A few words about a few great Pentagon leaders

I was thinking about the Pentagon over the long weekend – appropos, given the Memorial Day celebration. But my thoughts were also sparked by viewing a 9/11 documentary, reviving all the memories of that dark day’s attacks on New York and Washington – which ultimately led to my joining the ranks of defense intelligence for a while.

Swap Panetta and Blair: A Modest Proposal

First, a quick story from when I was working in government.

Not long after the initial establishment of a “Director of National Intelligence,” the DNI CIO held an inaugural “DNI Information Sharing Conference” in Denver in the summer of 2006. I was asked to sit on a panel about “Innovation across the Intelligence Community,” representing the Defense Intelligence Agency and sharing the stage with two counterparts, from the CIA and NSA.  Our panel chair was Mr. CJ Chapla, then the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the old Intelink Management Office, redubbed “Intelligence Community Enterprise Services,” an office now under the Office of the DNI (ODNI). CJ asked the three of us to describe briefly the goals and projects we were each working on, and in seriatim that’s what we did for 90 minutes or so.

When it was time for questions, the very first audience-member asked: “It seems that each of you are independently working on, and paying for, very similar kinds of technology projects. It would make sense to combine or rationalize the work, so why are you continuing to do it independently?”

Some say Obama has already chosen Cyber Czar

I’ll wade into the breach again, of analyzing (and trying to anticipate) some national-security appointments for the new Obama Administration.  Today I must admit that I’m taken with the latest reportage from the U.K. Spectator – a quite conservative publication not usually known for its closeness to the Obama inner circle.

Crisis? Pshaw. Be Bold with Research Investments

Bottom line: The smart companies will weather this fiscal crisis by “steering into the skid,” and actually increasing their investment in the future.

One of my last pieces of advice to DIA’s director before leaving last year was to increase the amount of money annually invested in IT research and innovation. DIA’s technology budget was typically too bloated on the side of operations and maintenance for current systems, and not investing enough in the future, though during my time there we had made significant progress in redressing that, increasing the resources (people and money) put against “what comes next.”

In government-agencies particularly (and many torpid commercial enterprises also), budgeteers make the mistake of throwing money at legacy systems instead of being bold and prioritizing research for the next generation of systems. (Last year I wrote about these issues in “Moving Money to the Left.”)

Now, no one has asked me about my views on the fiscal “bailout package,” which makes sense, particularly when there are people who make far more sense than me expressing their well-founded opinions in ways I thoroughly agree with – such as, say, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron in his excellent op-ed piece for CNN last night (“Bankruptcy not Bailout is the Answer“).

But a number of people have asked me what the impact on Microsoft might be from the current “crisis” and market volatility.  I have to say that I’m pretty optimistic, precisely because Microsoft is investing in the future, in ways that are designed to carry us through short-term downtimes and on to exciting new platforms.  The company’s cash-rich, which helps. 

 Most importantly, our CEO Steve Ballmer firmly pointed to our increasing bet on our new approaches to the future.  Speaking in Silicon Valley, he said proudly that not only will Microsoft continue to buy about 20 innovative companies a year, but we will also keep spending $9 billion a year, or 14 percent of revenues, on internal research and development. (See the Venture Beat story here.) 

 

Microsoft “will use the slump as a chance to invest more in our future than the other guys we’re competing with” – Steve Ballmer, quoted in Bloomberg.com  

 

There are going to be winners and losers coming out of this slump, as there have been in each of the tech slumps I’ve seen in my short (!) life over the past three decades I’ve been involved.  The winners are inevitably those with a vision for the long term and the determination to plan beyond the horizon. 

Microsoft won’t be the only winner (see “Microsoft, Xerox Invest in Innovation” for a description of the Xerox CTO’s similar thoughts), but I’m convinced we will be in the front rank.

 

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Research and Intelligence … Research for Intelligence

I’ll be at Penn State University for the next couple of days, at the Research in American conference.  This particular conference, with the theme “Connecting Technology Thought Leaders with Government Officials,” is sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focusing on their Science and Technology area. 

Here’s the agenda for the conference, which has an excellent lineup of technologists presenting their approaches and progress. 

ODNI turned to the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) to host and run the conference.  Someone, somewhere in the chain, slipped up and invited me as the Keynote speaker for Tuesday – I’m planning to do the thing with no slides and to speak (in part) about the emerging possibilities of revolutionary research in a post Web 2.0 world.

For some sobering background information,  check out a recent tour of the research-funding horizon by Amy Ellis Nutt in the New Jersey Star-Ledger (“As research funds stagnate, science in state of crisis“).  Here’s a taste:

Once the world’s gold standard, American scientific enterprise is in free fall. Short of government funds and strapped for cash, researchers across the country are abandoning promising avenues of scientific investigation and, increasingly, the profession of science itself.” – Amy Ellis Nutt, The Star-Ledger

Do you share that pessimism?  Think it’s overstated?

I’ll give an update about the conference tomorrow.

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A Roadmap for Innovation – from Center or the Edge?

Fact:   In marking its five-year anniversary earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security released a fact sheet touting the department’s accomplishments in that time, including “establish[ing] the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to provide a 24-hour watch, warning, and response operations center, which in 2007 issued over 200 actionable alerts on cyber security vulnerabilities or incidents. US-CERT developed the EINSTEIN intrusion detection program, which collects, analyzes, and shares computer security information across the federal civilian government. EINSTEIN is currently deployed at 15 federal agencies, including DHS, and plans are in place to expand the program to all federal departments and agencies.”

Analysis:  I’m not going to write, in this post at least, about US-CERT and EINSTEIN in particular. I will point out that some writers have been skeptical of “Big DHS” progress on cyber security up to now, and the anniversary was an occasion for much cynical commentary. 

Charles Cooper in his popular Coop’s Corner blog on CNet wrote that “when it comes to network security, DHS appears to be more of a wet noodle than even its sharpest critics assumed… Talk with security consultants and former government officials involved with DHS and you come away wondering what these folks do all day.”