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Thinking Strategically or Reacting to
Years of History and Tactics?
By Clay Ryder
Earlier this week Norman Lorentz, CTO at the Office
of Management and Budget (OMB), outlined the administration's IT priorities
and his Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) at the Federal CTO Forum 2002. The
goal of the five-step FEA program is to bring all federal IT systems into
compliance with a single enterprise architecture across all federal
government agencies. Lorentz has championed FEA as the way to change how
government executes IT operations, defining the needed steps to begin the
transition of the federal government from its historic monolithic and
stovepipe infrastructure, which often results in information isolation or
redundancy across agencies, to a standardized information infrastructure. The
CTO identified a number of benefits that continuing to develop the FEA
process could provide, such as identifying cross-agency initiatives including
establishing trans-agency LOB champions, and integrating defense and
intelligence enterprise architectures as well as state and local
architectures into the FEA. In addition, Mr. Lorenz stated that FEA is not
about technology, but how the government goes about business; further
stressing that government should not be operating or constructing technology
but rather creating specifications and demanding that solutions conform.
When thinking of technological and business
excellence, few would associate these virtues with the practices of the
federal government, but despite the popular perception that government
agencies’ IT acumen has hardly surpassed that of the punch card with a
dimpled chad, the fact that OMB appears to be viewing federal IT
infrastructure as a strategic concern is heartening. The intertwined nature
of legacy IT infrastructure and business demand has often set in stone
processes that were based on the needs and capabilities of the technology as
opposed to the constituent. Hence, the monolithic approaches to IT that
various agencies took during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, although driven by
technological limitations of the time, came to further the myopic mentality
of many agencies. The result was that the primary customer of government, the
citizen, rather than being a user with many needs, became the placeholder of
a social security number against whom discrete processes, regulations, etcetera
were applied. Businesses long ago came to the realization that despite their
technologies, products, and places in the market, ultimately they needed to
holistically serve the needs of their customers, lest said customers take
their business to somewhere that would. This is a realization that government
agencies have either avoided or ignored.
While government agencies tend to have a monopoly on
the services (markets) that they provide, the demand for more businesslike
behavior in “reinventing” government remains notable. To this end, we believe
that the OMB is on the right path, but at the same time, this will be anything
but an easy undertaking. One only need remember the ambitions of the USPS, Mr.
Lorentz’s former home, in its quest to modernize and rethink its IT and
services approach. Ultimately many a good (and some not so good) ideas found
themselves the victim not of silicon technology, but of entrenched carbon
organics (i.e., bureaucrats). The historic limitations of IT driving behavior
can not simply be dismissed, nor can it absolve those responsible for the
operations of an organization, be it an enterprise or government agency. We
believe the single biggest challenge to achieving OMB’s FEA will be changing
the mindset and behaviors of hundred of thousands of government employees and
managers from a myopic focus on the tactical daily operation of their
agencies to a broader strategic view of providing service and value to their
customers. Without a galvanizing initiative that changes behavior and
mindsets along with technology, we are afraid that the FEA will become just
another indiscernible acronym in the alphabet soup of government-speak, with
as about as much impact on the daily operations of and the value provided by
the government to its customers, the citizenry at large.
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Intel Ships Enhanced Xeon MP
By Charles King
Intel has announced that it is shipping the new Xeon
processor MP (codename Gallatin) with an enhanced two megabytes of level
three cache at speeds up to 2 GHz. According to Intel, the new processor
offers up to 38% better performance for server workloads such as database, CRM,
and supply chain processes, as well as enhanced scalability. Designed for
mid-tier and backend servers with four or more processors, the new Xeon MP is
Intel’s first 32-bit processor built on the company’s 0.13-micron process
technology. The new processor maintains hardware platform compatibility with previous
generations, and Intel is now sampling server platform building blocks that
support the new processor and the latest Intel networking technologies. In
related announcements, HP and IBM introduced products based on the new Xeon
MP processor, along with benchmarking data. HP announced next-generation
Proliant ML570 (four-way) and Proliant DL760 (eight-way) servers which also
include HP’s Advanced Memory Protection technology. The Proliant DL760 is
scheduled for shipment in early 2003. IBM announced that three xSeries
servers would support the new processor; the four-way x255 rack and tower
system, four-way models of the x360 rack-dense server, and four- and
eight-way versions of the x440 (with
planned support for sixteen processors). Worldwide availability for the
xSeries servers is planned between mid-November and early December.
The story of processor performance evolution is
largely one of incremental gains. The most notable twist in the tale of
Gallatin is the doubling of L3 cache over the previous Xeon generation
(Foster) chip, a pleasant bonus of Intel’s new 0.13-micron manufacturing
capability. In short, Gallatin costs the same as Foster but should deliver
considerably better performance. That translates to good news for enterprises
that depend on Intel-based servers for CPU-hungry apps and business processes
and the vendors who develop those solutions. Taking the longer view, Intel’s
dedication to backwards hardware compatibility means that Foster-based
systems can be easily upgraded to Gallatin, which helps to protect
enterprises’ investments along the way. So is there a potential dark lining
lingering in any of these clouds of joy? Perhaps. While Intel’s continuing
product enhancements are likely to be welcomed by most everyone involved, and
will further fuel the push toward higher end (eight-way+) industry standard
server configurations, we wonder if they might also shadow the company’s
Itanium efforts. As Intel presses Xeon performance upward, the opportunities
for overlap and confusion of aims also grow. The irony here is that despite
these potential difficulties, Intel is in a win-win situation. Further
improvements in the IA-32 space will please the burgeoning group of customers
who rely on Intel-based servers for Microsoft and Linux-based apps, and the
continuing profits and increasing footprint generated by those sales will
fuel the company’s patient press forward with Itanium.
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IBM Announces ThinkVantage PC Products
By Charles King
IBM has announced ThinkVantage Technologies, a set
of new solutions the company said are designed to address fundamental
problems with personal computers. ThinkVantage solutions IBM expects to
introduce in 2003 include: IBM RapidRestore PC, a software tool that can
restore previously saved data and applications after a software failure;
Embedded Security Subsystem, to protect PC-based data; ImageUltra Builder, a
software image management toolkit for IT departments; System Migration
Assistant, a software tool for easing PC migration; and Access Connections, an
automated tool for easing PC connectivity processes. The new ThinkVantage
Technologies are a key element of IBM’s new “Think” strategy and will be extended
across company offerings including IBM’s signature ThinkPad laptops, new
ThinkCentre desktop PCs, new ThinkVision displays, ThinkAccessories, and
ThinkServices offerings. In addition to announcing the new ThinkVantage
product offerings, IBM demonstrated a number of new technologies developed by
IBM Research laboratories in conjunction with PC product developers as part
of the company’s investment in autonomic computing solutions.
The ThinkVantage announcement offers one middling
surprise with a couple of not unexpected twists. The surprise, of course, is
that IBM appears to be re-energizing its PC business, an area that has been
overshadowed to an extent by the greater energies IBM has expended on higher-end
computing efforts. Though IBM formally exited the consumer PC space over a
year ago, it has maintained a presence on enterprise desktops, though its
products have tended to be overshadowed by Dell and HP. This new effort might
be considered the first inkling that the company’s greater “autonomic”
computing effort is finally trickling down to the desktop. On the surface,
ThinkVantage proposes to deliver the desktop portion of a future where all of
a company’s computing resources form an integrated whole to drive On
Demand-style services. The toolsets mentioned in this announcement will
largely be of interest to IT personnel to begin with, but they do offer to
ease some common PC headaches. While ISVs such as Connected offer products
that deliver similar capabilities, it is the integration issues and
capabilities that set ThinkVantage apart.
Integration is the essential strength of
ThinkVantage, but it could also be the source of a greater weakness. It is
uncertain at this point just how, if at all, the ThinkVantage management
toolsets will be able to interact with non-IBM PCs. If they are able to
function in larger heterogeneous PC environments, they could prove to be a
boon to businesses across the board. If they are simply integrated
enhancements of the ThinkVantage product line, they could provide IBM some
advantage among existing customers but will be a tougher sell among
enterprises that buy and deploy PCs from multiple vendors.
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Holy Grail? Or Tin Cup?
By Jim Balderston
HP has announced the introduction of a new Compaq
Tablet PC TC 1000, a wireless device that uses “electronic ink” to allow for
handwriting input. The device comes with the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
operating system. The device can be docked and used as a desktop PC, and it
comes with a detachable keyboard for use if handwriting entry is not the
preferred method of communicating with the device. The Tablet PC is .8 inches
thick and weighs three pounds. It includes built in 802.11b wireless
capabilities, 60 GB hard drive, and USB connectivity. The device is priced at
$1,699.
While reliable and natural handwriting input has
been a challenge for the industry, we wonder if that challenge is actually
evidence of a need. Certainly if this device does what it promises, it could
offer real advantages to certain specific types of work environments. The
press release notes that doctors might employ these, or field service
workers. Perhaps so, yet we are not sure that these devices represent a
broad-based revenue opportunity in the long run. A price point of $1,700 a
pop is not going to drive sales either.
So what larger niche does this device fit in? It’s
not a PDA — it’s too big. It’s not really a laptop — or at best it is a small
screen version — which has not been that dynamic a market in the past. One
has to ask, as a desktop unit will handwriting be more efficient than typing?
Or will using this device fulfill more needs than one’s high-powered PDA? It
certainly won’t fit in a pocket. Without belaboring the obvious, these devices
seem to lend themselves to “form fillers” more than writing tablets. Having
said that, we can see their use in many industrial applications where
checking off boxes and writing notes using dedicated applications is the task
at hand. For the general enterprise and consumer
markets, however, we suspect that this offering is the latest in one of the
oldest passion plays of innovation and technological progress — a technology
in search of a problem to solve. Removing the keyboard interface between the
user and the computer is a challenging, and perhaps noble goal. But we
suspect viable voice input is going to be the bearer of that particular Holy
Grail. As it is, the tablet PC seems to be little more than a finely crafted
tin cup.
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