Interview with Dave Wennergren, Deputy CIO of DoD

I had the good fortune to meet with Dave Wennergren, the Deputy CIO of the Department of Defense recently. Dave also serves as the Vice Chair of the Federal CIO Council. I met him when he was working as Deputy CIO for the Department of the Navy, when I was working on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) program. Dave is an energetic and enthusiastic person the DoD is lucky to have as a career IT executive. He’s a strong advocate of government adopting industry best practices and leveraging new capabilities to improve mission effectiveness. His long held reputation as an agent of change will serve him well with the new administration. Here are a few pearls of wisdom and insight from Dave:

• “The change pace must be dramatically faster or we will risk becoming dramatically irrelevant.”
• He’s a fan of managed services and would like to see the government embrace more of it.
• Information sharing is a must. We can’t build walls. We have to figure out to how to share securely in a Web 2.0 environment.
• He’s an advocate of measuring the effectiveness of information sharing and solutions that include measures to gauge effectiveness.
  

It’s refreshing to speak with an IT executive eager to leverage new capabilities to improve mission effectiveness but pragmatic about measuring that progress in an objective fashion. It was clear Dave has adopted several tools Karen Evans successfully employed as the OMB CIO. We’re fortunate to have him as a source of continuity as the administration changes.

Interview with Karen Evans, Outgoing CIO of OMB

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Karen Evans the CIO of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). For those a little rusty on your Civics, OMB supports execution of the President’s management agenda and oversees the departments and agencies in the Executive branch of the Federal Government. Big job. Ms. Evans has been responsible for implementing a management framework to manage IT as a portfolio and strategic investment. She was quick to point out that although IT is a strategic asset, it is also just an enabler of the mission. Her comments were very candid and caveated by the fact that she’s got 30 days left in her job. She was unwilling to comment on any forward looking projections regarding the next Administration but offered that the Transition Team seemed to respect the basic management framework OMB has used to review IT strategic plans, progress toward those plans, and portfolio investments.

Parting shots she had to offer:

• The Government needs to continue to work on structuring contracts to ensure vendors are incented to behave in ways that benefit the customer.
• Industry should look for niches where there’s a need and the Government’s struggling on developing a solution, develop a solution, and relieve the Government of the burden of development.
• Industry must demonstrate the ability to deliver solutions and services while meeting Government requirements for transparency (FOIA), data quality, security, and privacy.
• The most significant challenge going forward is managing risk while delivering on mission and ensuring the above requirements are satisfied.

I have to admit, going in; I was expecting to hear a little more talk about IT from U.S. Government’s senior CIO. But, in retrospect, it makes sense the person responsible for overseeing the planning and execution of over $60B of Federal spending on IT would be more focused on wise management of those resources rather than the sizzle.

Welcome to the Storage Strategies blog. This blog is intended to help IT leaders learn about important topics regarding data storage management they need to understand to successfully manage their organization’s information assets. Everyone knows that data volumes are growing rapidly. IDC reports that enterprise data stores will grow an average of 60 percent annually. Considering the inevitable growth of information assets and the probable reduction of IT capital budgets over the next year (resultant from the global economic crisis), IT managers must actively scrutinize both the data their users are creating and the resources they plan to spend on hosting and protecting that data.

To start off here are ten questions regarding data management every IT manager must be able to address to be successful. Can you answer these questions?

1. How much data do we have?
2. How fast is our data volume growing?
3. What is our current data storage capacity?
4. What are our most critical applications/data?
5. Is our data backed up regularly and are data restoration processes and procedures tested regularly?
6. Are data backups and data archives stored at a secure off site location?
7. How long will it take to restore access to data if our primary data stores are corrupted or destroyed, and how much data are we willing to lose to recover?
8. Do we have a documented data retention policy and do local operating procedures ensure it is implemented?
9. Do we have policies and procedures for provisioning additional data storage to users?
10. Are our data storage personnel appropriately trained and certified?
    

If you can’t answer these questions because you don’t know or can’t give an affirmative answer, subscribe this blog and stay tuned for more.

To read my white paper, “Ten Things IT Management Needs to Know About Their Data Storage”, go to this link to down load it: www.storagestrategies.com