Posts By Andy Blumenthal

Cloud $ Confusion

It seems like never before has a technology platform brought so much confusion as the Cloud. No, I am not talking about the definition of cloud (which dogged many for quite some time), but the cost-savings or the elusiveness of them related to cloud computing. On one hand, we have the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy,Read… Read more »

Technology Forecast 2013

I am an avid follower of everything technology and trends, but am tired of hearing about cloud, mobile, and social computing. It’s time to get over it with the agenda of the past and get on with it with the future of technology. Here is my “Technology Forecast 2013” with the top 8 trends IRead… Read more »

Mind Readers and The Psychology of Excess

Seeing a number of senior officials in the last year “ousted,” I find it sort of scary the risks and travails that executive leadership can entail. There are so many good, hardworking people at GSA making progress for the Government in terms of property management, contract management, fleet management, and more, that it was aRead… Read more »

Lead With Technology, Not Trinkets

RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, continues to flounder, and many organizations are rightfully moving their mobility solutions to the ever more capable iPhone and Android platforms. Changing the device has the potential to bring the latest technology to the organization, but the risk is that the device is viewed as a “toy” to handRead… Read more »

First Stop Saying First

First came “Cloud First” in the 25 Point Implementation Plan To Reform Federal IT Management (9 December 2010). Then came “Sharing First” and “Future First” in the “vision for information technology” (25 October 2011). According to Federal Times (31 October 2011), there are many more ‘firsts’ to come– with a “set of principles like ‘XMLRead… Read more »

Fixing The Information Flow

So check this out–H2Glow has an LED faucet light that it temperature sensitive and turns blue for cold water and red for hot. When I saw this, I thought this would be a great metaphor for managing the information flow from our organizations–where we could quickly and simply see whether the information flowing was sharableRead… Read more »

Doomsday Clock Architecture

There is something fascinating to me about the doomsday clock—where we attempt to predict our own self-destruction and hopefully prevent it! The chart in this post from the Mirror in the U.K. shows the movement of the Doomsday Clock over the last 60 plus years. Currently in 2010 (not shown in the chart), we standRead… Read more »

Toward A Federal Enterprise Architecture Board

A Federal Enterprise Architecture Board (FEAB) would provide “teeth” to further implementing enterprise architecture across government. We have a Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) that provides a government wide framework for architecture strategy and planning, but we do not have a FEA Board to govern the subsequent IT investments through capital planning and investment control (CPIC).Read… Read more »

Reflections On The Role of a Federal Chief Technology Officer

Had interview today with Federal News Radio on the role of the Chief Technology Officer. Here are some key points: 1. The CTO is a subject matter expert on technology modernization, transformation and deployment of new technology in the agency. 2. The CTO is responsible to work with the lines of business and IT toRead… Read more »