Aneesh Chopra is talking so why wouldn’t I attend?  Need I say any more?  Even before he starts, you can tell he is an energetic speaker.

• Innovations in Health IT would be good for the economy.
• We are coming from “There’s a form for that.” to “There’s an app for that.”  Government reality doesn’t reflect public reality.
• The US is 15th in Higher Education, 22nd in E-Government, and 40th on the Innovation Trends.  This was out of 40 countries.  The US had 2.7% growth.  Obama wants to return to number 1 by 2020. (Reasonable, but challenging) 
• Perceives Healthcare and Energy as the growth areas for the economy.
• Stimulus act called for an increase in health It R&D.
• Broadband is important.  If patients don’t have broadband, how do they access their records remotely.  Same for doctors at home.  (Suspect that doctors have a higher percentage of broadband than patients)
• Trying to bring the R&D side of the house with IT procurement (CIO Vivek Kundra).
• Told story of how in Virginia it took 1.5 years to procure a 150K, 6-week, web application.
• Text4baby is a partnership with the wireless carriers, who are waving fees, to send SMS updates to expecting mothers based upon the due date.
• (Trying to sell how things are changing in Washington. Haven’t seen it yet.)
• Prioritization, transparency, engagement, and rapid results (90-day measurements) are the Core Principles on how they are trying to get Washington to work.
• Releasing next week, guidance to federal agencies on prizes and rewards for innovation.
• Open Government plans will be published April 7th.
• NHIN: A set of policies, standards, and services that enable the Internet to be used for secure and meaningful exchange of health information to improve health and health care”
• NHIN Direct: Open transparent collaborative process to evolve the NHIN.  An Gov20 initiative that was launched today.
• Don’t abandon 5 9s reliability for core systems, but look for the innovation for new ways to serve.

Say what you want about the president, the CTO has a good vision and the enthusiasm to push towards it.  That is a very good thing.

Time for the exhibit hall until close.  Always interesting as the vendors are tired and giving everything away.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

Social Media is moving
into television on an increasing basis as I have covered a bit on this blog.
This is the theme of a post by Tim Dillard on TheNextWeb: Will 2010 be the Year
of Social TV?  For example, fans of
certain TV shows from different time zones are saving the latest episodes of
their favorite shows and then arranging common viewing times with their friends
to watch the shows whilst discussing the action together on Skype,

The shows themselves are
also launching efforts, sometimes with mixed results. In the UK, high profile
post-apocalypse drama, BBC's 'Survivors', launched with stream of tweets from
'survivors'. They were supposedly trying to get messages out to a world in
which most of the population had been wiped out by a mystery virus. However,
the effort did not last. In another failed case, Fox tired integrating Twitter
during reruns of sci-fi series 'Fringe' in the US. It got criticism almost
immediately from the show's fans by swamping the screen with tweets from the
cast and crew of the show, thus obscuring much of the action. Sounds like those
tweets do blast you with multiple tweets in a row, except even worse.

It seems the most
successful efforts so far are user generated. For example, with Twitter,
real-time conversations about TV shows at the shows are broadcast live are
linked together through the use of hashtags.  This is the same with online communities. The television
shows will need to move better in this direction by listening to their viewers
and being creative. 

Artsetter is a Paris based online art gallery. I have now been accepted as one of their artists. I had to go through a voting process
and I appreciate those of you who voted for me.  Now I put up an initial gallery of 24 paintings. I will add
more and perhaps some drawings and photos.

I encourage you to visit the Artsetter site and
comment on my work as feedback is really appreciated. When you get to the site
you can find my gallery under the gallery tab. For now it is listed in new
galleries but that may evolve.

 Here is what I wrote in my
profile. I paint with acrylics and also do simple line drawings. My focus
is directly painting what I see. The goal is not photo realism but an
integration of painting and seeing. I primarily do still life or painting from
a model at the moment. I have experimented with landscapes from direct
observation. I recently did a series on breakfast. These were done from photos.
I do not go beyond what I see as I have always imagined paintings as I look at
the world. Now I am having fun creating some of these images. I live and work
in the Boston area (US) but also paint from my travels. I grew up in New
Orleans and it remains a favorite place. I would like to paint there.

Here is a sampling of the initial
works in the gallery. You can click on the images to enlarge them. 

Here are more 2010 predictions. Forrester
has issued a report, Collaboration Needs Will Fuel A
Smartphone Surge, by Ted Schadler with
Matthew Brown, Brownlee Thomas, Michele Pelino, and Peter Schmidt, with the
subtitle: The
Surge Can Be Funded Through A Bring-Your-Own Smartphone Strategy.  I appreciate receiving a review
copy.  It predicts that 2010 will
be the year of the smartphone surge.

The Forrester team
surveyed 3,904 information workers nad found great excitement about about
smartphones, “attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with
documents from anywhere.” While only 14% percent of information workers across
the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones, another 64% would like to. This
compares with general consumers usage at 78% with mobile phones and 11% with
smart phones. That yet to be fulfilled demand in information workers, along
with some employers’ willingness to share monthly mobile costs, sets the stage
for the surge. This calls for KM and other information professionals to
determine a strategy for effective and coordinated usage. There is also the
numbers to pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across plans.

I imagine that most
smart users also use a fraction of the capability of their devices. I know I
do. I see my colleagues using much more capability.  The report provides along list of potential capabilities and
their current usage from email (92%) to enterprise apps (7%). Some others
include: personal contacts (84%), work calendar (83%), IM (48%), emergency
response (17%), and team collaboration (12%). The last one should go up
dramatically if the report is correct it its predictions.

Location flexibility
is the top reason (60%) for using a smartphone over a laptop. The increased
reach will provide the ROI for smartphone, according to Forrester report. While
this seems obvious, there seem to be two reasons here: the portability of the
device and the extended access, and these will continue to evolve. Having
greater wifi access will mitigate one difference and such devices as the tablet
might go into the other.  However,
I think the convergence of capabilities into a single type of device that takes
two forms will balance that out.

In other words,
content that used to come through many channels such as music, TV, Web, phone
now comes through one device (see for example,  TV Moving
Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web and Who Will Win TV Sets or Computers? I now have all my music and
photos on my iPhone, as well as my laptop and have stopped using separate
devices for them. However, this device will take two forms, one that sits on a
desk and perhaps even connects to a larger monitor and one that fits in your
pocket.  There will be an increased
need to synch these devices and that needs to be part of the smartphone
strategy.

There is much more in
the report including suggestions on how to start your smartphone strategy. 

This post combines two FastForward posts as I wanted to continue to share this story with a broader audience. The US military
is using an enterprise 2.0 style collaborative network to help coordinate its
relief efforts in Haiti.  As
reported by David Pierce in Wired in Pentagon’s Social Network Becomes Hub for
Haiti Relief:

“TISC (”the
Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation”) is a new iteration of APAN, the
All Partners Access Network, which was developed by the Defense Department a
few years ago. Initially, the military was using APAN to communicate across
borders, particularly in countries without sophisticated communication
technology. Even in third-world countries, Internet connection seemed to be
frequently accessible, so the APAN system was built to work over the Internet,
to facilitate the sharing of classified files, as well as things like
coordinating calendars.

The system is
designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like
Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses
file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other
things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they
are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network,
its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.”

I recently spoke with Walton Smith from Booz Allen who
was involved in the development of APAN to get the details (see my series on
how Booz Allen, itself, uses enterprise 2.0 within the firm). First, I will
cover how it works and then cover how it came into being and then its use in
Haiti.

We have been reading about the logistics troubles in
Haiti but they might be even worse without the TISC. Haiti is the first
activity of scale to use the system. When you are determining ROI based on
number of hospital beds filled and people who receive much needed food, the
benefits take on a different meaning. The TISC concept is to help the US
military better coordinate with NGOs and other countries when disaster strikes.
The objective is to a create system that not only helps with particular
disasters but also builds an archive of best practices, key
people/organizations and useful information to better handle future needs, as
well as a platform for efficient cooperation.

There are several main components of the system: forums, wikis,
chat and blogs. In the forums, people are able to ask questions (how to find
experts, etc.) and make requests (can you help with this issue, etc.), as well
as offer help or point out resources that others can draw on (e.g., available
hospital beds or safe landing areas). The forum tags content and sets up a
treaded dialog on the specific issues. 
The chat tool allows for real time secure communications.  Then the content is organized and
placed in a wiki for ease of retrieval. Finally, the best practices are
abstracted and put into blogs to attract comments and be available for use in
future disaster relief efforts.  In
the future, there will be expert locators and profiles. 

This version of APAN began two years ago when the US
Pacific Command (PACOM) wanted to develop an online community for the free flow
of information between validated people from the US military, NGOs and other
countries.  Ty Wooldrige and Jerry
Giles led the effort for PACOM. Booz Allen was asked to create the system with
PACOM, and James Kaina and Tim Gramp are the Booz Allen leads.

The system was first tested on some small efforts. The
support for mobile devices was strengthened. The US Southern Command asked the
PACOM to provide an operational demonstration of the system. The PACOM team was
in Miami for this demo when the Haiti earthquake struck. The Southern Command
said to forget simply doing a demo and decided to put the system into real use
to help with Haiti. Now APAN is providing real-time help, validating the
concept and vision, gathering useful content, and the Haiti effort is providing
a significant test of the system to make further improvements.

The US military was one of the early leaders in
knowledge management and the use of after action reviews and lessons learned.
It is nice to see it acting as one of the leaders in the use of Enterprise 2.0
concepts that take the vision of knowledge management significantly forward
with new tools, transparency, and capabilities.

The Defense News also
reported on how on APAN has evolved into a broader communications and
coordination tool that's proving vital to those who want to help and those who
need it. Governments, companies and private citizens are using it to post what
they are offering, allowing disaster relief officials to pick and choose what
they need.  Defense News also
pointed out the usefulness of Web social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as
well as geospatial systems such as Open Street that was been used to create
detailed maps of damaged areas.

I remember how a
very basic use of wikis helped with the Katrina efforts (see: Katrina
PeopleFinder Project). In this case a call for virtual volunteers to help
populate a centralized missing person database was meet over 20,000 people
within a day. It is great to see social media and its users helping out again
and the evolution of its capabilities. However, the basic human drive to help
others in need continues to drive these efforts. Social media just allows a
much greater way to productivity channel this human drive. 

ALEXANDRIA, VA. – Feb. 16, 2010 – Bitrix, Inc. (www.bitrixsoft.com), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the availability of Bitrix® Virtual Appliance 1.5 for Amazon EC2, a major release of the free virtual platform that creates an optimal performance environment for Bitrix® Intranet Portal and Bitrix® Site Manager.

The software underwent a number of significant improvements to deliver customers more reliability and services while using the company’s CMS/EMC solutions in Amazon Web Services. Bitrix Virtual Appliance is based on a self-updating Fedora Linux operating system, includes the latest versions of the Bitrix web environment, and features increased system performance and optimized memory usage. Following the latest Amazon development initiatives, the software now supports all three datacenter location regions (US – Standard, US – N. California, EU – Ireland).

The release also includes the beta-version of Amazon EBS storage volume, customized especially for Bitrix Virtual Appliance. This feature allows the user to create up to 1TB of back-up copies of web projects and intranet portals, roll-back projects to a specified point in time, protect data for long-term durability and remain sure that the data is securely stored and guaranteed by Amazon.

“SaaS deployment provides a wide range of benefits connected with cost reduction and quality of service,” said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc. “It reduces expenses on high-priced hardware, IT staff and the user pays only for the actual software usage time. Moreover, customers get the service provider’s guarantee for solution availability, security and integrity.”

read more

Here is an interesting post
that I can certainly agree with. Aaron Kahlow writes about the information curation potential of
social media in his post, 2010: Social Media Removes the Dam of
Gutenberg-Google.

Aaron begins with the effect
of the printing press. It certainly opened up content distribution way beyond
what the monks doing hand written work could accomplish. However, it
established new controls over what content got out. You still needed to have
the resources to set up a printing press, print and distribute works.

Now there is the Web and you
might think the dam is broken. In one sense it has, as there are very few
barriers to getting content out on the Web. In 2008 there was more content
created than in the entire prior history. 
The trick is finding this content, especially the quality stuff. This is
where Google has both helped and created a new bottleneck. As Aaron writes, “With
only 10+ organic results and a similar number of paid results, consumers will
only find content they seek in those 20 places — with less than 20 percent
being relevant as it relates to information they seek.” For example a search on
“green card” will get you a lot of services that want to charge you money for
what the US government does for free.

Aaron goes on to comment
that social media can help break this new dam. Now we can “get good information
through tweets of those we follow, Facebook Sharing, and from others within our
networks who are usually connected online. We have a new discovery outlet and a
new way to find stories, whether mainstream or from an unknown blogger. We find
things based on recommendations of trusted colleagues, friends, etc.”  This is how I found Aaron’s post.

Peter Cashmore raises a
similar point in his predictions for 2010 than I commented on earlier (see Reflecting on Peter Cashmore's Web Trends to Watch in 2010). Peter
wrote that, “The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content
creation is outpacing our ability to consume it:
"Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint…
In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter…
Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your
consumption.”  I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for
me.  Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends,
including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions.

Aaron
offers some good points to make effective use fo social media to get your
content out. Instead of having to
contact a prominent journalist to write a story about your company, you can use
your own channels such as blogs to consistently write good content worth
tweeting and sharing.
 You can also leverage your own social networks to start
sharing content. 
These are all reasons that we write this blog and participate
in Twitter and other social media.

Darwin
Ecosystem Awareness Engine™ is designed to address this issue of finding
relevant quality content without having to go through the filter of Google or
other search engines. Unlike Google, it does not decide what content is most
relevant but rather lays out the content related to your topic of interest in
clusters of themes and lets you explore what themes interest you. (see: A Comparison of Google Web Search and the Darwin Awareness Engine™). 

Darwin
allows you to become your own curator for topics of your interest. You can also
go beyond this to act as a curator for friend or colleagues You can set
attractors on your topics of interest: people, places, concepts, and more. Then
you can see what emerges. This can be especially valuable for niche areas. You
can create your own online magazine. It can cover a much greater array of
source than Google News and it will show the relationships between news items
that emerge rather than simply displaying them. You can adjust your filters to
further focus you’re your curation efforts. We see content curation as one of
the major applications for the Darwin Awareness Engine™.

After a recent briefing with a Danish system integrator, I started speculating on whether Umbraco CMS might be on track to steal market share from Sitecore in the marketplace for .NET-based content management systems. Others have mentioned the possible trend to me in the past, but is it really happening?

Comparing open source Umbraco and proprietary Sitecore has been the norm for a couple of years in Denmark, the home market for both vendors, but we are increasingly seeing the two vendors on the same shortlists far beyond Denmark.

The question is, whether the “friendly CMS” really will be able to win business from Sitecore?

Here’s why Umbraco will beat Sitecore in the long run:

• Open source: This evergreen mega-trend is a big plus for Umbraco in terms of attracting developers, press and customers.
• Partners: Umbraco is very popular with system integrators. Nearly 60 people signed up for the LBi-hosted Umbraco 2009 UK Meetup in London. Since then we’ve heard of several consultancies that used to be faithful to Sitecore, but are now winning their bids with Umbraco. Without license costs there is more budget left for the partners.
• Price: You can download Umbraco and get started free of charge. You can buy a year of support starting at €3k. To compare, the cheapest Sitecore license starts around €10k and quickly goes up from there (and then you still need to buy support).
• Community: Umbraco has a strong, happy, positive, enthusiastic and growing community of developers.
• Simplicity: Many customers don’t require online marketing, all the different interfaces and bells-and-whistles offered by Sitecore. Several partners claim that Umbraco is simpler and hence also easier and cheaper to implement.

Here are a few good reasons why Sitecore will continue to do well, even though Umbraco might continue to gain in popularity:

• Analysts: Umbraco is not covered by any traditional industry analysts, including CMS Watch. Sitecore is covered by all the main players and Gartner even crowned them as “very innovative” in most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM (Aug 2009).
• Partners: Building a network of experienced integrators is not easy and Sitecore has been at it for many years. With well-developed skills and a traditional kick-back the partners have good reason to stay with Sitecore.
• References: In both North America and Europe, you can easily find an existing Sitecore customer. This is very helpful to further increase adoption as it means that new customers have some experience they can tap into. In addition, Sitecore has many government references where Umbraco has almost none.
• Finance: A quick look at the recent Sitecore annual reports shows they are doing extremely well. Sitecore has demonstrated that they are capable of earning money in a competitive market and posted record-numbers again back in December 2009.
• Global footprint: Sitecore is an established global player; much more so than Umbraco. Sitecore is in particular strong in the important and highly competitive US and UK markets.
• Complexity: Many customers have started to realize that they do indeed have complex requirements. Sitecore has targeted the higher end of the market for quite a few years now, which has made the product more complex and capable towards the demanding, global enterprises.

My take: If you do a proper CMS vendor evaluation, you will probably find that the license cost is only a fraction of the overall project costs. Your criteria should really be to look at which system will meet your requirements most efficiently.

It is common for vendors to ask prospects, customers, analysts and others to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA). Without a signed NDA, vendors may be reluctant to share roadmap details, financial numbers and other sensitive information. Recently CMS Watch published a blog on why they have a policy of not signing NDAs with the vendors they evaluate, but what is the customer perspective? Should you as a buyer willingly sign any NDAs that vendors put on the table?

To quote former Gartner technology industry analyst Vinnie Mirchandani from his excellent blog from 2005 on Non-Disclosure, Non-Compete, Non-sense:

Why should they bind themselves with an NDA unless the information being shared is really sensitive -not shared with more than 1-2 people within the company or outside?

The problem with an NDA is that it is a legally binding confidentiality agreement that creates restrictions and can get you in trouble later. Talking about trouble: You will almost certainly get yourself in trouble if you sign an NDA without involving your legal department. Involving the colleagues in legal means added time and complexity, so in a procurement process, you don’t want to have to go through this with too many vendors. To add to the fun: if the vendor is not based in the same country as your are, then you can expect the lawyers will take some additional time deciding the state of governing law and other legal details.

In reality, and with very few exceptions, almost no vendors keep track of what exactly was said at a given meeting. This means that it is extremely hard for any vendor to actually enforce an NDA in case a story leaks. Let’s say you have an honest and open-mouthed employee like intranet manager Mark Morrell at BT who writes blog postings with titles like these:

• How you can help improve Oracle’s poor usability
• Is Oracle up to its old tricks?

Mark is doing a great job for the intranet community by openly sharing his perspective. Even though Mark is not sharing any trade secrets, some NDAs are so restrictive that blog postings like Marks would have to be approved by the vendor. The same goes for tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn status messages and group postings, etc.

I used to work at a US software company, where the rule-of-thumb as a European employee was that I should never sign anything at all. As a customer, I suggest applying the same principle to save time and avoid potential trouble down the road.

Note to buyers/customers: I’m not saying that you should not ask vendors to sign confidentiality agreements. I understand that your digital projects may be very sensitive and may require contractual arrangements in order to guard secrets. As always my advice here is: Remember that you are the customer and that you are the one paying the bills.

Note to vendors: We are not a traditional analyst firm, but also don’t sign vendor NDAs. We will honour any news embargo for a couple of days, but we will not consider covering industry news unless we are allowed to talk to customers to get their perspective.

 Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design spoke on Real Time Data and the Power of
Visualization at the Webtrends Engage event in New Orleans. The city is very
proud of their New Orleans Saints football team that is going to the Super Bowl
for the first time in the 43 years of playing here. On the left is an American
flag Saints style that I saw here in the Uptown area. It is a great
visualization that I could resist adding before I start to cover the session.