August 28, 2009 • Volume 7 • Number 5

Providing Infrastructure For "The Sweet Stuff"

The vision is articulated among government IT professionals whenever the conversation turns to modernizing infrastructure, implementing virtualization and/or embracing cloud computing.

“As the Infrastructure Officer, from an efficiency standpoint, part of my job is to reduce what I look at as being the burden of infrastructure in order to allow people to focus on the information and the applications.”

To me, that’s the sweet stuff,” Timothy Quinn, Chief Infrastructure Officer at the Department of Interior said during the recent Federal Executive Forum on Infrastructure broadcast on Federal News Radio.

 “My vision for the Department of Interior is an array of infrastructure services that will be provided to a very highly mobile workforce,” declared Quinn.

That workforce will use highly collaborative converged IP voice and video services that cross many boundaries -- state, local, tribal, other federal, and international said Quinn.

They are the stewards of more than 20% of the land in the US -- 500 million acres. With a large field staff out in parks, refuges, Indian reservations and other public lands, Quinn said these pros must have an IT infrastructure primed to handle the rigors of 21^st century information sharing. 

Joining Quinn on the Forum panel, hosted by Jim Flyzik of The Flyzik Group were:

·         Karl Krumbholz, Director, Network Services Programs, ITS/GSA

·         Margie Graves, Acting CIO, Department of Homeland Security

·         David Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Citrix Systems

·         Gary DePreta, Manager, Channel Operations, Federal Channels, Cisco Systems

·         Michael Donovan, Chief Technologist, EDS

Quinn told the audience that the primary network optimization effort at Interior is through their Enterprise Services Network, which is a managed service acquired through GSA and the Networx program.  Infrastructure Sweet Stuff Continued Below  Watch Quinn Video

Underpinning Homeland Infrastructure

Getting out of the infrastructure business is one of acting DHS CIO Margie Graves biggest wishes. “I want to get to the point where the CIOs are concentrating on their mission applications, and concentrating on the delivery of the data to people who need it at the correct time.”

“So our play in this is all about the data -- securing at the data layer, having data standards and moving information as quickly as we possibly can."  Read More   Watch Graves Video

Networx is playing a key role in modernizing government infrastructure – and will have even a larger role when agencies are finally transitioned from FTS 2001 to Networx.

Karl Krumbholz is GSA’s director of Network Services. His team manages the Networx contract, but even as Krumbholz focuses on transition -- which is calls his “top priority”-- he has his eyes on the future. “We are focused on adding new services to our contracts to address the evolving needs of our agency customers and to meet government mandates.”  Read More   Watch Krumbholz Video

Virtualization technologies are optimizing infrastructure, separating the application from the underlying infrastructure. No longer does a one-to-one server relationship necessary. In fact, the technology is enabling according to Gary DePreta from Cisco.

But while technology is important, it is not the only dynamic at work. “At Cisco, we study the future of work and the future of connected life."  Read More  Watch DePreta Video

Providing the technologies that help enable the transition of government has been what Citrix has concentrated on during its 20 year history.

“What we are looking to do is help organizations optimize their current networks better and leverage their existing infrastructure and transform that infrastructure into an architecture where service delivery is the bottom line,” said Citrix’s David Smith.   Read More  
Watch Smith Video

A lot of what is going on today in modernizing infrastructure has to do with moving to a shared infrastructure or paying for services “by the drink” (e.g. cloud computing).

“When you think about the movement towards cloud, when you think about the movement towards virtualization, when you think about consolidation, what you are really talking about is moving towards a shared environment,” said EDS’s Mike Donovan. And that raises questions.  Read More Watch Donovan Video

Vital To Success

“Networx has been vital to our success in providing network services to 2,400 locations. Built on top of this IP-based network are a number of initiatives that we are looking at as being focused on green IT, providing enterprise data centers and virtualized centers.”

Quinn sees these efforts as supporting federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s vision of cloud computing and optimizing efficiencies and economics, while improving services to Interior’s far flung customers.

Quinn faces a number of infrastructure challenges starting with the fact that Interior has so many different lines of businesses – with different priorities. Plus, because of its mission and relationship with the American people and the land, Interior wants to be seen as being a green leader when it comes to IT.

“We go from science to land management to minerals and many others. And to take one in particular, I like to call it science versus security,” explained Quinn.  

“We have scientists, maybe a volcanologist or a geologist or working on climate change and those scientists have a high need for collaboration on a massive scale with departments. In fact many of our scientists are located at colleges and universities, which gives us significant challenges in trying to give them all the network and full array of IT services that they need in order to do their job, while at the same time trying to secure that in such a way that we don’t completely cut them off from communicating with their scientist collaborators. So a lot of work to do there and we look at Web 2.0 technologies as providing a lot of help.

Quinn is looking to the CIO Council to continue its work on solving the issues surrounding architecture and infrastructure that many agencies face.  “We are not the only ones with these problems. We talk to the Department of Energy, NASA, NOAA; lots of folks have similar problems.”

Like many agencies, a big concern is IT governance. At Interior they rely on a well defined set of rules said Quinn.

Interior has an IT Management Committee that includes the CIOs of all of the bureaus. “They meet on a regular basis to discuss issues. Underneath that we have our CTO’s committee which handles a lot of the standards work and development within Interior. Underneath that we have operational change management for network systems and desk top. Sort of parallel to that we have investment review board and working capital fund consortium.

Quinn acknowledged that it sounds like a lot of committees, but made it clear there is well defined set of rules in terms of who does what and there’s a lot of interaction between those groups.

###