Dave McNamee: My Products

New Portal Efforts

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 15:19:01 GMT

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.

Commonly Held Assets

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 14:31:14 GMT

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.

Advance the Front

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 14:02:20 GMT

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.

SPML: Open Standards User Provisioning

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 17:51:28 GMT

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.

Organized RSS

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:04:59 GMT

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.

Websphere Portal

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:27:37 GMT

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.

Websphere Studio Demo

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 19:34:38 GMT

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.

IBM Web Services Demo

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 16:40:41 GMT

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.

Enterprise IM

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:54:56 GMT

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.

Enterprise Infrastructure and HIPPA

Wed, 21 May 2003 13:48:12 GMT

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.

Shrinking Community

Tue, 06 May 2003 17:32:42 GMT

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.

I'm Back

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 16:27:09 GMT

Well, I am back in the office after being gone for a week for the birth of my son, Conner James. If you haven't seen pictures yet, you can go to www.davemcnamee.com and read about his birth and see pictures. He is the cutest kid ever. And no, I am not biased. ;)

Look back to this blog for my game plan for the next little while.

Product Pricing

Sat, 19 Apr 2003 17:59:13 GMT

With the coming of spring, we draw closer to the rate committee meetings. ITS is an internal service fund agency which means that we have to recover our costs. We are not an appropriated agency. Instead, our customer agencies, who are appropriated, have to ask for the right amount of money to be able to purchase products from us. What this means is we have to figure out how much we are going to charge for our products far enough in advance that agencies can change their budgets in time to get the money they will need for our services.

To make a long story short, we have to figure out what our rates are going to be about 18 months before they become effective. Yup, thats a fantastic way to price IT products.

We are going through our accounting processes and organizing things according to our new product families. I am very encouraged that I will have the financial information I need to price my products appropriately.

Official Pages

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 13:49:26 GMT

In an effort to create a more official web outlet for information on ITS products, we have created some informational web pages. As time passes, there will be more and more information available here, including product descriptions and other documents.

Portal Product

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 13:40:54 GMT

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.

He's Like Michael Jordan

Tue, 08 Apr 2003 14:32:47 GMT

My fans are wondering when I was going to come out of blogging retirement. Well, friends, your long wait is over. I know it's been a long time since my last entry on March 28, and a lot has happened since then. Unfortunately, this emergence from retirement is much like Jordan's return to basketball through the Washington Wizards-it probably won't be as good as the Chicago days.

I am currently busy with several efforts. Probably the most significant one is the UMD/Web Authentication project. I have been working on product documentation, and on reviewing the developer's work. We are really making pretty good progress on things. One of my main concerns is selling the concept of single sign on to business owners. I have a very grand vision for what eGovernement services could become. There is so much potential to improve the experience that citizens have when they obtain services from the State. A lot of people have done a lot of really great work towards developing systems that deliver services to citizens. We could take it a lot further, though, and that's what I want to do.

Meanwhile I am also working on developing our reporting products, specifically Actuate web reporting. It is a service that we have been providing for some time without any product definition or cost recovery structure. I am working to change that and make it a world-class product.

Identity Management

Fri, 28 Mar 2003 17:07:48 GMT

Windley recently attended a Digital Identity Summit where leaders spoke about why digital ID is an important thing. I am in the trenches developing a serious base for Digital ID for the state. Phil mentions the Utah Master Directory (UMD) in one of his articles on Phil Becker's presentation. I believe that UMD will provide tremendous value to the citizens and the employees of the State of Utah.

UMD is based on Novell's eDirectory technology. It will have space for all users of State web applications. 2.4 million plus. It will have account management tools that will let users update their own information. Imagine if all State web applications used the directory for primary information on users, such as address. The citizen would have total control over the information the State was using to provide services. As an opt-in directory, citizens could still be e-hermits if they want to, hiding in the hills of paper processes, rather than taking advantage of the civilization beneath them.

There are major challenges to overcome. The biggest one, I think, is the fact that very few people understand the potential of UMD and consolidated web authentication. I am working on a marketing strategy right now to get more people to see the value of it. Also, there are many technical and policy challenges that need to be overcome.

One thing to remember is that we are not trying to build the whole thing in a day. We started with initial development of UMD last year, and now we are working on other components that will bring us closer to our goals. Major component releases, like the new web authentication system, will occur this year. Also, we realize that agencies are free to choose whatever directory structure they want and whatever authentication platform they want. The only way they will use UMD and authentication is if they see the value, and the value equals or exceeds the cost. The product has to serve their interests. It's my job to make that connection.

Teamsite Consultant

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 16:35:49 GMT

Tom Brown, a consultant for Interwoven, is here to look at our Teamsite installation and see if he can demo some things successfully for us. After he gets things set up, we will show the product to agencies and get their input, if they wish to give any.

At any rate, a final recommendation regarding Teamsite will be produced shortly, with a final decision from management coming shortly thereafter.

UII and Co-Loc

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 14:16:02 GMT

Yesterday I attended a joint ACIO/Product Management Council meeting. The topic was the renewal of the Utah Interactive contract and web hosting in general. For those unfamiliar with the history of web development in the State of Utah over the past 4 years, Utah Interactive, Inc (called UII by most state folks, UI by those who work there) has been responsible for a large amount of progress towards getting services online. They basically own and run the Utah.gov portal, and they have successfully created 70+ web applications for a multitude of state agencies. They have done a lot of great work in a time where there really wasn't anyone else to fill that void.

Well, their 4 year contract expires sometime in May, and the discussion at the meeting yesterday centered around renewing the contract, and on where their applications will live. Today, all UII apps live in their own facility. ITS attempted unsuccessfully last year to migrate their apps to our iPlanet environment. UII uses Linux. In order to bring those apps into a more controlled environment, it has been decided that colocation is the best option. UII will bring their servers to ITS' data center where they will enjoy world-class environmental, network, and power facilities, not to mention physical security. I think this is the right thing to do. I also believe that renewing the UII contract is a wise decision, however, in order for eGovernment to mature, changes need to be made to our relationship with UII. I believe that the relationship should be more customer (the state)/contractor (UII) rather than partner/partner. I'm not discounting the value of what they have done, nor do I think our relationship should end, I'd just like to see the state take charge of its eGovernment destiny instead of outsourcing it.

Good Day

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:52:14 GMT

I am ready for another exciting week here at ITS. This week will be filled with UMD/Auth and content management. Last week I met with some key customers to explain our teamsite proof of concept, which is underway right now. I will be publishing a business case document for teamsite next week.

Last Tuesday I attended the IT Manager's breakfast where Novell talked about their ID management, authentication, and web services products. These are all services that I have product responsibility for. Their presentation was very interesting. I have scheduled a meeting with IT directors for this Wednesday where I will be presenting what we are currently doing on these fronts.

I will try to do a better job blogging my activities this week.

New Web Presence

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 21:42:59 GMT

ITS Product Managers, Project Managers, and Customer Relationship Managers have a new presence on the web. We will be useing this space as a place to put documents and other information on our products. My page can be found here.

How will this relate to my work weblog, you ask? Well, I will continue blogging, but if I want to link to specific information on a product, I will link to pages based in this new web presence. If you go there how, you will be dissappointed, because I have't put anything out there yet, but don't worry, I will have stuff there soon.

Customer Connections

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 21:35:14 GMT

Several of us from ITS met with a slew of eREP folks down in American Fork to discuss UMD and authentication. We have had a lot of contact with them about UMD in the past, but we haven't really made a solid connection until this meeting. I basically described the whole shooting match on the whiteboard and we answered questions. I find that if our customers understand our products, they see how they can use them to accomplish their business objectives. Now, we have been talking to eREP and collaborating with them in the past, but I feel like we are moving into a new phase where they know and understand what we are doing and we know and understand what they are doing, and we work together to meet business objectives.

This is the kind of relationship that I want to build with more of our customers. I put out an email to some IT directors offering to come and describe UMD and authentication to them as well. It's extremely important that we get the word out. In the next little while I will post more information about UMD here on my blog, and elsewhere.

Directory Services and Web Authentication PRD

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 22:08:42 GMT

I finished an initial draft of the PRD for UMD/Auth/Auth/App Profile/Identity Management today. It has been distributed to our engineering folks for review. Tomorrow I will share it with the eREP team.

Busride

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 13:37:31 GMT

Radio Userland software is pretty cool. I am sitting on the bus right now, on my way to work. Once I submit this post, it will go to my localhost and then as soon as I connect to the network in the state office building the article will be automatically uploaded the radio userland community server. Now if I only had Sprint WiFi service...

This is going to be a very busy week. I will be finishing my first rough draft of a PRD for UMD/auth/auth/ID management. I will be sharing this document with key stakeholders including eREP, DHRM, DPS, DWS, DOT, DHS, and DAS. This thing is so huge that the PRD will evolve over the next month, but our experience with DPS last week has proven the value of talking early and often with customers about the product. In the meantime, because there is so much work to be done to get the whole thing put together, development will continue. One major difference, tho, between now and previous development is that now we are working as a team, and everything will go thru a peer review process.

Wednesday we are meeting with the eREP team in American Fork. I have only been in contact with the eREP team for a couple of weeks, and already my understanding of their requirements and timeframes has improved significantly. Their needs are many and complex. Dan Cook at ITS and Dan Rossean (spelling?) at eREP are trying to keep everything straight, getting the right people to talk at the right time. That's a big job.

Also on my plate for this week will be activity on the "web services" strategic plan. This plan will address all of the web-related technologies and products that ITS offers. In the past we have not done a good job at packaging all of these services and combining strategy. Because of this we have not been as competitive as we should have been in the businesses of web hosting and web-related services. We have to improve to survive.

Workflow and XML

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 22:52:12 GMT

ITS has tried to create a workflow product in the past. Our efforts failed completely, but it is still in the back of my mind. And with the mid-year (according to microsoft.com) release of Office 11, I think InfoPath may turn out to be a tool that we could use to create a workflow/BPM product. I would sure like to try it.

You know, there are times when I wish I had time to dig down into the depths of technology and just learn it all. Alas, I have departed from the techie path (I did some Java and other web development during a previous assignment) and I am now firmly rooted on the management path. There's some cool stuff out there.