Friday, August 15, 2003

New Portal Efforts I am assisting key stakeholders from different State agencies in building a new State Enterprise Employee Portal project. The project team has not yet been formed, but we have a pretty good idea of who needs to be involved. Obviously DHRM and Finance have a major stake in this project, so their involvement will be extensive. No employee portal would be complete without the services that those organizations provide. I am very excited about this new effort, because, unlike previous efforts, it is being driven by business owners rather than by technologists. Also, it has the support of the CIO and will become a fully sanctioned enterprise project if we do things right. Meantime, other "portal" projects are in search of direction. Public Safety has a couple of efforts that could benefit greatly from solid enterprise strategy for portals. This strategy does not exist yet. I hope to help pull people to solve this portal meta issue. It is possible that we could create economies of scale with portal efforts, and at the same time work towards integrated presentation of services provided by State government. 9:19:01 AM

	Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Commonly Held Assets ITS is the custodian of the State's largest and best equipped data center. Notice I wrote ITS is the custodian of this data center. We have not always acted that way. In fact, we still use terms like "our data center" or "come host at ITS' data center." Wrong. This is a facilty that is available to all State agencies. It is the State's data center. Now, you may say, "well, how can it be the State's data center if ITS is responsible for recovering the cost of it?" That is a good question, but I don't think that having one agency have custodial and operational responsibility for the facility is mutually exclusive with it being viewed as a commonly held asset. ITS should only be the managing partner. To further explain what I mean, consider this example: 3 guys go in together and buy an airplane. They discuss how to manage the finances of the airplane, and decide on an hourly rate for operations which will cover all of their costs. They ask the pilot with the most experience out of the three of them to collect the money from each of the other partners and arrange for maintenance, a hangar, insurance, etc. Now, I am not familiar with the financing arrangement that built the Salt Lake data center, but it belongs to everybody, and ITS is simply the senior pilot who manages things. Certainly, there are adjustments that ITS should make. We need to stop calling it "our" data center, unless by "our" we mean all State agencies. I also believe that there are changes that we could make that would make it a more attractive place for agencies to bring their stuff. I will be working on this. 8:31:14 AM

	Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Advance the Front ITS is making serious progress on multiple fronts. Fortunately I have the opportunity to be involved in many of them. I am very excited about UMD and the new web authentication system. UMD is being used in production mode for the Groupwise Instant Messenger system. Synchronization is taking place between the individual e.Directory resource trees (basically the trees that are used to grant LAN access) and UMD and HRE, the HR database. For example, when I changed my password on Groupwise IM it also changed my LAN password. This may sound simple, but it will provide a lot of value to the state as multiple applications and IT platforms use UMD for authentication. Just the costs of password administration alone would make a strong business case for doing UMD, not to mention the provisioning and de-provisioning capabilities and increased security that it offers. I am convinced that many great things lie ahead for UMD. Aside from individual projects and products, I am encouraged by the fact that project and product management are gaining momentum. This is a new way of doing business for ITS. Although we've had our struggles, the amount of collaboration and hard work that is taking place is a credit to the people of ITS. I believe it is ultimately the citizens of Utah that benefit from these improvements. 8:02:20 AM

	Friday, July 18, 2003

SPML: Open Standards User Provisioning Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is getting good press for its ability to automate user provisioning accross multiple systems. I would really like to see the State implement SAML, SPML, and other emerging standards for security and identity in the future, after they mature a bit. 11:51:28 AM

	Thursday, July 17, 2003

Organized RSS RSS is a powerful content aggregation tool. It is useful in more applications than just blogging. At ITS, we have developed an RSS tool that will make it available to state agencies for creating things like press releases, articles on www.utah.gov and on business.utah.gov, the new doing business in Utah portal and soon to be the home of One-Stop Business Registration. This RSS tool is called news.utah.gov. News.utah.gov is not intended to be a blogging tool for personal weblogs, however it works in much the same way as a personal weblog. It is based on the Movable Type blogging platform, but again, it is not intended to be a blogging tool. The types of news feeds that are out there now are things like "Utah Business News," which is being consumed right now on busines.utah.gov. Control over the feeds that are created will be very strict. News.utah.gov is also an example of a project that used existing code bases to develop an effective application that can run in an inexpensive environment. The environment this is running in is a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) environment. ITS should be adding LAMP to its hosting product portfolio this year. I am the hosting product manager, so I will be working towards that end. 7:04:59 AM

	Monday, June 16, 2003

Websphere Portal Well, I worked on a long blog entry to describe the Websphere portal server demo, and clicked the wrong button and lost it all. Sorry. If you want details on it, please let me know. Suffice it to say that it looks pretty good. I didn't notice any features that were obviously missing. It seems to have everything that Novell's exteNd product has, with the addition of a powerful development tool, WS studio. It also integrates with existing systems. Again, email me if you want more info. 2:27:37 PM

Websphere Studio Demo Still at the IBM demo. Before lunch, they showed us the new Websphere studio developer tools. Based on open-source eclipse, WS studio is pretty impressive. They did side by side comparisons, or competitions between WS studio and MS Visual Studio. They did four tasks: Change a presentation layer Create an EJB Create and publish a web service Integrate with CICS and COBOL on the mainframe. Of course, it's a planned demo, but they did get the message across that WS studio is a one-stop development tool. Depending on the version you buy, you can use WS studio for systems integration development accross many platforms. One cool thing is that it is open source based, and Java development is done based on struts. It is an attractive tool, especially in light of the fact that we have a lot of legacy systems that could be web-enabled without migrating them off of the mainframe. 1:34:38 PM

IBM Web Services Demo I am attending an IBM "e-business on demand" pitch right now. I have to admit, so far, the presentation has been interesting. They have an impressive array of platforms running on multiple laptops, including a Linux laptop. This is basically a websphere app server/websphere developer studio/rational rose demo. Of course, they are starting the day with a demo of web services. I am sad to admit, this is the first real demo of a running web service, a real web service, that I have seen. They just showed us a web services demo where a .Net app called a websphere-based web service. They have two projectors up, one showing the client app and the other showing the server console so we can see the actual calls. Cool. Being a Java vendor, they are taking a lot of time to demonstrate the differences between .Net and Java. They are preaching to the choir. I used to develop Java apps before making the fabled switch off the "technical" track and onto the "management" track. As far as I know, no state agency  is using .Net. These demos bring several questions to my mind: How soon will agencies want to create web services? What should our enterprise strategy for Websphere be? What about Linux on the mainframe? How can ITS get ahead of the agencies and lead in the development of web services? What infrastructure should we build to handle future demand? How can we do all of this and provide the best value for taxpayers? I'm goning to have to chew on this quickly. Customers are waiting. 10:40:41 AM

Enterprise IM I am very excited about the opportunities that ITS has right now. We are doing a lot of very interesting things. One project that I have written about in the past is the Utah Master Directory (UMD). UMD will serve as an important piece of infrastructure for many future state IT projects. It moves forward on schedule. We already have one production application using UMD, and that is Groupwise Instant Messaging. Any state employee can install the Groupwise IM client and chat securely with any other state employee. This is what is known as enterprise instant messaging, which is still a pretty hot topic among large enterprises. UMD makes it possible. Additionally, we are engaging Novell to make improvements to UMD and the DirXML connectors to make the employee provisioning process better. It is an evolutionary process, but I believe that UMD will change the way state agencies think about things like employee provisioning. The potential benefit that UMD provides for internal applications is surpassed only by the potential benefit for public-facing applications. 9:54:56 AM

	Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Enterprise Infrastructure and HIPPA Yesterday I attended a training on the HIPPA Security Rule. For those unfamiliar with HIPPA I think it stands for Health Information Privacy and Portability Act. HIPPA has rules on privacy, security, and transactions, and it has implications for a number of state agencies, including ITS. Two issues stuck with me from the training. The first was a realization made by one of the participants of the training that it would make sense for agencies to collectively solve HIPPA-related issues, and let all benefit from the work. I think agencies will be realizing more and more that, for a lot of IT challenges that they face, it is a good idea to solve those issues as an enterprise rather than each agency on their own. With shrinking budgets and increased business and regulatory demands on our IT resources, it makes sense to solve things once for everybody. That brings me to the second thing that stuck with me, and that was the fact that UMD-based authentication could really solve a lot of HIPPA issues. One of the security rules stipulates that agencies need to be able to assert that access to protected information is indeed limited to those that should have it. This includes being able to revoke access efficiently when necessary. UMD-based authentication could really benefit agencies that have to meet these HIPPA requirements. One example would be an employee termination. If every application that said employee had access to was protected by UMD-based authentication (web or non-web, it doesn't matter) then as soon as the HR tech enters the termination event in the HR Enterprise database, access to those applications would be immediately revoked. The application administrator would not have to do a thing.  A gartner study revealed that the average employee has access to 15 to 17 applications during employment. The same study reveals that employees usually still have access to about 10 of those applications after termination. If we can tie authentication to UMD, we could solve this problem for the state enterprise. 7:48:12 AM

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