, partner at Homeland Security Federal Systems at Unisys Corp.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

When we talk about infrastructure and optimization we first think about GSA and the Networx program which is sort of the hub of optimization for the government and infrastructure. John, can you start us off with an update on the Networx program and where you are at?

JOHN JOHNSON, GSA

Yes, Networx is moving along quite well. We’ve made our awards for Universal and Enterprise. AT&T, Verizon Business, Qwest, Level 3 and Sprint are working hard right now to conduct their OSS verifications -- their Operational Support Systems verifications -- making sure they can pass those areas. Also we are working on certification and accreditation of the interfaces between our carriers and our customers, so everything’s working well. It looks like transition will begin around the September–October timeframe and we are hopeful that the agencies will be prepared to make their selections shortly afterwards.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Thanks John and congratulations on those awards. It seems to be moving very, very well for a program of that magnitude. We appreciate all the work you are doing there. Barry West over at Commerce, I know you’ve been doing a lot looking at your infrastructure and ways to optimize. Can you give us some updates on your program at the Department of Commerce and perhaps how you see using GSA programs?

BARRY WEST, COMMERCE

Sure. At Commerce we can take advantage of the GSA program through the use of Networx. This vehicle represents a true paradigm shift in services and offers a complete range of intercity telecommunications services we believe to the federal government. This program will allow the Department of Commerce to use the latest technologies to combine the requirements of multiple organizations to realize significant cost avoidance and eliminate duplicate efforts. We are looking primarily right now at email consolidation amongst our 13 bureaus. So we are currently working through our RFI as we speak and we will be looking at service providers as well.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Right, I’ve heard a little bit about that. It seems like that is where optimization usually begins too, with email platforms, and then you are able to begin working into the other applications. Ed Vacaro, over at Unisys, how does industry, when you look at some of these programs, how do you position yourself to support the government in moving towards infrastructure optimization?

ED VACARO, UNISYS

Well, as a large provider to the federal government, what we try to do is be the enabler. When an agency or department is looking at moving in the direction of consolidation or taking optimization into consideration, we work very closely with them looking at what they currently have, where they want to go, and build a vision for the future with them. We try to take into account all of the issues that would come up, and we then lay out the platform, the mechanism, the whole approach to getting there with them. Then we provide the capability along with the people and the services and even the technologies necessary to help get there. We work with all the providers involved and are the overall enabler.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Thanks. Let’s turn to Bob Suda from Agriculture. Agriculture is one of those large organizations; there’s a lot of decentralization, I’m sure there are some challenges there. Can you give us a little update on some of the things that you are doing at the Department of Agriculture to try and optimize your infrastructure there and perhaps how you see using GSA programs.

BOB SUDA, USDA

We have a number of things going on in the areas of both network as well as in our infrastructure optimization areas. Help Desks, obviously we are looking to consolidate a lot of our Help Desks across the department.

As you may know we have 29 different agencies that we dealing with. We are also eMessaging; our messaging project is going well, consolidating that. On the network side of the house that we are looking at now, how can we develop a USDA-net for the whole department? And we currently have a task force looking at a lot of requirements and trying to put something on the street probably in the December- January timeframe under the Networx contract.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Seems like a lot of, we’ll get to that later on in the show, but a lot of convergence here moving towards optimization across the board and I guess John you are right in the middle of it, so we’ll come back to that. Tom Simmonds over at Citrix Systems, tell us how Citrix plays in this. I know you have a lot of product offerings and service offerings. Can you give us an idea of how you play into this overall government infrastructure?

TOM SIMMONS, CITRIX

Citrix is one of many partners in industry that is looking to help the government provide building blocks to achieve the missions and goals. Relative to infrastructure optimization, one of those building blocks is the optimization of the application delivery infrastructure.

Citrix is all about providing access to critical IT resources to users, whether they are citizens, government employees or contractors. We focus on the changing technology around applications because how they are developed and presented puts a lot of pressure on the network and the infrastructure to connect users to the IT resources.

The building blocks that Citrix provides are there to try to decouple or if you will remove the traditional hard wired approach for an application to a user base. And to the extent that Networx gives a robust pipeline for users to get to those IT resources we are there to provide what’s on either end of that pipeline to make sure that the user experience and the missions are met.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific! I like some of those ideas about the wireline, wireless and so forth. If we have time to explore that, I think we’ve got a lot of interesting things happening in the world of wireless down the road and how it will work into a lot of these programs.

Let’s go to Von Harrison at GSA. Give us some ideas of some of the objectives of that IT infrastructure optimization line of business and perhaps some of the progress you are making in your efforts.

VON HARRISON, GSA

Sure. The IT infrastructure optimization line of business was initiated at the beginning of 2006. And we discovered that across government we could save literally billions of dollars in IT infrastructure investments by optimizing. We developed an approach to use a common performance measurement method to improve service levels and cost efficiency.

And the task force decided that this was the right approach, 23 government agency CIOs signed up to that approach. We intend to assist agencies by establishing metrics benchmarked against industry performance and then allow them to decide how they want to reach those metrics.

We are not going to tell them how to do it. There’s a great deal of enthusiasm in this approach because we know that agencies have a lot of challenges with their legacy infrastructures and the contracts that they now have in place. We haven’t laid out any timetable for them to change to a specific contract or migrate to a specific service. We are encouraging agencies to determine for themselves how they will get there and then we will provide some resources to help them.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific! Sounds like the model. As John Johnson and his programs provide the infrastructure and the platforms you are looking out at what are some of the easy ways to lay applications and programs on top of them in a consolidated way. It makes a lot of sense.

I’d like to change and talk a little bit now about some of the challenges. I mean this stuff is tough. Having been there myself at Treasury where we did a large consolidation of all the bureaus there I know that some of the hurdles and constraints one needs to bump into and I know this stuff is hard. If it wasn’t hard we wouldn’t be optimizing now, we’d already be optimized.

But I’d like to talk and maybe get out on the table some of the things that you think are more difficult challenges. Let’s start with Bob Suitor at Agriculture where you’ve got a very decentralized agency with I’m sure a lot of stakeholders. Bob what are some of the difficult challenges you think you need to address to get there?

BOB SUDA, USDA

Well Jim I think some of the challenges that we’ve had in the past are being overcome. I think the issues we’ve had with privacy and security recently across the government have helped us focus more on what we need to do from a consolidation standpoint to increase our level of security and our level of privacy across the department.

We have 20 agencies across Agriculture with so many people in rural areas. The availability of privacy leaks and things like that becomes tremendous. So we are trying to bring all that in from a perspective: what does the user have access to? And part of that is to look at the infrastructure and how we determine the access rights of individuals.

There were challenges but I think those challenges are being overcome and we are getting a lot of consensus across the department now from the CIOs and the CFOs. We’ve actually developed a CFO/CIO council combined to look at these various issues, so we are bringing the right people to the table now and making those challenges now opportunities.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I know we have some questions later about governance but getting CFOs and CIOs at the table together is an important part of all this. Barry, how about over at Commerce, you also have a number of bureaus, some of which have major programs of their own, so what are some of the challenges you encounter on a day to day basis?

BARRY WEST, COMMERCE

Commerce has 13 different bureaus each with different mission requirements. We are probably one of the more diverse departments when you look at everything from NOAA and the scientists and the satellites to Census with the decennial census to the US Patent and Trademark office where we have patent attorneys.

Our bureaus tend to operate autonomously procuring services independently and based on their specific needs, mission, scope, and funding. There is great opportunity to save money and optimize the services.

However there are challenges in providing the governance and the structure to facilitate corporate decision making. Increased coordination amongst the bureau CIOs and the enterprise architecture teams to determine the true technological and business needs of the Department of Commerce as a whole will need to be accomplished in order to overcome this challenge.

I am working aggressively to increase the robustness of our enterprise architecture and will encourage bureaus to seek review across a Commerce EA body that would provide concurrence before implementing a solution. At the enterprise architectural level inconsistencies can be flushed quickly before costs escalate. So communications and knowledge are essential for us in optimizing our infrastructure.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

That’s great and I’m glad you brought up that enterprise architecture because it does seem to be a tool that allows a certain amount of autonomy at the bureau level as long as that autonomy is working within the confines of an enterprise architecture and everyone is moving in the same direction.

John how about at GSA? I know that getting the program in place had to be a challenge in and of itself but now that the program is in place what are some of the short term challenges that are on your plate that you now need to overcome to keep the program moving in a positive direction?

JOHN JOHNSON, GSA

Well, first of all a point of clarification, you said you invented wireless, I thought you invented the internet.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP AND PANEL (banter and laughter)

JOHN JOHNSON, GSA

Where should I begin?

The challenges are to some extent overwhelming. We are somewhat victims of our success. When you think about the number of agencies that we serve; we serve 135 agencies and 1800 sub bureaus so we have a lot of customers out there. They are all building their own versions of their network, if you will; USDA-net as Bob mentioned. Justice Department has Judnet; Treasury Department is T-net, the One-net for DHS, and all these networks being built under the Networx umbrella.

And some of our challenges really are addressing some of the cost cutting initiatives such as FISMA compliance and the movement towards IPv6. They are challenges because quite frankly our customers are looking at us for some guidance on how we are going to address those things.

So while these policy mandates come to us, it’s very important for us to address them in a very forward way; to clear the way for agencies so that they are not encumbered by the uncertainties associated with those policies.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I’m sure the challenge is there. I know a little bit about that Treasury network myself having been there at one point in time and following the story and I’m sure our listeners follow the story on a day to day basis also. It seems like everything is working its way out and moving in the direction it should be. Bob at USDA, what are some of your challenges?

BOB SUDA, USDA

I just want to follow on from what John said a little bit, it’s not only about the inside of the department itself, it is how we are working with the other agencies also.

We are spending some time now with the deputy CIO of Interior and how our Forest Service works with the BLM and also with the Park Service. Because we are dealing with radio communications and there are a lot of challenges there. We are bringing the teams together within those areas also under the Networx umbrella and we are looking forward to seeing how we can work better together.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

That’s a great point and one that’s becoming more and more critical as you look at not only your own organization but your supply chain and those that you do business with and you quickly realize that whatever you do to optimize your own infrastructure if you are relying on other external forces to meet your critical mission objectives you need to understand where they are in their systems.

Great point Bob! Von, how about in the line of business, heading up the eGov program there? What are some of the biggest challenges that you face day to day?

VON HARRISON, GSA

Well just from the perspective of what agencies are sharing with us, we are finding that asset management is a huge issue. It’s difficult to fix your business processes if you can’t identify your costs and know what you have on hand. Organizing that, being able to take a look at that and evaluate and analyze where you can make greater efficiencies, do some consolidations, get rid of some costs that are duplicative, etc.

Agencies are telling us that those are great issues for them. We also know that as agencies look more towards consolidations, it’s a difficult change, it’s not a technology change, it’s more of a culture change and a process change.

We’ve all heard the term before: technology is easy, change is hard, and we hear that and see that over and over again. We know that agencies already have a number of optimization efforts ongoing and some are further ahead than others. Everyone has something that they are doing that’s moving towards either consolidating their email systems or consolidating their data centers or trying to improve how they offer those services. The entire objective of course is to provide all the business processes that will facilitate accomplishing the mission.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Right! Terrific! This is our 21st radio show here and I believe it’s the 21st show that someone very early on raised the issue of culture. And I’ve come to realize that no matter what the topic we pick, when you look at what are the challenges in government that culture issue comes through loud and clear in just about every program.

Break.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

We are talking infrastructure optimization and we were talking about some of the challenges and John you had a comment you were going to make right before the break and could we follow up with you?

JOHN JOHNSON, GSA

A point that I wanted to make is that while we were looking at this point in the life cycle of Networx a lot of folks are looking at Networx to be more of a transition. How do we get off the old contract to a new contract and really this is a transformation.

We need to really take advantage of what Networks has to offer. It is much more robust than some of our previous contracts and agencies should really be looking at how they want to transform themselves to be able to operate more efficiently in the future. At the end of the day we are all graded on have we created a more seamless secure interoperable government all interoperating and sharing information effectively so that we are really a stronger nation.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

So what you are focused on is let’s look at the result and try to measure how we get to that result. I’d like to hear from our industry guests too on that same issue, challenges. Ed, how about from the Unisys perspective when you look back at some of the challenges of trying to work with government optimizing infrastructure, what do you see from your vantage point?

ED VACARO, UNISYS

The interesting thing that we find, as has been alluded to before, is the cultural issue is really the thing that we always have to tackle and it’s kind of a fear more than anything. Organizations are concerned that as we get to a much more consolidated larger and larger infrastructure, more homogenous, that are my mission priorities going to be met?

Are my needs going to be met? Because the one thing that we can say is that while technologies are becoming common across the government, it’s how they are being applied that makes the difference and how do they meet my individual mission.

To deliver good work the organization that is managing and delivering these things has to have a good customer management approach that understands individual needs and makes sure that those are properly met. They have constructed the program such that we have resiliency and elasticity built in so that if you’ve got high critical mission priorities built you can address those needs. Then at the same time if you need to be able to absorb heavy demand and growth or in time requirements and things like that, that it’s built in without constraining the ability to meet other types of requirements for other customers.

Now, that’s a lot of dimensions and a lot of degrees of freedom to handle at any given time. But it’s those types of things when you look at these types of programs that you are going to make successful or not. Otherwise you are going to have agencies running away from it.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Sounds like flexibility, you’ve got to be flexible and make sure you are able to respond quickly which I like John’s focus on the result and as you are aware I’m real big on trying to do things on a performance based approach and having true results that you are looking to get and be able to get there helps a lot in that issue.  

Tom, how about over at Citrix Systems, what are some of the things that you consider some of the bigger challenges in optimizing, in working with government to optimize infrastructure?

TOM SIMMONS, CITRIX

Jim, we are seeing a lot of the same things that Ed mentioned and Vaughn’s reference to culture.

At the end of the day it’s the people that will get the job done and culture is a critical aspect but I think the other challenge that we see at Citrix working with the federal government is that you’ve also got this legacy of some of the largest enterprises in the world that have to be taken into account.

As you well know, IRS has an application infrastructure there that is so customized and so tuned to a specific requirement that changing it and bringing it up to date in a world of web enabled applications and enterprise applications presents its own set of challenges. As a government now you have to serve a legacy application base and you have to develop with the tools and technologies that are available today always keeping an eye to the future to what’s the next technology and what’s the next access or application delivery mechanism that we are going to use.

We will see in the near future, a government that is more My Space or Google-like in its immediate access to information but some of the back end will probably still be built around these legacy applications. And a program like Networx that has to take into account all of these things is a tremendous challenge.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I want to shift a little bit to this next issue and it’s one that comes up all the time. I think it’s a misunderstood issue from time to time.

The administration has a lot of efforts towards competitive sourcing or outsourcing of a lot of these types of activities to get the government out of some of the operations and maintenance kinds of activities. Then you have the concept of managed service, which isn’t necessarily outsourcing but it’s providing someone with a managed service.

I’m wondering how you decide on whether or not you are going to outsource things or use a managed service or buy it yourself with government ownership. I don’t know how big this issue is in the various programs but it is one that comes up all the time. Vaughn in the line of business issue; is the issue of outsourcing one that comes up and how are you dealing with that kind of a question?

VON HARRISON, GSA

Yes there are a number of agencies that are in the throes of A-76 studies. They are evaluating within internally how they need to reorganize and what pieces of it they need to outsource.

One of the first things that they need to do is to determine what their security priorities are and what levels of security their infrastructure needs to address. And then they need to determine which parts of those are inherently governmental and which parts can be outsourced to companies that either will provide them either with a full slate of services or even partial.  

Seeking managed services is one way of addressing the desk top. There are agencies that are already buying much more than that, their data centers are included in what they are buying. There are agencies that are selling some of those services to each other. If they have good contracts, good practices, good processes, and other agencies, usually smaller agencies find it more economical to buy from another agency than to try and do it themselves. So there are a number of things that have to be considered when they do that.

The bottom line is for agencies to be able to optimize they are going to have to consider all of their responsibilities. Everything is going to have to be on the table. I don’t think agencies any longer can turn away from considering options that in the past some of their employees were not in favor of considering because it may have meant that there would be a reduction in the number of government personnel.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I think that the depth in the numbers of government employees is a challenge to have all the people you need to do everything you need to do because it’s so complex to manage infrastructure today to think that you can have all those skills internal is a difficult thing. Barry, how about, is this a question at Commerce? It seems to come up all the time, outsourcing, managed service, should we do it ourselves, how do you wrestle with that issue at Commerce?

BARRY WEST, COMMERCE

Right, it’s coming up all the time at Commerce as well. It seems like the decisions are driven by many variables as far as outsourcing goes including expertise in the vendor community, in house expertise, partnering with other federal departments and so on. Each decision is also impacted by the realities of available funding, lead time, future trends, and initiatives. Another key factor to consider is the service part of the mission of the organization. Outsourcing can relieve an organization of the chore of the routine IT function so that resources can spend time on the core business functions.

We are looking at that right now with our email. Many of our bureaus have embraced email as part of their core function. We are looking at that as email Help Desks that can be something that can be outsourced if you have the proper security, privacy, identity theft task force issues are considered, we can outsource a lot of this material and move on and really focus on the core mission of the department.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I think that’s a great point Barry, focusing on the core mission and get away from the day to day things. It’s funny the way some of these things came about. I see how at Treasury when I first took over when I began taking calls on the weekend that the Secretary couldn’t get on to his computer, I quickly realized that I needed an outsourced Help Desk that could respond to calls like how do I get on to my computer and that type of thing.

And I know in the case of security too when you are looking at getting patches put in place, when vulnerabilities are identified it’s nice to have an outsourced operation that can quickly do that. Vaughn, do you have a follow up on that?

VON HARRISON, GSA

I just wanted to mention that we have a new focus on “green IT” and there are services available and companies that are able to provide a better approach to green IT than government can in some cases. It’s an important thrust that the administration is solidly behind and it needs to be something that’s factored in.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Yes, it’s certainly something that has risen up in the priorities here in the last few months or so. Bob, how about at Agriculture, this issue of what we do ourselves, what do we do as a managed service, what do we outsource. Are you encountering those same kinds of questions?

BOB SUDA, USDA

Yes, it comes back to security, as far as what do we want to have internal staff versus external staff do for us in regards to data and the information that we have out there. It depends on the function. Whether it’s a small Help Desk or whether it’s a large Help Desk, whether it’s a data center or not, it goes back to what kind of systems we are housing in those locations and what are we using the data for.

So we are taking the approach that we want to make sure that we have a secure facility, a secure USDA and as part of that whole process is to make sure that there’s the right mix between management and the activities that are done day to day within the department itself.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Right. John I guess from your perspective it’s an interesting question too because in a way you are providing managed services to the agencies that you are supporting in government but on the other hand you have those vendors that are supporting you are doing so in a managed service role. Is this issue one that makes it to your IMC meetings where you try to discuss what do we do internally, what do we do in government versus what we can rely on the community to do?

JOHN JOHNSON, GSA

First of all I’d like to say that we maintain three very robust channels to the market that provide goods and services, IT and telecom goods and services to our customers. Our schedules program where we have about 5300 contracts, our GWACs program, very robust, we have Alliant, we are just getting prepared to make an award for Alliant, and Alliant Small Business later this year. And then we have our network services program where we have about 160 contracts.

I think this outsourcing initiative or these managed network service initiatives are really spawned from a couple of different perspectives. First of all there’s an erosion of our intellectual capital within the government and folks realize that it’s very, very hard to keep pace with the evolution of technology and with the erosion of our intellectual capital one way to address that would be to rely more on the service provider to provide requisite services required.

The other thing is that we are also under some, an evolution if you will, to learn how to manage an SLA driven environment, a Service Level Agreement environment, where we are looking at performance based contracts and we are measuring the effectiveness of our service providers in terms of them meeting what we need. So I think as we evolve and agencies become more comfortable with that kind of arrangement we will see more and more of that. Today in the area of network services we are about 35% as managed network services.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Tom, how about at Citrix, how do you look at that issue? Is that something that comes to your attention or is there preferences in terms of the way you see this market going in the future?

TOM SIMMONS, CITRIX

I think that from our perspective at Citrix, our job is to enable the government to make the right decision. The way we approach what we do with our technologies is one of the ancillary benefits of consolidating data centers and the applications in those data centers is that you do decouple the application from the network and the client device that the user has to use to get to it. So the government can then make the decision on outsourcing any component, all components.

We see today a trend in government around thin client as a way of saving costs, enhancing security, while giving the user the same kind of experience that they would with a fat client PC under their desk or their laptop.

The concept there is by pulling the applications behind the firewall, consolidating them in a data center, you can secure them more effectively, you can manage them more efficiently and then you rely on the network as your access mechanism and the client device can be a thin client and thereby reduce the associated help desk costs, life cycle costs and so forth. So outsourcing in a Seat Management scenario in that kind of environment gives the Seat Management contractor the ability to put whatever is cost effective for them to management there, and the government can focus on what is the application there for and how do we use it to do our mission.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

That’s good. It’s amazing to me the way the pendulum swings. We’ve gone from centralization of the IT function to decentralization to end user computing to thin clients, fat clients whatever, it seems like we go through generations of pulling it all back in and then pushing it all back out and then pulling it all back in. Someone should write a book someday on all that on the whole history of the way this thing works.

Ed, how about at Unisys? I know that Unisys has been involved in lots of managed services. You’ve seen some of the best stories and probably faced some of the most difficult challenges too. You have a lot of experience in this area.

ED VACARO, UNISYS

I’ve always said that I am going to write a book about all this. I’ll talk to you first about that. I have to go back a little bit. Five years ago when we started up TSA we offered a managed service program where TSA was a nascent agency that had nothing and we came in as a complete provider and gave them everything. It was a total turnkey solution. But as the agency has matured the mission has changed a little bit and their ability to manage more things and the need to control more of the IT infrastructure and information, we’ve realized that we have had to morph that. So what we are finding is that we have had to change our service offerings as the customers have changed and now we are offering a broader range.

I think that we are altering our ways of delivering the services as the customers are changing. So what we are really finding is that it’s not a kind of a binary thing where it’s either all in-housed or all outsourced, it’s a matter of we tailor it now to what is right for the particular agency. Is it that we just simply provide you with a consultancy service or staff augmentation or do we really take on more and more and become part of your IT organization where we do more and more of the stuff that you can’t do.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Handle it case by case, look at agencies…

ED VACARO, UNISYS

It’s very customized.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Agency by agency, program by program. There are some tough challenges there. This is great and we want to talk a little bit about money and governance and vision for the future.

Break.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Before we begin talking about the future and where this is all going, I’m curious about one question perhaps we can hear from everybody quickly about. And that is when it comes to the money.

Money is always an issue. Money and governance When you look at consolidating or getting multiple stakeholders, the pass the hat approach has always been difficult or the dialing for dollars or knocking on doors trying to figure out who throws in what chair for the money, and I wonder if we could ask our panelists,

John let’s start with you at GSA, do you have a governance structure in place or some model in place that allows that finding and that money issue to be resolved as you work through this?

JOHN JOHNSON, GSA

I think we have a natural structure and that is customer feedback. If we don’t produce or provide them with what our customers want at the most reasonable cost possible, then we have issues.

And I think their view in terms of how they handle money and what they are going to do is going to be a bit different than mine as I’m a service reseller, but basically we are very mindful of the need to provide them with what they need in a timely manner as well as providing it as cost effectively as possible.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I like that. It’s performance based. If you perform, you get the money. Barry, how about at Commerce? When you try and do your consolidation I’m sure that getting everybody on board and agreeing to the money has got to be a very interesting discussion.

BARRY WEST, COMMERCE

It is and it’s a tough one. As you mentioned earlier, we had several options and funding strategies to fund IT requirements programs and make enterprise wide purchases. We work closely with the CFO to ensure that we use the best funding strategies and we also work closely with our procurement executive on procurement and acquisition.

But things do come up. For example the 0616 security requirements last year with two factor authentication and the encryption of remote devices and in those cases we went out and actually used algorithms based on population of our bureaus. And we used the working capital fund and taxed those bureaus accordingly based on the population. and that seemed to work well.

But what we are really finding tough is when you get into some of the, where you have to roll your sleeves up and get into some of the tough issues like email consolidation and server consolidation where you need some of that up front funding is really where it gets tough and you’ve really got to open up the hood and look under and really look at contracts.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

That’s great. Well put Barry. Ed when you look at the funding, I guess for you guys you look across and hope you get paid from all of these stake holders. I guess another way to look at it from industry is on Barry’s issue of up front funding. Sometimes I think industry is called upon, are you willing to put some up front funding in place to help and get the government going. How do you view that issue?

ED VACARO, UNISYS

We look at it from a couple of ways. Obviously we are a business and we have share holders and responsibilities to make sure that we keep up with those. But we’ve always worked in partnership with government and many times we’ve been called upon based on situations to step up and do that and we’ve done so willingly knowing that there will be something on the end that makes it whole.

In the long run it’s always pretty much worked out. The key thing here, however, is to make sure that when you get into situations like this that you have a very, very clear set of understandings with the program, with the contracts officer and with the whole management structure and make sure that that governance structure is well understood and in place otherwise you get a lot of misunderstandings and into a lot of long discussions later on about what did you really mean and how much is it going to cost?

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Yes, get it right up front.

ED VACARO, UNISYS

Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of red faces later on.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

And I still believe that we are heading to a time where things like share-in-savings and performance based contracts are going to continue to be necessary to get the government where it needs to go. We haven’t really figured it out yet but I still think it’s going to be there and over time we will figure it out.

ED VACARO, UNISYS

And I think we are going in that direction. Performance based is really the way it goes and we fully believe that getting paid for quality work is the best way to measure the effectiveness of a contract.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Absolutely. Bob, how about from your vantage point, the funding and governance as you try to move along and meet your objectives, how do you work through that issue?

BOB SUDA, USDA

Actually we’ve established IT governance a framework within the department in the last year that really we sit down with our agencies prior to budget time to discuss their budgets for both infrastructure as well as their business applications.

And then we have an approval process that each agency must go through for any IT procurement over $25,000 must go through the CIO shop, it’s a legislative mandate that we’ve had for several years. So we are able to, at least up front, find out what they are purchasing.

Now we have got back into that we are going to be tracking those purchases through the procurement system to make sure that what we are buying is effecting the investment that they asked for up front. So we are going to be able to do the whole life cycle process of how we are actually providing the money and looking at savings while we can. We are consolidating a number of our contracts that we have for software.

As you know, agencies are buying their own software so now we are looking across the board through our EA process to determine where we are buying these in pockets and try to consolidate some of those contracts. So we are moving forward from a procurement standpoint and a budgeting stand point, working very closely with our CFO and also our procurement executives as a team to try to carrel a lot of those costs that are occurring today.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great that you have that model in place to and you are tracking along. We’ve seen a lot of those contracts where you go back and study what’s happened in the past up until the award and the award goes in place and then things start off and all of a sudden you don’t have the accountability in place and things get out of hand real quickly. It’s good to see you putting all that in up front; it makes a lot of sense. Tom, how about from your perspective looking at government, how do you see this issue working?

TOM SIMMONS, CITRIX

We develop technologies and position them and develop them around our ability to either do a job better, or do a job more efficiently. And a lot of what we do in presenting that technology as a solution has to do with the finances. What is the return on investment, what is the total cost of ownership? It wasn’t too long ago that I visited with a CIO, who is not represented on this panel, who said, I know that you are here to talk about my $1.3 billion IT budget but let me tell you that 90% of that is spent before I ever get it.

So your job is to show me how you can create budget for your solution out of what I’m already doing. I think that’s the big challenge that we have in not only managing the budgets as they come but as industry trying to participate in those budget decisions is to be able to clearly articulate the areas of cost savings or cost avoidance, how quickly you can get a return and then how often you can maintain that cost savings with cost of ownership analysis and things like that.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

And I think that is what this is all about. It’s how to spend money more wisely as opposed to spend more money. You have to get over that first hump of getting that initial investment but then over time the goal obviously is to reduce the overall per unit cost of providing government infrastructure services. Vaughn in your role, I’m sure all the agencies just are real happy to throw in and contribute and give you all the money you need to keep the program rolling. How is it setting up a line of business when you are looking to fund that business? How do you deal with that money in governance issue?

VON HARRISON, GSA

I’d like to answer the question on two different fronts. First of all with regard to how agencies do it. Clearly they need to prioritize their requirements. Sometimes that is easier said than done. Every agency is required to have some kind of governance structure; their architecture review board should have the ability to review investments, to reprioritize, to move money around to do whatever is necessary within that agency to make the right choices to support the mission.

Agencies should also be maximizing the use of acquisition vehicles that are available to them, service level agreements, putting in place best practices that they’ve seen done in other places, and certainly the whole acquisition game is in part an art of balancing risk so we know that government as well as industry has a dog in the fight and that has to be balanced.

From the perspective of the line of business itself, yes there are various funding models. Some of it is agency contributions only, some other eGov initiatives are a combination of agency contributions and of appropriations or funding by the managing partner or the lead agency.

In the case of this line of business it’s a combination. In the first year it was agency only, I think that speaks to the interest of the agencies in making sure that this line of business gets off the ground. In FY ’08 we will have additional funding kicked in by GSA and so managing that is probably far easier than the job that agencies have to do to manage their funding and governance issues.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. Panelists we always like to talk about the vision for the future and we have about 10 or 11 minutes left, which is about 2 minutes per panelist here and I’d like to ask each of you to give some thought about this, about your vision for the future, where you think we are going in the years out with this optimization of the government infrastructure. Let’s start with our industry panelists, Ed what is your vision for where we are all going in the future here?

ED VACARO, UNISYS

What I like to do is look at where commercial industries is going first and see some of the interesting ideas that are happening in some of the breakthrough areas and take a look at what does that do for us.

Some of the things like iPhones and iPods, how does that have applicability to what we are doing here in government. Forget about the hardware and stuff and think about what is going on with the information. It makes an awful lot of sense when you think about the need for situational awareness in what we are doing today. In all aspects of government, in all aspects of what we do today, situational awareness has a lot to do with how we use the information.

Take a look at a program like Networx that brings together the ability to take our entire infrastructure and create access to large amounts of information, it’s all about access presentation and control. Now you have various forms of media and access devices that you can use to get to it. Once we have those capabilities and control mechanisms in place now anybody that needs to have the information any time they want it, anywhere they want it, that’s the vision of the future, so that you can do your job and have the information available any time anywhere.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Tom?

TOM SIMMONS, CITRIX

Ditto. Our CEO has a term for the next generation of workers coming out of the colleges and universities today, he calls it the “echo generation”. And they are used to this on demand environment that Ed speaks of where they get their news, instead of from CNN or CBS from My Space and You Tube. They file their assignments electronically over the web. They do this from their dorm rooms, from Starbucks; they do this from the beach. These are the folks and the expectations that are coming into not just IT across the board but IT in government as we move forward. It will be interesting to see, I don’t know that I have a vision here, but it will be interesting to see how we accommodate this next generation coming on with that on time, on demand, anywhere availability of information as these guys come on line.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Tom, that’s a great point, what the kids are doing these days. I just got a new cell phone and I picked it up and I give it to my daughter and she put it together like that. We’ve only got a minute here and Vaughn your one minute version of the future.

VON HARRISON, GSA

A seamless, secure, interoperable infrastructure that enables the mission providing optimal service levels to citizens, businesses and governments and within our own government.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Well thought out and succinct. Bob what you see from the Department of Agriculture where you have been involved with telecom in government for quite some time a lot of different agencies’ view points. Give us your vision of how you see the future of all of this.

BOB SUDA, USDA

I’d like to talk for a minute about the next generation coming into the government. We’ve got to make sure that they realize what they have access to. We can’t give everybody access to everything. The new generations are used to that.

But what I think we have to do is step back now and say what are we going to do about things like records management, eRecovery, the things that are going to be affecting us from a legal standpoint down the road. What emails do we save, which ones don’t we save from a more detailed perspective.

But I think it’s getting bigger than that with enterprise contracts, how we look at those. How we look at the use of the thin client. I have that on my desk today and I love it. I won’t go back now to a fat client. So how many people within the Department of Agriculture can actually use that type of technology and how much can we save doing it and obviously increase the security. So we are looking at short term and long term from those perspectives. But it all comes back to what is the information that is needed for somebody to do their job in the future.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. Thanks Bob. Barry, again you’ve had an opportunity to look at these issues from a number of different vantage points through your great career in government. You’ve moved from a couple of key spots and you are now sitting as CIO at Commerce. What is your vision for where this is all going in the years ahead?

BARRY WEST, COMMERCE

I really think Jim back to my earlier points this afternoon about enterprise architecture. We really need to step up to the plate and really treat that as a true program and quit going through the motions. We really need to engage enterprise architecture. Maybe we need to change the name to business transformation. Maybe it’s time to get rid of that name.

But enterprise architecture really becomes a routine part of our business analysis and basically it becomes integrated into our routine business operations and strategic decision making. That has to happen. And then the two underlying factors I think in making a common government infrastructure is security and then second the health of our government IT workforce of the future.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great points there Barry and you are right to think about the people.  People are so important on that one too. John Johnson, where is this all going? You are kind of a key driver; you are sitting right in the middle of this Networx program, the big infrastructure consolidation of the future. Where do you see it all going in the future?

JOHN JOHNSON, GSA

Thank you for reminding me of that. If I had to boil it down to a few words, I would say ubiquitous, secure, and reliable communications. In other words you can send and receive information wherever you are whether it is wireless or wired or what have you. I think that’s what everybody is looking for; they are looking at the infrastructure to serve more as a utility. To send and receive information focusing more on outcomes as we mentioned earlier. Mission accomplishment. Do I have what I need where I am when I need it is key. We’ll be looking at simplifying interfaces for security and reliability and focusing more on dominant business space awareness in other words the agencies really knowing what they have where they have it and what information they need to accomplish their core missions as my peers highlighted.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

As we’ve been talking I’ve been jotting down little notes to make a summary comment or two. And I think the couple of things that John just said, the idea of utility I think where we are heading and what we will see with things like Ipv6 which is going to open up a whole new world of applications and opportunities where the network will be able to address all the devices and so we will deal with that interoperability issue as opposed to being worried about how to make all these devices talk to each other we’ll be focused on the issue of how can the network talk to all the devices and allow the network to be the mechanism by which these devices communicate.

And I do think we’ll see a time as these new generations come up that they will assume a lot of these things in the case of infrastructure and they will assume that a lot of these things that we are working on today will be in place; just like they are today with the cell phones and the iPods and devices. They don’t worry about how it works, they just make it work. I actually think we will see the day where we have, I actually wrote something about this thing, instead of a General Services Administration, there might be a Government Services Administration where there will be an agency providing government services and the agencies themselves will be focused on their critical mission, policy and the services and the infrastructure will be there as a utility to support them whatever they choose to do.