Interoperable Democracy: (#INDIVISIBLE) I just read Howard Schultz' open letter in the New York Times July 1 edition. This blog is about interoperability, and when you think about democracy, it is the ultimate standard for oppportunity and freedom. I applaud Howard's call for getting along, compromising, and getting this country back to a nation where all can work, and all can feel that the American Dream is still within the reach of those that do the work. 4th of July should give us all a few moments to figure out who in our political districts are pulling on the oars, who are sitting their doing nothing, and who are actively trying to disrupt progress. Demoncrat, Republican or Libertarian - we need to move anyone not working in our interests back into the private sector and out of being the people's representative. I too have been blessed from a life that started with some poverty, trauma, and strife. There have been some bumps along the way way, but only in America do I feel that I have had the latitude to make my own decisions, execute my own path, and receive the market driven benefits from those efforts. I'm sorry to see so many people not empbracing the work ethic required to make this happen, and I'm disappointed with the number of people that don't pay taxes. I'm aslo disappointed with the people at the top of the income ladder - they need to invest and lead versus take their winnnings off the table - both corporations and individuals are sitting on mountains of cash. We need leadership in both business and government that we're not getting. I applaud Bill Gates for starting Microsoft from scratch and reaping the benefits. I abhor executive compensation where major shareholder losses still result in multi-million dollar bonuses. If you need some great examples, look at our military and our olympic athletes - they epitomize striving without regard for the almighty dollar!

The importance of data standards in 2012

2012 promises to be a watershed of new technologies heading to maturity; particularly cloud computing. Larry Ellison was way of his time back in the late 90's in trumpeting the Web PC and the demise of the local PC with all of its associated issues and costs.

Like almost all revolutions, the cloud will be additive and help make all the rest work better, faster and longer. PCs will interact with phones and tablets, and an increasing number of automated sensors will be feeding cloud based applications across a wide range of functions.

Standardizing the data "bullets" will make the issue of whose platform and technology largely moot, and allow greater interoperability across partners, government, vendors, competitors and internationally. There are plenty of issues - security, scalability, resiliancy and total cost of ownership are going to be with us for a long time to come.

You've gotten a taste of how this can work with Twitter - for people to people transactions, keeping it to 140 charachters (though with links, people reference huge data sets including the library of congress) makes brevity a necessity.

Google has embraced CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) for their newly launched Public Alerting System - allowing for a wide range of alerts to be consolidated into one map. For the private sector security market, Pinkerton/Securitas has launched a product called Vigilance that is heavily embracing CAP as a means of integrating public, private, premium, open source, sensor, and internal data all into one interface.

It will take time, but this is a growing trend! Big data with no structure is tough to utilize. Big data with structure is far more searchable by mere mortals.

Interoperability and 2012

Lots of activity going on in the interoperability world:

OASIS and SITREP: I saw an amazing set of demonstration dashboards that showed the new Situation Report standard from OASIS Emergency Management Committee. Amazingly deep, the idea of multiple organizations being able to share detailed incident information transparently is a great vision.

NOAA nextgen: I don't know a lot about it, but I know NOAA always leads the field in terms of innovation in the federal government. Weather information very valuable to all.

CAP: Montreal summit on CAP, and a lot of work on future CAP concepts. Global adoption continues, and FEMA is rolling out IPAWS and CMAS systems finally.

HTML5: Promises major interoperability of web pages on all sorts of devices.

More to follow - the world is becoming a more standardized place!

The world of systems is changing for the better....

Say hello to cloud computing, it is something you will get to know well over the next 5-10 years as most information technology moves to centralized servers instead of inside the corporation data centers.

When energy was first produced by harnessing the wind or putting a paddle wheel on a river, it was all created and used locally. Few economies of scale, lots of maintenance issues, and generally a hard way to do things.

Corporations have built vast empires of servers and staff to service their IT needs over the last 60 years. What has resulted has limited economies of scale, lots of maintenance issues, and a generally hard way to operate. Corporations that hired great IT people did well, others not so well. Even world renowned companies like Sony had their systems broken into, with only the internal people to hold accountable.

The cloud helps these problems in several ways. Security can be watched more tightly (Fort Knox versus a bunch of local branch banks), economies of scale can apply, and the Cloud providers provide a level of liability protection that internal IS people have not since they are part of the host corporation.

Will there be problems? Of course. Disasters and embarrassments? Inevitably. Is this progress or the "next wave" of computing? Yes it is.

Interoperable data will allow rapid collaboration between the cloud applications, stepping up the pace of innovation and cooperation.

Will this affect everyone? It already has as major businesses like EBAY and Amazon and SalesForce.com all have conducted business from a web hosted environment. It has worked very well, and the cloud is the next step toward making this model pervasive.

Will this move 100% of everything? Nope. There are some sensitive applications that will defy the trend, and there will always be the need for some local data (spreadsheets, word docs, etc) for convenience.

Times are changing. Don't get left behind.

Standards and the Broken Government

The government of the United States is broken - at the Federal, State, and local levels - 1 completely redundand federal govt, 50 states, territories, over 3,000 cities and thousands of overlapping city and town governments.

This made a lot of sense when you had large distances between populations, and slow transportation (pre 1930). It makes no sense today to allow for thousands of different approaches.

If you talk to people in these various entities you find out that redundancy, duplication and any lack of a standardized approach is mostly absent. Insurance is regulated by the states, and there are 51 separate methods of being an insurance agent? Why?

Corporations like WalMart and Home Depot have shown how standards drive success and efficiencies. If a WalMart exec suddenly decided he was going to something majorly differnt, he or she would quickly be shown the door.

Do we really need Fish and Game at both the federal level and all the states? As much as I love fishing, it makes no sense in our current financial straits. Are all the government agencies necessary? Why do the overap so much.

Imagine the blowback if someone suggested getting rid of states in favor of regions, or consolidating all the counties in one set of state provided services.

We have to change with the world if we're going to lead.

OASIS - Structured Emergency Management Data

OASIS (www.oasis-open) is laying the groundwork for a sea change in how emergency management is handled. Elysa Jones heads up their technical committe and has been a tireless contributor for years (pro-bono).

Common Alerting Protocol, conceived in the late 90s/early 2000 is now becoming a world standard and saving countless lives with severe weather warnings (NOAA), Earthquake reporting (USGS), Tsunami Warning, and a host of other time senstive threats. CAP is easy to use, interoperabe so that you don't have to buy certain software, multi-lingual and other key constructs. There is nothing competitive to it that can handle the general nature of emergency alerts. FEMA has chosen CAP for their years after Katrina Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS).

EDXL-DE (a stndardized delivery package that can address both explicit and functional addressees) and a host of other standards are either released or in development:
1. Resource Messaging: instead of random phone calls and the good old boy method of borrowing needed resources - EDXL RM brings a scalable, complete method for acquiring people, equipment, and other key resources using XML transactions.
2. HAVE: Don't you think hospitals should be able to report status (beds, doctors, and other vital information) automatically to the 9-1-1 centers so they are informed when it comes to a life or death decision of what hospital to route an accident patient to? Its all manual, but the Hospital Availability Standard makes this achieveable without massive cost.
3. Tracking of Emergency Patients
4. SITREPS: you would think that one standardized set of info that could e shared would make sense. It would. Everyone does it differently, including every federal agency, state, and local group. EDXL SITREP will change this.

And there is more......they won't throw in Ginzu knives, but this non-profit, tireless organization is working to fix the huge problems that exist today in the Emergency Management world. Kudos, kudos, kudos.

NGOs - saving the world, but could be much better organized...

If you have ever seen the cartoon of the king brushing off a machine gun salesman to go fight his war with a sword, that is an apt description of IT in many NGOs.

CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) and other standards are easily adopted and implemented, adn would save NGOs millions of dollars, reduce their dependance on the IT group (usually 10 years behind), allow sharing of resources, and save lives through much better situational awareness.

Why aren't they doing it? See para 1. There are a million excuses, but no good answers except for the lack of long term vision when you are crisis driven. I expect the ituation to change over the next year as cloud based tools become easier to use, more widely available, and utilized by budget and speed conscious leaders.

CAP gaining ground.....

Recently (April 20211), a worldwide CAP conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland. People representing over 30 countries attended, and it was hosted by the World Meteorlogical Organization and had representatives from OASIS and ITU there as well.

Great presentations, and an overall sense that CAP is becoming THE world standard for alerting/warning. The standard is great in its current form, and actively being developed for version 2.0 and 3.0.

Kudos to all those making this happen, and all the countries that are adopting. I'd encourage all software developers to incorporate the ability to both import and export CAP feeds into their solutions.

Mobile phones will allow people to submit alerts faster and in greater volume. Sensors, dropping in price, and increasing in functionality, can also automatically send CAP alerts on a wide array of issues.

Go CAP!

Too much of a good thing!

At least on the creation side, government has gotten some momentum going on setting standards for information sharing!  Great deal - it will save lives, money, time and pave the way for more collaborative efforts between business and government and international....IF...

....the various agencies and groups cooperate and don't reinvent their wheel or make their efforts incompatable with others.  This is classic government craziness, understandable in a time before the internet and the web lets everyone know what everyone is doing, but certainly a waste of effort now.

A great example is Common Alerting Protocol by OASIS.  It has become used by many groups around the world - FEMA, DHS, private entities, Australia, Canada, software companies, and more.  It is a very good, lightweight, easy to understand and utilize standard.  However, there are many alerting areas that still need to be incorporated (food, financial, and more) - but it makes no sense to utilize some other standard or create a new, proprietary method.  THE WAY IS ALREADY PAVED!!!!

One of hte biggest possible losses is having the 9-1-1 capability in the US go some other  direction - 112 in Sweden (and 112 is a EU standard) has already piloted CAP for emergency calls.

This same issue applies for more standards that are starting to develop - smart grid, health, and many others - they need to examine the existing standards and work to move them forward versus creating parallell efforts.  Building on the shoulders of already existing efforts will make a major difference.

Pete

State of the Union and a standardized approach

In the SOTU, President Obama outlined that government was totally disorganized (who knew?), citing that salmon in salt water was a different agency from salmon in fresh water.

The last reorg of government was a long time ago - lets think even bigger toward a standardized approach - reorg the federal government and then also reorg the states into 6 economic groupings!  This would eliminate 44 disparate goverments, lay the groundwork for further reorganizing the county, parish, rural and urban landscapes into a 21st century structure - leveraging off each other instead of having a byzantine set of laws, processes, redundant positions, radios and systems that don't communicate and more.

It would be a major shift, but one that would stimulate the thinking of the entire country in how to accomplish it.  We already have the Northwest, the Northeast and other "zones" identified, take the best of the governments that exist and move it forward.

Stop Information Sharing? When did we start?

The Wikileaks debacle has many people calling for restrictions on information sharing - it must be all the innovation since 9/11 that is putting us at risk - right?

Wrong.  There has hardly been any innovation and widespread upgrades of information sharing technology - the systems that were compromised were likely designed in the 60's and 70's, deployed years later, and patched into the 21st century.

The fact that someone could download everything to a thumb drive undetected is crazy - and if detection was possible - who was asleep at the wheel?

Moving our inforamtion sharing capabilities to some new approaches will continue to be the answer - we're not going to make the proverbial sow's ear into a silk purse no matter how many defense contractors we put on the job.

It seems the world is moving too fast for the government to keep up, and that this is just another example.  There will be a hue and cry for more money to spend plugging the leaks (pun intended), but the reality is that the infrastructure is caving in from its own weight, and can't be fixed fast enough.  There are plenty of people willing to throw money at the problem, and an even greater throng willing to catch it and make promises of fixes to come.

Banks form Interoperable Data Center Alliance

banks consort on interoperable data centers

Great article - the banks are getting on the interoperability band wagon and looking at standardizing the cloud environment.  We might move out of the "Proprietary Age" of IT and into the standardized data world.  This seems like an enternity, but if you realize that electronic computer sytsems are less than 75 years old, it is amazing progresss.  The short term and long term gains of stndardardized data sets combined with cloud computing may make local server farms and proprietary approaches as quaint as an early factory running all of machines off belts from a centrally powered shaft!

Radio Interoperability - NOT!!!!

http://www.wkrg.com/caught_on_camera/article/accidentally-caught-on-camera-car-crash-not-part-of-movie/1078904/Oct-12-2010_10-26-am/


I thought the billions of dollars spent in the last 8 years since 9/11 on radio interoperability would have at least prevented this police care from crashing into a movie set - apparently being supported by a different set of police and different radios!!!!!

Interoperable data for turbulent times

The economy is certainly having some severe problems on many fronts, and many businesses are looking for ways to improve their long term viability and short term productivity.  Investing in interoperable data infrastructure is a very solid investment.

Like the adoption of the shipping container, the use of structured, interoperable data will have some immediate benefits in terms of easing sharing and accessing information.  The real payoffs will come as this creates a cumulative effect and begins to impact software design.  Software applications that plug together like Legos through defined data sets can be rapidly deployed and morphed as business requirements change; far better than legacy systems that need extensive, custom interfaces to be developed before any synergies can be obtained.

If you are a business owner, a CIO, deal with massive amounts of data, or an information architect, you need to be thinking about this as a critical element of your strategy over the next 5-10 years.

House, Senate agree on measure requiring standard format for spending data

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20100908_9226.php?oref=rss?zone=NGtoday


Standard format for spending data - while this seems almost common sensical, it is a big step forward for the government. The idea of agencies doing things the same way is a major opportunity to eventually streamline government at the federal level, and eventually filter this down to the states and local level.

It also allows interface to business, making the entire process simplier, faster, more efficient and ultimately less expensive. There are millions if not billions of dollars spent on proprietary interfaces for data today. Kudos to the people thinking out of the box!

Alzheimers and info sharing...

New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/health/research/13alzheimer.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss


A great story of why remembering to share information is so important!!!

European Cell Phone Standard!

Standards portend alternatives....See Facebook competitor

See the below threat to FACEBOOK, and you see the power of standards and cognitive intelligence (Clay Shirkey's new book). Imagine a distributed, open, free social networking capability, and there are lots of possibilities that come to mind....


From WIRED.com.....
1. Open, Distributed Alternatives
A pack of college kids drunk on Free Software launched an open-source, federated alternative to Facebook called Diaspora. After collecting an astonishing $120K in donations, the group is knocking out code. Meanwhile, there’s other cool stuff going on, including OneSocialWeb, the Appleseed Project and WebFinger. Get enough of these open protcols into decent shape and someone is likely to build them into an improbably powerful stack. Research the LAMP stack, if you don’t get my drift.

What might that look like? An elimination of the need for a centralized home and coordinator of social networking — where your social profile lives wherever you want it to (as your e-mail does) and can interact with any other profile around the net, on your own terms.

While it sounds far fetched, a recent poll suggests that people are as happy with Facebook as they are with their cable company, even if they do find it similarly indispensable.



Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/five-things-totopple-facebooks-empire/#ixzz0uKFKoRLU

5 Billion Wireless connections!!!

http://www.mobilefuture.org/blog/archives/global_wireless_subscriptions_surpass_5_billion/

5 billion wireless connections is a standards triumph - think about all those bits trying to move if they had not been somewhat standardized. There are some issues to be resolved with the different networks, and generational issues as the new starts to supercede the very usable basic stuff that will be around for a long time. The rate of addition seems a little high, but as things like IP6 and very inexpensive sensors start to take off, it may accelerate rather than plateau.

Who would have thunk it? DHS needs to share information

http://http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20100716_2491.php?oref=rss?zone=NGtoday

DHS figured out it needs to share information and consolidate intelligence into one shareable portal. Wow.