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

	Monday, July 28, 2003

AOL and Google to offer Blogs RSS and weblogging are getting some serious attention these days. See this InfoWorld article for an example. AOL and Google are investing time and resources to get into the blogging market space, and reputable news organizations everywhere are supporting RSS. It looks like people are recognizing the value of this open medium. Also in the article from InfoWorld is a discussion on Echo (aka Atom), a new standard that is supposed to overcome some of the limitations of RSS. 10:26:39 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

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

	Tuesday, May 06, 2003

Shrinking Community I have a few spare minutes, and Dave Fletcher has shamed me into updating my blog. A lot of folks have pretty much abadoned blogging, but I am not one of them. It's not that I don't want to update my blog, it's just that I really haven't had much that I thought you, my loyal readership, would be interested in. Until now. One of my products is portal services. What is it, you ask? Well, that's a complicated question, and one that I wrote about previously. I have seen several demos of potential portal solutions, including MySAP, Sieblel, NPS, and we will probably be seeing more. There's a lot of movement, but not much strategy. I am working to change that. My nirvana would be an integrated portal strategy, at least for employee-facing services. I am pushing for that. There really is a lot of potential for integrating systems and making the lives of state employees easier. The issue, as usual is not technology. It's figuring out how to bring all of these disparate efforts together under some semblance of a strategy. If we succeed at that, I will let you know. You will probably hear if we fail, too. 11:32:42 AM

	Monday, April 14, 2003

Portal Product People use the word "portal" to describe a very wide variety of things. In State government, we have a lot of different initiatives that use the word indiscriminately: Utah.gov portal, Payment Portal, Homeland Security Portal, Utah Enterprise State Employee Portal, etc. So, what is a portal? And what does ITS, the agency I work for, have to do with any of them? Those are fine questions. As the product manager for ITS portal services, they are mine to answer, at least for ITS. First of all, let me tell you what I think a portal is. A portal is a web site that: Aggregates conent from different content providers Provides customization and personalization options to users Is dynamic in content, and connects users to related services available through the web A site with a collection of links is not, in my opinion, a portal. Niether is an online payment collection service. The fact that the word portal is used in conjunction with both link collection sites and payment services obscures what I think a portal really is. ITS is faced with several questions regarding portals. The following paragraphs describe those issues. A couple of years ago, ITS built the "Innerweb" which is the current employee portal. In my opinion, it meets the definition of a portal. It is not widely used and is somewhat of an orphan, but it is a portal. It was built on an application server platform that we would like to stop supporting in the next year or so, which gives ITS an incentive to figure out what will replace it. Last year we headed an effort to create an enterprise employee portal. This was done in conjunction with the Teamsite projcet. The problem was that we were building it the same way we built Innerweb, without any clear business ownership. The project was stopped without completely resolving the issue of ownership. In my opinion, ITS should not be the driving force behind the next employee portal. Another question facing ITS regarding portals is what is our role in creating them for agency business owners? Should we provide a portal development product? I would say a tentative yes, but it remains to be proven out. If we develop a portal development product, then we can offer packages that connect the portals we develop with other State IT infrastructure, such as authentication and UMD. I am working through a plan to figure out exactly what ITS should do about this opportunity. Finally, let me say that I don't think that every site has to meet the definition of a portal described above. In a lot of instances, it is perfectly appropriate for a site to simply be a collection of links. In other cases, increased value to the user could be possible if sites moved towards my definition of a portal. 7:40:54 AM

© Copyright 2003 Dave McNamee. Last update: 8/15/2003; 10:48:58 AM.