Information Technology – Page 15 – Public Intelligence Blog

2004/12/182009/12/04

Review: Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public)

Superb book, my choice for gift to colleagues,

December 18, 2004

Robert H Buckman

Every once in a while airport bookstores carry something truly extraordinary. This is such a book. It is so utterly perfect, sensible, readable, and on target that Monday I am buying copies to give to colleagues I know are interested in making more of our global information accessible and actionable.

I am sure this book will alter the perceptions of any management team in any domain. At a larger level of international information sharing, what the Swedes are calling M4 IS (multi-national, multi-agency, multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional (or multi-domain) information sharing), this book is the single best and most practical book for turning Industrial era organizations into Information era organizations.

There have been other great books that captured some of these ideas early on, from the popular (Alvin and Heidi Toffler's POWERSHIFT, Paul Strassmann's Information PayOff) to the inspired (Thomas Stewart's Wealth of Knowledge, Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth : A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era), but this is the one that I think absolutely must be read by every flag officer and every colonel aspiring to be a flag officer, and their counterparts across all industries.

Heavily marked up, this book is already a classic. The author is brilliant in an elegant understandable manner in making several key points in an action-oriented implementation-facilitating fashion:

1) Technology is the easy part–changing the culture is the hard part (from information hoarding to information sharing)

2) Command and control stovepipes are a big part of the problem–we have to nurture trust and responsibility in all levels by giving all levels access to all information (within reason).

3) Communications, computers, and library services as well as external business intelligence services all have to be rolled together under one executive that has “direct report” relationship with the CEO–it is the networking of humans and their knowledge that has value, not the hardware and software and hard-wired comms lines

4) If you are not rolling over half your software and hardware each year, with nothing in your C4I system more than two years old at any one time, then you are losing capacity, productivity, and profit

5) 85% of what you know cannot be captured in structured knowledge archives–only a living network can allow employees to provide just enough, just in time articulation of answers that can be created in real time–this allows a *dramatic* shortening of the business information answer cycle, from months to hours.

6) If the CEO does not get it, live it, and enforce it, it will not happen.

The author shares with us practical real-world experience that makes this book a real-world manifestor rather than just a visionary proposal. His practical suggestions lead directly to the possibilities of global issue networks such as J.F. Rischard recommends in his HIGH NOON: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them, but this book by Robert Buckman is the real deal, a true “revolution in business affairs.”

We've reached a tipping point. The day this book reached airport bookstores, the world changed. From this point forward, we are either implementing this author's wisdom and gaining value, or not.

2004/12/122009/12/04

Review: Enterprise Integration–The Essential Guide to Integration Solutions (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series)

Information Technology

Elegant, Easy to Read, Good Primer for Managers,

December 12, 2004

Beth Gold-Bernstein

If you are a manager to whom information technologists report, or a manager that employs technical advisors who in turn help oversee varied IT procurements and implementations, then this book is an ideal primer. It can also be scary, because I will wager than in 7 out of 10 cases, the technical experts are not pursuing the enterprise integration fundamentals that this book outlines.

Both authors are strong in their own right. The book bring together Bill Ruh, former MITRE, MITRETEK, and Concepts 5 guru, today the global manager for CISCO AONS, who is updating his 2000 book on the topic, with Beth Gold-Bernstein, who has consulted, lectured, and written on this topic, and has her own book titled “Enterprise Integration: A Practical Approach.”

I regard the book, and the topic, as a watershed between the old days of configuration management and a focus on data that was largely within internal custody, and today, when real-time data integration and exploitation is required across both all internal points (i.e. including the 85% that is in emails and hard drives) and external points–not just the web, but supplier, buyer, regulatory, and other databases.

I recommend this book for managers in part because the book itself is quite clear on the fact that information technology by itself, no matter how much money is thrown at it, will not achieve enterprise information integration. Management mind-sets, management metrics, management enforcement of standards and compliance with the strategic direction implied by enterprise integration, are all required.

Early in the book there are important references to both scale and speed, with the key difference between the 1990's and today being that instead of humans accessing the data, there now much more machine to machine communication and sharing, and this requires hyper-speed. There is also much more focus on event-driven information actions, with Delta Airlines being cited as a very good case study–the system must be able to take many autonomous actions triggered by an event (e.g. an airplane more than 15 minutes late, with repercussions across gate management, luggage management, connections management, catering management, etc.). Zero latency, real-time enterprise, and event-driven information transactions are among the buzz words.

The case study of CISCO on page 6 grabbed me early on–my primary focus is on the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and reading about CISCO's move to real-time metrics (this book is *very* strong on metrics, which I take to be a very good thing) and real-time decision making and course corrections, I was thinking to myself that CISCO is to information as special operations are to terror. So when CISCO doubled productivity, cut costs by 30%, and made daily reporting the norm, I say to myself: okay, now let's see that in GWOT….this book is Ref A in answering that challenge. Another case study, on FedEx using hand-held devices as both points of data entry in the field, and end points for data value to the field, also struck me as relevant to GWOT.

Throughout the book, one of its own phrases: “people are the most expensive part of any system,” keeps resonating, because everything in here is about either increasing productivity or reducing the time-cost of information transactions. This book also has a very healthy focus on information sharing across all boundaries, with appropriate security, privacy, and legal attributes for each transaction.

Standards receive heavy emphasis throughout.

The book is slightly dated on the topic of automated metastandards and semantic data definitions, but I know the authors to be personally very engaged in the very latest developments surrounding semantic web and synthetic information architectures and other related automated assignments of meaning, so I take this to be primarily an issue of timing–the book had to be put to bed.

The chapters on Information Integration Architecture and on Information Integration, the ones I was most looking forward to reading, strike me as the least developed among the many excellent parts of this book. In part this is because Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is just coming of age, and truly scalable solutions to the challenge of managing global multi-media multi-lingual unstructured information data (Cf. InfoSphere AB in Sweden) are just now coming into being. This chapter does provide an important itemization of key organizations responsible for metadata standards, and lays out a framework for establishing “who needs to know what when” as part of the manager's contribution to the over-all enterprise integration planning process. These two chapters excel in pointing out that information management is about ensuring long-term data value, allowing for reachback over time and space.

In its conclusion the book makes reference to turf wars, training, reducing redundancy, reducing reliance on proprietary technologies with lock-in costs, finding a return on assets, and creating a culture of reuse. The last hundred pages of the book, and the CD-ROM, provide templates that any manager could reasonably demand of their technical advisors. I opened these up and found them very useful, to the point of being worth at least a week if not more of man-time, and hence easily repaying the price of the book many times over.

The bibliography is good and the index has been thoughtfully developed. I recommend this book to anyone who deals with global information in any form, but especially to managers who might be wondering if their IT people have any clue as to where they are taking the enterprise and its information. This book also strikes me a superb textbook, both for undergraduates as a primer, and for graduates as a foundation for a more nuanced discussion. For myself, it was “just enough, just in time” information, exactly what I wanted and needed in my specific context.

2004/10/212009/12/04

Review: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised–Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything

4 Star, Civil Society, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Media

Great personal story, important national message,

October 21, 2004

Joe Trippi

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

Joe Trippi has produced a very fine personal story that clearly presents Trippi, Dean, and the Internet as the people's tool, in the context of “early days.” His big point is in the title: this is about the overthrow of “everything.”

I took off one star for two reasons: his very limited “tie in” to the broad literature on the relationship between the Internet and a *potentially but not necessarily* revitalized democracy; and his relative lack of attention to the enormous obstacles to electronic democracy getting traction, including the corruption of the entire system from schoolhouse to boardroom to White House.

There is a broad data point that Trippi missed that adds great power to his personal appreciation of the future: the inexpensive DoKoMo cell phone and network approach from Japan, when combined with Sony's new playstation that is connected to the Internet and opens up terabytes on online storage to anyone with $300, and to this I would add […]semantic web and synthetic intelligence architectures–these all combine into finally making possible the electronic connectivity of poor and working class voters, not just the declining middle class and the wealthy. 2008 is the earliest that we might see this, but I suspect it won't be until after two more 9-11's, closer to 2012.

There are a number of gems throughout the book, and I will just list a few phrases here:

— politics of concentric circles–find the pebble in every town

— polling substitute's conviction for bullshit (his word)

— citing Robert Putnam in “Bowling Alone,” every hour of television watching translates to a 10% drop in civic involvement

— what gets destroyed in scorched earth politics is democracy

— McCain led the way for Dean in using the Internet and being an insurgent (“the Republican branch of the Republican Party”)

— the dirty secret of US politics is that fund-raising (and I would add, gerrymandering) take the election decision out of the hands of voters

— the existing party machines are dinosaurs, focused on control rather than empowerment–like government bureaucracies, they cannot accept nor leverage disruptive innovation (see my review of “The Innovator's Solution”)

— Open Source Rules–boy, do I agree with him here. He describes Dean's campaign as the first really committed “open source” campaign, and this is at the heart of the book (pages 98-99). One reason I have come to believe in open source software, open source intelligence, and open spectrum is that I see all three as essential to the dismantling of the Maginot line of politics, institutional dominance of money and votes on the Hill.

— Media will miss the message. He has bitter words for the media spin and aggression that helped bring Dean down, but his more thoughtful remarks really emphasize the mediocrity of the entertainment media and its inability to think for itself.

— TIRED: transactional politics. WIRED: transformational politics

— Democratic fratricide killed Dean–Gephardt on his own, and Clark with backing from Clinton, killed the insurgency

— Cumulative Intelligence is a term that Trippi uses, and he puts in a strong advertisement for Google's gmail that I found off-putting. Googling on the term “collective intelligence” will get one to the real revolutionaries. When he quotes Google as saying it will “harness the cumulative intelligence of its customers” this reminds me of my own phrase from the early 1990's, one Mike Nelson put in one of Al Gore's speeches, about the need to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth. My point: we don't need Google to get there–collective intelligence is already happening, and Google is a side show.

Tripi's final chapter has “seven rules”: 1) Be first; 2) Keep it moving; 3) Use an authentic voice; 4) Tell the truth; 5) Build a community; 6) Cede control; 7) Believe again.

There are a rather lame few pages at the end on Change for America. Forget it. Change for America is going to be bottom-up, from the county level.

I want to end by noting that at one point, on page 156, I wrote in the margin, “this is a moving book,” but also express my frustration at how unwilling Dean and Trippi were to listening to those of us (Jock Gill, Michael Cudahay, myself), who tried very hard to propose a 24/7 team of retired Marine Corps watchstanders with structured staff processes; a massive outreach to non-Democratic voters including the 20$ of the moderate Republican wing ready to switch. On page 161 Trippi writes “The truth is that we never really fixed the inherent problems in the organization that I saw that first day….” I could not help but write in the margin, “We told them so.”

The problem with Dean and Trippi is they became enchanted with the blogs and the newness of its all–as well as the fund-raising–and lost sight of the fundamentals. The winner in 2008 or 2012 will have to strike a better balance. One other note: the revolution that Trippi talks about is sweeping through Latin America, with active Chinese, Korean, and Japanese interest. It is just possible that electronic populism will triumph in Latin America before public intelligence becomes commonplace in America.

2004/07/282009/12/04

Review: Stealing the Network–How to Own a Continent

5 Star, Information Operations, Information Technology

A Real Hoot, Way Better than Spy Stories–Be Afraid…,

July 28, 2004

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links and a comment.

I picked this book up at Hackers on Planet Earth, and got Kevin Mitnick to sign a poster at the same time. The book is a hoot. I've done the spy stuff, it's boring compared to the persistent intelligence shown by these cyber-spooks, a couple of whom I am pleased to know.

I suppose the disclaimer is necessary: this is a novel, for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you want to be cyber-spy, this book strikes me as a great way to start getting hooked. If you are a security manager, be afraid, very afraid…you need to read this book.

20 Dec 07 Comment: The US Government does not want you to know that all of the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are totally open to the Internet. These are the computers that control power, natural gas, water and fuel pipelines and storage tansk.

For a great idea of exactly what this book talks about, watch:
Live Free or Die Hard (Full Screen Edition)

2002/02/062009/12/04

Review: Pearl Harbor Dot Com

5 Star, Communications, Information Society, Information Technology, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)

Everything You Need to Know About the Next Attack–And Fun,

February 6, 2002

Winn Schwartau

This book is a based on a *non-fiction* manuscript about U.S. vulnerabilities to electronic that was so hot that the author's lawyers insisted he turn it into a novel to avoid liability.It is absolutely superb and written by one of the most authoritative persons around. Unlike most academic and industry security specialists, the author has from the very beginning understood, respected, and been in touch with the elite hackers who worked very hard in the 1980's to expose the outrageously vulnerable electronic systems used by our financial, transportation, power, and communications industries.

In my view, books like this as well as the non-fiction books such as “Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway” have been vital elements in educating consumers, stockholders, and voters. If you want to know just how vulnerable your bank account is, read this book.

I won't reveal the surprise ending, but will say that it is absolutely a shocker, and totally credible.

2002/02/032009/12/04

Review: Networks and Netwars–The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

4 Star, Information Operations, Information Technology, Intelligence (Government/Secret), War & Face of Battle

Lacks Index But Excellent Collection,

February 3, 2002

John Arquilla

Although their references lean toward “the usual suspects” among the beltway bubbas, and none of the authors demonstrate real access to the various hacker groups with deeper insights than any government bureaucrat will ever achieve, this is without question one of the best sets of articles, put together by two people I view as being the most capable in this area of inquiry, and therefore I recommend it very strongly as a starting point.As with most publications by RAND it lacks an index, for which I deduct one star. The value of an index does not appear to be appreciated by those who publish these taxpayer-funded collections, and I continually lament the myopia that prevents the publishers from making such a useful collection even more valuable by taking the time to create an aggregate index.

I hope this is the last of the theoretical volumes. While it has some operationally-oriented contributions, one of the best being by Phil Williams on Transnational Criminal Networks, it is too theoretical overall, and much too US-centric. There are French, Nordic, and Singaporean, and Australian authorities, to mention just a few, that the editors must now make an effort to bring into a larger dialog. At the same time, it is now vital that we get on with much deeper study and discussion of the actual networks and specific practices–we must do much more in documenting the “order of battle” for netwar. One article, for example, lists a sample of Arabic web sites but goes no further–I would have liked to see some discussion of the 396 terrorist, insurgent, and opposition web sites, including the “Muslim Hackers” who asked for a clerical ruling on whether the Koran encouraged hacking as a means of war (it does, according to the same people that support bin Laden's views), and I would like to see much more integration with the investigative efforts of both law enforcement authorities and private sector security and fraud authorities. I am especially disappointed that all of these authorities appear to be largely oblivious to or at least not making substantive reference to the ten-year-long track record compiled by Winn Schartau and his InfoWarCon speakers and web site, an event that is arguably the only serious international venue for addressing these issues in a serious manner, with a commensurately valuable web site.

There is one other major gap in this book's approach to networks and netwars. With the exception of Paul de Armond's article on netwar against the World Trade Organization, there are no references to intelligence failures and intelligence requirements vis a vis this threat domain. The editors and authors need to establish intelligence concepts and doctrine for this threat.

This book represents the very best that DoD money can fund in isolation, and therein lies the problem. What few taxpayer funds are spent by DoD in addressing such important matters and not being spent wisely because there is no serious commitment to creating a data warehouse of all studies related to networks and netwar; there is no commitment to accessing and understanding the considerable lessons learned outside the somewhat nepotistic DoD network of standard experts; and there seems to be no commitment to creating a center of excellence that can nurture *public* understanding and new *public* standards for protecting both our critical infrastructure and the vital data that circulates on that infrastructure.

The editors and the authors are of the very highest caliber. They are also operating in a vacuum. I for one would like to see them get serious funding, to include the establishment of a public international center of excellence on netwar, with branch offices in London and Singapore.

We are losing the Third World War, between governments and gangs, in part because the military-industrial-congressional complex continues to define security in terms of very expensive mobility and weapons systems–communications, computing, and intelligence are an afterthought, and the authors are quite correct in the aggregate when they suggest that we are our own worst enemy in failing to redirect substantial funds toward cyber-war and cyber-peace. The editors and authors could be very helpful if they address in their next volume, both an intelligence order of battle against which capabilities might be created; and specific proposals for establishing international, national, and state & local capabilities. What should they be, what will it cost, who should manage them? “It ain't real until its the budget.” The authors are gracious to a fault, but it is clear from their work in the aggregate that they share a concern with our lack of preparedness for a 9-11 level of effort against our financial, transportation, power, and communications networks. They merit the greatest of respect and a full hearing from the public.

2002/01/142009/12/04

Review: The Unfinished Revolution–Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us

4 Star, Information Technology

Great Thoughts, Limited Reality, More to Do….,

January 14, 2002

Michael L. Dertouzos

In some ways this is the gold-collared knowledge worker counterpart book to Ted Halstead and Michael Lind's The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (citizen-centered). Those who liked The Cultural Creatives or IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century, can adopt this book as their user's guide for demanding change in information technology.I recommend it because it is full of common sense, is the first really helpful “requirements document” for a clean sheet new approach to software and hardware and ergonomics ($3000 word for user friendly). The bad news is that nobody is listening. We are ten years away from this being a reality because the legacy providers (big hardware, one certain software company) are not about to retool their empires for the sake of delivering better value.

It is more than a little amusing to me to have this book endorsed by the CEO of the one company that prides itself on producing software with mutated migrated Application Program Interfaces that are used to extort tribute from third party software developers, where no sane consumer will invest in his products until they've had three years to “mature” in the marketplace.

The opening listings of the “standard faults” in today's “consumer electronics” is alone worth the price of the book–unintegrated systems fault; manual labor fault; human servitude fault; crash fault; excessive learning fault; feature overload fault; fake intelligence fault; waiting fault; ratchet fault…

The book ends on a low note and high note. The low note is a description of Oxygen, a $50M project seeded by DARPA and including several major company partners such as HP and Nokia. This project has some excellent ideas, including a new focus on an architecture for nomadic computing with three aspects: a Handy 21 (hand-held), Enviro 21 (intermediate personal computers at home, office, and in car), and N21 Network (Intentional Naming System, every computer and peripheral everywhere is in the public domain and broadcasting its location and status, use on the fly). Good stuff. What he doesn't mention is that the U.S. Government is spending over half a billion dollars on completely uncoordinated desktop analysis toolkits, and there is probably 2-3X that much being spent in the private sector. He does note that we will never get our act together if we continue to develop hardware and software in a very fragmented and hardware-based manner.

On the high note, the author has clearly thought about the consequences of having an information revolution here in the USA, creating information royalty, while leaving the rest of the world dispossessed, in poverty, and unconnected. He has a very practical appreciation for the fact that the USA must fund two distinct foreign assistance programs–a Digital Marshall Plan (my phrase) to jack in the entire world; and a commensurate literacy, birth control, disease control, and famine control program to stabilize populations to the point where they can be productive within the global grid.

I read this book on the airplane coming back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Federal Emerging Technologies Conference sub-set), and I was really struck by the contradiction between the vast fragmentation spread out over Las Vegas (the man who has everything also has to carry it) and the elegant simplicity of this book's vision–one hand-held able to be any of 100+ devices. “It's the software, simpleton….”

What saddens me, especially when considering the billions of dollars being given away by our richest software developer, someone who seems to favor gestures on the margin instead of quality control and open source at the core, is that we knew all this in the mid-1980's. The eighteen distinct functionalities needed for a desktop analysts' workstation were identified by CIA in 1986–everything from data ingestion and conversion softwares to modeling and simulation and pattern detection and of course desktop publishing. The year after the CIA prototypes were working so successfully on UNIX (Sun), CIA decided that the PS2 would be the standard “dumb” terminal, and all UNIX efforts were ordered to shut-down. The big organizations, the ones with the power to make the revolution, chose control and dumb terminals over freedom and smart software. I am very skeptical that the vision in this book will come to fruition…