PreferenceSet

Is your data slow? Do you need 100% uptime? Cloud computing is the innovative solution!

Shortly before Thanksgiving in 2010, a small ‘glitch’ in FAA computers caused the entire system to freeze. Solution: Power down, reboot, and wait. In the meantime, hundreds of planes all over the world were grounded.  In 2005, a virus caused the Dept of Agriculture to grind to a halt for 6 days.  For other federal systems, increased uptime and load (for example, financial systems that cave under pressure during year end) have been a recurring issue.

The Cloud is the much touted solution.  Cloud computing has flexible capacity, huge scalability, brings no additional costs (for low usage or peak usage, the price is the same), and it enables organizations to prototype and test easily.  It’s an incredibly agile technology that easily expands to suit the organizational needs.

Yet, this past week, Google cloud problems forced the complete shutdown of Blogger.com – that’s millions of blogs that could not be updated. There have been problems off and on with Google documents.  And while no one  would really care if they lost a post about their cat, imagine how many people would care if the data lost meant that your paycheck didn’t happen today. Or your social security check did not come. Or your car registration was permanently lost.

Prior to this point, the major criticisms of a Fed Cloud were data security and privacy, integration with non-cloud applications and platforms, and of course control – who would manage multiple departments, divisions, or agency’s data? Who would ‘own’ (and get the $$$) to control such a massive amount of information?

These are some big problems.

Yet… the Blogger debacle raises other major concerns that were previously assumed – data quality and service level. What do you do when a cloud outage eats some (but not all) of your data?  And what happens when the “foolproof, always up” cloud  crashes to the ground?  Is it still cost effective to have a cloud and have backup servers locally?

I am hoping that the CIOs and heads of IT departments at the federal agencies are reading this news and reconsidering some of the soundbites they’ve been told about the cloud.  This is not me saying that I think the cloud “sucks” or isn’t the most amazing solution ever… merely that every concern must be checked off prior to handing over social security, or federal student loans, or vital national security intelligence information – to something that may not be exactly as promised.

Each year, organizations spend millions of dollars on technology.  Between upgrades, maintenance, training, implementations, and integration… there is a steady bleed of cash.  Technology is the #1 enabler of organizational change – it can provide faster service, increased communication, cleaner data. It can help an organization overcome a tiny staff, a small budget.  Technology can enable any size organization to make things better.

But even the most pristine, glorious application is meaningless without users.  And therein lies the problem with many implementations – most employees do not understand, or embrace, technological change.

Why not? Is it because employees are really lumbering oafs, resistant to using a computer?  Many organizations portray their users to be this way; pegging employees  as obstinate elderly, practically incapable of sending an email.   But in my experience, this portrayal is false – I have had devoted users upwards of 70 years old, burning with zeal to get something new and innovative.  There is one common theme, however, that occurs in implementations and may have something to do with employee reluctance.

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I’m a huge fan of Komodo Media‘s Social Media Network Icon set. The icons are simple and elegant and they’ve become quite popular on the internet. Recently we were building an application here an needed an icon for Google Buzz and decided to build one to fit the Komodo Media icons, as the set has not been updated with one yet.

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Responding to the growing popularity of link shorteners (services which compress long links into short, coded links), Facebook, Google and Bit.ly. all announced new products yesterday. Google and Facebook are launching their own link shorteners, while Bit.ly is enhancing their market leading service. Beyond the excitement of these new developments, none of the new services forge new ground, nor do they help uses gain actionable insight into the way their content is being used.

Cross-site engagement is a particular interest of ours here at PreferenceSet. More traffic is moving off of traditional websites and onto social networks where it cannot be tracked or measured using traditional tools. Yet understanding the relationship between different entities and content is increasingly necessary to gather meaningful insight into the way an organization or company makes use of its own online presence. Despite this trend, the current crop of tools leave users mostly in the dark.

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There’s been a lot of recent press on government technology contracts. In response, the Office of Personnel Management has published recommendations on how best to implement large enterprise systems.  Most of these recommendations draw from previous failures: efficiency and cost savings that failed to materialize, or stalled projects that have no determined end date.  I think that OPM’s recommendations are incorrect, based on flawed assumptions, specifically in the realm of Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) solutions.

The original mindset behind the development of Enterprise HRIS was to develop a “Custom Off the Shelf” product that could be purchased and implemented, then changed minimally in order to accomodate customer requirements.  They were touted as ways to cut both costs and timeline – a massive replacement of an entire HR system could be done, hypothetically, in as little as 6 months.  There have been great successes in the private sector in implementing these systems – efficiency gains, cost savings, standardized business processes leading to improved productivity and the like.

The federal government, always eager to follow the private sector, began to examine the idea of standardization in the realm of technology and along with that, the COTS products.  But, unlike the private sector, the feds implementations have not gone so well. 
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Recently we launched an internal project called Giv.to.  Giv.to is a URL shortener with a few additional tricks.  To support all the features we wanted to provide our uses, we decided to go with a full Ruby on Rails application.  We were worried about expensive scaling with Rails, if the service ever really caught on.

But there was really no need to scale most of the application.  The admin interface would not be used heavily, and usage would likely grow predictably.  The only element on the application that might grow quickly and demanded high scalability was the actual URL redirection – that is, turning our shortened URLs into long URLs.

So we decided to separate our this piece of the application and build a separate web service.  URLs are created and served from a very lightweight Sinta application which is under 100 lines of code.  This application is hosted on a cloud based web service that can be instantly scaled depending on usage.  The Rails application queries the Sinatra application to create URLs and to read URL statistics.  This is done via RESTful web service.

An additional benefit of this method is we get a working API for integration with other services as well.  We’ve already implemented this on Contribune, a social news site.  Posting a story automatically creates a Giv.to URL for each posting.