Combining the powers of Web Conferencing, Social Media, and Advanced Data Searching can answer a lot of governmental pain…

Where others see the colors orange and red when it comes to homeland security threats, Chris Rasmussen sees purple.  

Rasmussen is a social-software knowledge manager at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. But he prefers to call himself a purple intelligence and mashup evangelist, pointing to the fact that purple is the color that results from mixing multiple points of the spectrum.

Purple is an apt symbol for combining the expertise of organizations working to help prevent future attacks, he said.

Rasmussen has seen purple power in action through countless little success stories accomplished via Intellipedia, the information-sharing wiki that serves intelligence agencies, the military and the State Department. “All the time, people are connecting with others [who] they didn’t know worked on the same issue six feet down the hall,” he said.

Connecting the dots, more formally known as information discoverability, is gaining increasing attention from homeland security officials and experts in their ongoing attempt to corral anti-terrorism information that resides across federal, state and local jurisdictions.

In January, the departing director of national intelligence issued Intelligence Community Directive 501, which gave intelligence personnel a “responsibility to discover” information believed to be relevant to their work, along with a corresponding “responsibility to request” information they have discovered.

The directive defined discovery as the act of obtaining knowledge of the existence, but not necessarily the content, of information collected or analysis produced by any intelligence community element.

Two months later, the bipartisan Markle Foundation published a report that reaffirmed “discoverability” as the first step in any effective information-sharing system.

“Solving discoverability simplifies solving information sharing,” said Jeff Jonas, an IBM distinguished engineer and a member of the Markle Task Force on National Security in the Information Age.

But despite these high-profile mandates, challenges call into question the feasibility of discovery tools and techniques for solving data-sharing problems that span agencies, jurisdictions and cultural boundaries. Some say the technology isn’t even the hard part.

“It’s difficult to make information discoverable, useful, and, at the same time, make sure it complies with all of the other requirements around privacy and security,” said Andre Etherly, chief solutions partner at systems integrator Keane.

Managing information

One of the biggest discovery roadblocks is the mountain of data that federal, state and local authorities collect.

“When we speak about discoverability, we’re speaking about the ability to determine who to ask for a certain piece of data,” Jonas said.

That’s why some information systems architects want to abandon what has been the traditional answer: a giant data warehouse. Officials create these massive databases by merging copies of the central databases maintained by intelligence and law enforcement agencies such as the CIA and FBI.

“That model isn’t productive because you have so much data to move and the more copies, the more data to protect and keep current,” Jonas said.

Data warehousing is also problematic because it requires officials to know before setting up the system what information they might want that others have and vice versa.

More of this story at http://fcw.com/Articles/2009/05/18/Data-sharings-new-mandate.aspx?s=hls_190509&Page=3

From Rod Hodgman the marketing genius over at Convergence:

Recently Gartner published research that predicts that in four years 40 percent of knowledge workers will have abandoned their desk phones.  While we can argue whether it’s going to be more or less than 40 percent, the trend is already apparent in large, global organizations. These organizations need to cut costs in every business process and traditional telephony is a “target rich” candidate for cost savings.

Major global corporations have to lower communications costs while at the same time increase the communications capability they offer their users. In every instance, lower costs and increased capability is derived from moving voice from its legacy model to the web model, something I like to call voice-as-a-Web service.

Voice-as-a-Web service is a shift from telephony equipment to Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) platforms.  In other words, a shift from hardware to software, from proprietary protocols to standard protocols, from routing calls over the PSTN to routing them over IP, from vendor-specific APIs to Web 2.0 interfaces, from developers with specialized telephony knowledge to generic Web developers. My experience tells me that voice-as-a-Web service will have a profound impact on the face of telephony. 

I’m sure you’re thinking, “What? For the past 18 months all I’ve heard about is UC and its enterprise benefits – what’s the deal?”  Here’s the deal: in a very short time voice has become one of many real-time communications options.  There was a time when voice was the only option but that is no longer true.   The communications needs of professionals have changed and while they started with e-mail, many are now adding capabilities such as IM, presence, desktop sharing, whiteboarding, and audio/video conferencing at an astounding rate.  This transformation is supported by business leaders who recognize they are more successful when their employees, customers and suppliers are better connected to the businesses and communications process on which they depend. To keep up, voice communications has to evolve so it can become part of the presence system, be accessible from handsets, PCs and mobile devices and, increasingly, must be quickly and easily embedded into business applications. 

The good news is that the industry has had to solve the problem of integrating legacy systems into the Web before and SOA has emerged as the best model to turn them into more modular, flexible and extensible systems that can be integrated into a new generation of services.   

While SOA is the overarching model, it is Web 2.0 programming models and development techniques that enables voice-as-a-Web service and the delivery of voice to browser-based applications. Web 2.0 is a broad term but, when used in an application development context, it refers to a collection of development models, protocols and standards, such as REST, AJAX and XML that are used to create mashups and are familiar to the large, low-cost Web developer market.

These standards serve a variety of beneficial purposes.  First, Web 2.0 hides telephony complexity behind abstract service interfaces so developers do not need telephony expertise to embed voice into applications. Also by using HTTP, without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP, organizations can now use lower-cost, general purpose Web developers to quickly integrate voice into applications rather than continue to use more expensive professional programmers.  Another benefit of HTTP as the sole transport protocol is that it ensures that your communication-enabled applications leverage the existing network and security infrastructure, preventing any new capital outlays for opening new ports in the exiting firewalls. Finally, Web 2.0 encapsulation gives legacy PBXs a new life as vendor agnostic, voice servers and allows the organization’s system architects to add, modify and delete underlying PBX platforms or capabilities without disruption to the users.  This facilitates the organization’s consolidation strategy, which is critical to lowering costs. 

This last point is a crucial component that is often overlooked in the UC conversation.  Most companies justify their UC expenditures by pointing to the end user benefits rather than focusing on operational costs.  For these organizations, the ends justify the investment.  However, Web 2.0 allows organizations to gracefully migrate expensive legacy telephony to a lower cost software model without disrupting existing operations.

Take handsets as an example.  The traditional PBX handset provides voice service to an office, rather than a person, which makes them the most expensive and least flexible service delivery option available. The Softphone delivers voice service to a computer, which is more flexible but still has a high total cost of ownership because IT needs to install, patch, upgrade and secure software on every endpoint.

On the other hand, Web 2.0 makes it possible to deliver voice, video, presence and IM to any device that supports a browser.  This eliminates the need for desk phones or to install, manage, or support client software. These savings can be significant as Gartner research has shown that zero-install clients can save organizations between $200- $500/client/year.   Some of our customers expect their Web 2.0 user population to be in the 20 – 40 percent range, others think it could be as high as the 30 – 60 percent range.    In any scenario, it’s a big ROI for the customer.  How big?   If you looked at a company with 150K employee population and assume 30 percent could get by with basic telephony service, they would save between $6M and $15M annually.