Green IT

The Government Printing Office (GPO) was recently named as a finalist by Computer World magazine for Green IT initiatives. This is an impressive honor granted to a 147 year old agency that is slogging through several massive information system transformation initiatives.

GPO’s IT systems are similar to any other organizations; relying upon networks, hardware, trained personnel and the most important, satisfaction of the end user. In the past several months, the department has eliminated redundancy throughout the agency by consolidating servers, reused or recycled all retired hardware, enhanced end user capabilities and reduced energy consumption in areas by more than 50%.

Additionally, the IT organization is specifying all new systems with low energy components, and equipping areas, as appropriate, with low energy Citrix solutions.

Sustainable computing is a priority for GPO and every effort is being taken maximize green computing techniques. As a federal agency, GPO takes pride in our mission to Keep America Informed and believes environmental stewardship is not only good business but good government.

One of the fundamental transformations at GPO is to develop and launch a world-class information management system for Federal publications. This is known as FDsys, GPO’s Federal Digital System (www.gpo.gov/fdsys). This and other system initiatives are being developed in line with GPO’s sustainability initiatives. These digital system initiatives will allow GPO to maintain their mission to Keep America Informed, by offering access to Federal publications electronically, and improving our print operations to efficiently utilize raw materials and energy. All new digital systems are being installed with energy saving components.

We plan to implement virtualization technology for servers once this technology proves to be reliable for our applications. Virtualization offers us the ability to share single physical servers to support multiple applications operating systems. This will further reduce our Information Technology energy consumption.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided as a service, allowing users to access technology-enabled services without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.

As we face the need to convert several hundred years of paper documents to digital files for quick and easy access, cloud computing may provide a nice solution for us at the Government Printing Office. There have been efforts underway at GPO and other Federal agencies to scan documents and produce collections of TIFF images that can later be processed to create accessible versions. To date we have several terabytes of TIFF data collected that needs to be converted. But, this is just the tip of the iceberg – we anticipate this unprocessed data will grow to multiple petabytes. To process this data, we are faced with either building an in-house computing capability to convert these documents, outsourcing the conversion, or getting creative and exploring capabilities like cloud computing.

Fortunately there are some benchmarks emerging that we can use to help model this problem and guide us to a solution. It appears that processing a page of text in TIFF from and converting this to a searchable PDF takes about 1 minute with OCR engines working on a typical computing platform available today. This will certainly improve over time as Moore’s Law continues to benefit us. This simple benchmark will allow us to cost out the options.

One of the key barriers that we need to anticipate is licensing specific applications that will be used to accomplish this conversion. In particular, licensing OCR technology to be used in a cloud of thousands of virtual machines to parallel process a large collection of TIFFs appears to be one of our major hurdles to clear.

As virtualization technologies continue to emerge and mature, they will play a big role in solving some complex and, at times, short term computing tasks, minimizing the need to build large, on-site computing facilities.

The Wisdom of Teams

I have had the pleasure of working with some great teams throughout my career and I hope to be associated with several more great teams. I discovered the book The Wisdom of Teams several years ago and have routinely handed out copies of this book to team members as their teams form. Jon R. Katzenbaum and Douglas K. Smith outline many of the critical aspects of great teams that I wholeheartedly support.

My notes from this book…

Teams consist of a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Complementary Skills:

• Technical or functional expertise – the basic skills required to attack the problem.
• Problem-solving and decision-making – teams must be able to identify the problems and opportunities they face, evaluate options and make necessary trade-offs and decisions about how to proceed.
• Interpersonal skills – common understanding and purpose cannot arise without effective communication and constructive conflict that, in turn, depends upon interpersonal skills that consist of: risk taking, helpful criticism, objectivity, active listening, giving the benefit of doubt, support, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others.

Committed to a Common Purpose and Performance Goals:

• A common, meaningful purpose sets the tone and aspiration – most teams shape their purposes in response to a demand or opportunity put in their path, usually by management.
• Specific performance goals are an integral part of the purpose – transforming broad directives into specific measurable performance goals is a critical first step for a team trying to shape a common purpose meaningful to its members. Specific goals provide clear and tangible footholds for teams by: defining a team work-product, facilitating clear communications and constructive conflict within the team, maintaining focus, having a leveling effect (teams that succeed, evaluate what and how each individual can best contribute to the team goal and do so in terms of the performance objective itself rather than a person’s status or personality), allowing the team to achieve small wins (small wins are invaluable to building members’ commitment and overcoming the inevitable obstacles), and challenging the team members to commit themselves.

Committed to a Common Approach

• Team members must agree on who will do particular jobs – agreeing on the specifics of work and how it fits together to integrate individual skills and advance team performance lies at the heart of shaping a common approach.

Mutual Accountability

• No group ever becomes a team until it can hold itself accountable as a team
• Two critical aspects of teams: commitment and trust.

One of the finest teams I have been associated with is the Program Management Office at the Government Printing Office. This team formed around a central purpose: to define, develop, and deploy a world-class digital information management system for the Federal government. They embraced the goal and charged forward to do everything they could to achieve the goal. The charter members of this team consist of Scott Stovall, George Barnum, Selene Dalecky, Gil Baldwin, Kirk Knoll, Lisa LaPlant, Matt Landgraf, Kate Zwaard, Blake Edwards, Kirk Petri, Adam Schwartz, and Magan Mohrmann. I will always cherish my involvement with this team.

The wisdom of Steve Jobs

This is a post from an earlier blog that I had that I thought was a good start to the The WashBaord, and characterizes my feelings well.

.....[being] fired from Apple was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Stewart [Brand] and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.