As Featured on CloudTimes

Contrary to a sea of white papers and hours of slick video clips, the point when your back is against the wall is NOT the time to start looking to “the cloud” to save you. Instead, you need to start with a controllable situation of your own choosing that is as far from the fire, but as close to reality as possible.

The IT battlefield is littered with mangled reputations and dead careers from those who picked up the shiny new technology-of-the-month and went chasing windmills, while hordes of very real IT problems overpowered them in a cruel game of attrition. Cloud technologies can help even the odds in many situations; however they very rarely can go straight into production without a proper evaluation. After all, you’re not just playing with technology here, but with workflow & mindset as well.

Compared to other types of proof of concept (POC) work, the cost of giving the cloud a spin can be considerably cheaper than what you might be used to. In many cases, you can deploy redundant structures into the cloud and directly compare their performance & operational profiles in real-time with little unknown risk.

There are a number of things that you can do to make POC in the cloud more successful; however, some of them may be a little counter-intuitive:

1) Private doesn’t mean easier or less embarrassing: It seems logical that a private cloud floating in your own familiar data center should be easier to deploy, right? Think again. While there are a few different technologies that help you apply the basics of the Cloud methodology to the confederated mass of IT resources in your server room, most of them have tradeoffs in features and maturity when compared to going with a CSP. If you decide to go private first, see if you can’t get a small amount of capital to at least attempt a public cloud trial side-by-side at the same time. In many cases, you will be surprised at how much easier it is to get an environment up in a public cloud as opposed to building private cloud.

2) Dynamic, not lethargic: The cloud is a reactionary platform: It reacts to stimulus, almost like it is a living organism. If you take on an application that is mostly static, you will not exercise the design elements and operational tools/constructs that make the cloud any different than virtualization or co-location. In essence, you’re not going to learn that much, and may set yourself up for an unexpected future fall by allowing hubris to lead you to the conclusion that “this cloud stuff is easy.”

If you choose an application that is already in service or possibly in need of an overhaul, pick one that has a dynamic load/feature profile because you will get the best bang for your buck and, along the way, learn more about the cloud models and design patterns. Doing so will help you better understand the benefits of cloud including pay-as-you-go and just-in-time provisioning.

3) Clouds are not fluffy and soft: Security is security, and you’d better pay close attention to how it works and how it doesn’t. In many ways, even though the name seems to imply that it’s less secure than previous methodologies, constructs in the cloud are often locked down a lot tighter than your local data center. You can quickly find yourself locked out of your hosts and, even worse, you may find yourself in situations where something should work but, very stubbornly, doesn’t. The abstraction of cloud services and their security controls can make parsing through a traditional, multi-layer firewall profile seem like child’s play.  Take no short cuts here – learn the security ins and outs of your particular CSP and put it to paper before you start your infrastructure modeling.

4) ‘Apple’ is to ‘Orange’ as ‘Hand Grenade’ is to ‘Land Mine’: Anything you move to the cloud will need to be rationalized against its relationship (or in cloud speak, ‘affinity’) to other infrastructure or software systems that your business relies on. Understanding the type of systems and business processes that work with, feed or are fed by the systems you move into the cloud is vital to making sure that you don’t upset the eco-system that is your IT & business environment. Discover these affinities by using software tools or good old fashioned IT detective work, and then document it formally. Next, make sure that you’ve got it right by meeting with your application teams AND your business partners. Frame the interactions carefully: You are verifying the relationship between the systems, not asking for permission to move your target application. It’s a fine line to walk, so tread carefully. Here be Dragons – don’t get crispy.

Ideally, you should choose an application that is open and well understood. The number of hooks into other systems/processes matter less than the clarity of the relationships and your understanding of them.

5) Hard now isn’t hard forever: Some things that work really well in the cloud are so difficult in the private data center that they never cross the minds of the professionals who are considering their first cloud projects/POCs. Here are a couple places to start that you might not have considered:

Log Management – The biggest logistical problem with deploying a log management and analysis system is the storage aspect. It’s expensive to get off the ground and exponentially difficult to keep up with. You almost always pay for more storage than you need on day one, and by the next budget cycle you’ve got to find the funds to feed the beast that you’ve built, regardless of how useful the system is. This is where the pay-per-drink model of cloud storage is a real life saver. By coupling it with expandable compute capacity to handle unexpected spikes in traffic and deep analysis queries, you’ve now made it a lot easier to have a functional, healthy log management system that can scale with your needs – both up and down.

Information Assurance & Disaster Recover(DR)/Continuing Operations(COOP) – Everyone wants DR and strong data backup, but anyone that has ever been charged with designing  it understands that the costs of doing it right can be downright prohibitive. Now, the devil is in the details, but this is another big area where the cloud can save you a considerable amount of headache and money. There are quite a few solutions out there that allow you to take snapshots of your data or even virtual machines and place them into the cloud to pull back when needed. There are also complete infrastructure designs at your finger tips that could allow you to build out an inexpensive DR environment that 99% of the time is only sized to handle data synchronization. However, within 30 minutes of a disruptive failure of your primary systems, the same environment can be scaled up to full strength to run your business in the cloud while you pick up the pieces and rebuild your primary site.

At the end of your efforts, the scaling abilities of a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) can allow your successful POC to become a production-ready system in a few clicks of the mouse. If the outcome isn’t what you expected, the POC can be terminated just as easily. In either case, you absolutely must think through the interdependencies of your cloud-deployed application and make sure that you properly stress the system. Remember, you’re evaluating not only a technology, but a methodology.

Photos courtesy of blog.vrxstudios.com, Cloud Business Review, and CanStockPhoto

Congratulations to our CFO Craig Adler, for being named by the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) as a finalist for their 16^th annual Greater Washington Technology CFO Awards.

Craig has played a key role in several successful endeavors including negotiating an expanded credit facility, which enables DLT’s executive team to focus on managing the business for growth, while maintaining the core business base, in the current economic environment.

In addition to capital raising, M&A and recapitalization events, Craig has been instrumental in negotiating new strategic partnerships and expanding business relationships with existing partners both key components to the Company’s growth.

The success and continued strong growth of DLT over the past year underscore Craig’s business acumen and we are very pleased that he has been named one of five finalists in the Private Company category.

NVTC has been recognizing extraordinary achievement in the greater Washington region’s technology community for 16 years. The awards banquet will be held on June 4, 2012, at The Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner in McLean, Va.

About NVTC:

The Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) is the membership and trade association for the technology community in Northern Virginia. As the largest technology council in the nation, NVTC serves about 1,000 companies from all sectors of the technology industry, as well as service providers, universities, foreign embassies, non-profit organizations and governmental agencies.

The AFCEA Global Intelligence Forum was scheduled for this June but given the ongoing debate in Congress on the conference topic and the FY13 budget uncertainties, the event has been postponed. Nevertheless, they have proposed some interesting questions:

• What does it mean to be a citizen of the information nation?
• Who are the protectors of that nation and what is the appropriate balance between personal privacy and public security?
• Is the choice between security and privacy a false one?  Can technology itself enable safe and secure citizenship?
• Who and how should the ethics of information technology be determined?  How does the next generation – the generation of cyber “citizens” – view the issue of privacy and security?

It is easy to believe that there are more questions than answers but that is not a particularly useful ground to stand on for analysis.  Let’s explore these questions.

What does it mean to be a citizen of the information nation?

Are we considering a nation built around the rights and responsibilities of people with respect to information?  First, we need to clarify the term ‘nation’ (classically, a politically organized body of people under a single government).  This suggests a full complement of social mechanisms that need to be in place to ensure compliance with society’s common interests.  If we consider these mechanisms to include moral pressures, reputational pressures, institutional pressures and security controls, then we have a dilemma.  To what are we going to apply these mechanisms?  Moral, reputational and institutional controls can only be applied to citizens themselves.  Information does not have morals, nor does it care about the relationships among people.   While we can apply security to information itself, it can only be done with respect to the personal, social and/or economic value that people associate with that information.

Are we actually going to suggest that information itself is the social and political glue that binds people together or is it just a tool?  That is certainly a great segue into the next question.

Who are the protectors of that nation and what is the appropriate balance between personal privacy and public security?

This is what happens when you declare a nation.  You now have to build a set of institutions to enforce compliance. We all know that compliance is never absolute and there will always be defectors from the common interest, so we need to understand just what level of defection is acceptable.  I don’t think we can do this for information in the aggregate.  We need to recall that information is “data within a context”. This context is applied by the people who share it.   Information in the context of experience is knowledge and knowledge extrapolated forward for prediction is intelligence.  Intelligence applied to society toward the common good is wisdom.  So, what are we protecting, data, information, knowledge, intelligence or wisdom?

The dilemma as stated is “privacy vs. security”.  Humans are a networked species.  We require information exchange to exist.  Remember “no man is an island,” but we need to have control of what information we exchange.   Let’s consider a scenario.

A catholic parishioner goes to confession specifically to divulge things about him that would be very socially compromising.  Why does he do it?  Because there are several enablers in place that provide confidentiality. First, it is just him/her and one other person. Second, that other person has moral and reputational pressure, as well as institutional pressure, placed on him not to divulge the information.  Because of these pressures, the parishioner has a high level of trust that what he says will not leave the booth.  Would he/she feel the same if they knew that the confession was being recorded?  I think not. Once recorded, there is no assurance that unintended parties will not gain access to the information. These other parties are not likely to have the same moral, reputational and institutional pressures against divulging the content.  So, what is the lesson here?  It is simply that the form that information takes is important and people need to control the authorization chain with respect to information about them. We do not currently have the technology to do such a thing.

Is the choice between security and privacy a false one?  Can technology itself enable safe and secure citizenship?

Privacy does not equal security.  We are constantly weighing our privacy needs against the need to elicit cooperation from others which requires the exchange of information. Sometimes we are more secure when we are isolated and sometimes our security depends on the cooperation of others. The cooperation of others is not evoked without the exchange of information.  We are not choosing between privacy and security, we are choosing between privacy and cooperation.

Citizenship is a complex web of trust and cooperation among people otherwise known as a risk equation.  Trust relationships are built on a combination of moral, reputational, institutional and security measures that provide an “acceptable level of trust” that enables any given society.  We cannot have “safe and secure citizenship”.  There will always be a percentage of defectors given the many conflicting interests embodied within any social group. The best we can have is a level of trust reflected as risk. Technology is simply one tool in providing security measures that reduce the risk to a tolerable level.  Nothing we do as citizens is safe and secure.  Life is dangerous and we know it to be a zero sum game in that, eventually, we all lose.  As humans, we don’t necessarily weigh risk logically.  We take huge risks like driving automobiles.  We regularly amplify that risk by driving less carefully than we should in order to get to work on time. We could reduce that risk by automating highways so that speed, spacing and congestion were absolutely controlled, but I haven’t run into too many people who like that idea.  Clearly, the concept of “safe and secure” is relative from person to person.

Who and how should the ethics of information technology be determined?  How does the next generation – the generation of cyber “citizens” – view the issue of privacy and security?

Finally, this is the ultimate question.  As in all nations, citizens have to decide how they will be governed. This is particularly true in large complex nations like ours.  It ultimately comes down to people.  Perhaps we are acknowledging in this discussion that societies are converging as globalization drives common interest across pervious national borders and this common interest is a “new nation”.  As stated earlier, we cannot apply ethics (moral and reputational pressures) to information.  Only people suffer consequences of risk.  Logically, it would be an extension of the institutions that we have in place such as the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to enforce policies that promote greater cooperation and penalties that drive less defection.

The technology challenge is, as I have frequently held, to provide the mechanisms for people to control the authorization chain on information about themselves in concert with institutional policies that will promote trust across society and enable cooperation toward the common interest.  It is not an absolute exercise any more than any other aspect of societies or nations. Trust is the only way people move forward.

What’s it all mean?

Information is indeed a powerful tool in achieving group prosperity. It is the enabler of all social interaction that can be imagined from the most primitive exchanges of “how to” to the global reach of resources such as Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.  The human propensity to use information to “defect” from the common interest of society in favor of short term, individual advantage will certainly have leverage commensurate with the power of these tools. But that cannot deter us from engaging them within ever-increasing complex policy structures and pursuing technologies offering greater control.

There will always be more questions than answers and answers are never absolute.  They evolve as inputs to other questions and so it goes. I agree with AFCEA’s assertion that it is “past time” to begin a national dialogue aimed at exploring theses questions. Given the international nature of information technology and its institutions, it should actually be an international dialogue.  We cannot let the passions of national pride and cultural interpretations of well being become the determining factors in our toolset in this domain of expertise anymore than we can let those factors determine our interpretation of the laws of physics or math.

Photos courtesy of Protect IU & Recent Developments in ECL

DLT Solutions and its Cloud Advisory Group have been named one of four finalists in the Excellence in Team Building, Management and Development category of the 2012 Institute for Excellence in Sales & Business Development (IES&BD) annual awards. The IES&BD Awards are the only independent awards that promote and advance excellence in Sales & Business Development by recognizing companies and organizations who have demonstrated outstanding leadership and strategic vision in Sales & Business Development.

Cloud technology offers numerous benefits, but it is often unclear for users and government agencies to know how they should start with implanting it within the context of government policy. In 2011, DLT made a strategic decision to formally address these concerns by forming the DLT Cloud Advisory Group.

We are very excited that our Cloud Advisory Group is being recognized for their mission to provide customers with architectural and technical direction in the selection of cloud products and services.  The awards will be presented at a breakfast event on Thursday, May 17 at the USA Today/Gannett Headquarters in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.

Most of the conversation focuses on the server layer; maybe because it’s the most visible and tangible portion or maybe because we system architects have a bias toward particular parts of the stack.  Either way we need to stop the server density navel gazing and look at a real implementation problem that must be addressed in our virtualization architectures: storage.

The Data Habit

System architects already know the value (and pain) of enterprise storage, usually centered on databases or large data sets.  Single servers can’t easily handle enough disks for multi-terabyte, multi-data file working sets generated by workloads like GIS applications.  Local spindle counts and speeds can’t keep a heavily used transactional database system fed, so we move to high throughput, low latency off-server disk systems.  Storage area network (SAN), network attached storage (NAS) and direct-attached storage (DAS) lead the acronym race for the care and feeding of our data habit.  Having pushed that work off the server, we are content with our local 200GB 3Gb/s SCSI, SAS and SATA drives to deliver our operating systems and application scratch space.

When we migrate those OS and application workloads from bare metal into a virtual environment, we drag that remaining local storage need with us.  But that’s fine, right?  The heavy-duty workloads are off on specialized storage devices, and we aren’t using very much of our super-sized local platters, so what can go wrong with our virtual servers?

Breaking the habit

As we look at our server pools, the very first thing we need to realize is that we are used to dedicated local storage for operating loads.  One OS instance has complete usage of a 3Gb/s disk with no contention.  With 100 systems to virtualize, that’s 100 dedicated spindles of I/O with 300Gb/s of aggregate bandwidth.  With 4Gb/s fiber channel cards, we’d need 75 cards to provide that amount of throughput.  In an extremely large environment or one that uses RAID 1 as a local performance boost … well, I’ll leave the math for you.

We don’t always utilize those local disk resources at 100%, so we need to model our actual I/O profile.  OS boot, application start up and heavy application loads are the known hard-hitting actions on our drives these days, but what about the rest?  Let’s say we find our servers are doing about 3-5 IOPS (I/O per second) for general application logging.  That’s noise on a local disk, but that becomes an additional 3-500 IOPS in our consolidated virtualized 100 server workload.  Failing to fully map the I/O requirements for each server moving into the virtual environment can seriously hamstring your consolidation efforts.

This means virtual environments need to be designed around three axes:

• CPU power
• Memory usage
• IOPS

The storage axis is easily neglected but is just as critical to the performance and health of your virtualization solution.  High speed, low latency, and high throughput enterprise storage devices are as critical to the mix as the high memory, fast multi-core servers.  High speed caching, high spindle counts and flexible protocol delivery are all features of enterprise storage that can make your virtualization efforts more capable and stable.  We can take advantage of advanced features of enterprise storage devices like geo-replication and snapshots to improve our disaster recovery scenarios.  Perhaps it’s another personal bias from ‘the UNIX way’ of tool chaining,  but a series of specific tools that work together always works better than a broad spectrum single tool built around general cases and least common denominators.  Using a software API to communicate with a hardware device allows each layer to focus on what they do best, a lesson the backup world taught us years ago.

By combining highly capable components, like RHEV and NetApp Filers, you can build a scalable solution that can grow as your demands increase.

Risk = Cost

So many items on wish lists get assigned to “cloud” that the risk associated with it is skyrocketing and, after all, I am all about risk here.  The goal at the federal level is primarily cost savings but, as I have said repeatedly in this forum and others, risk is dollars and if risk is increasing, cost is increasing.

From this vantage, the greatest threat to adoption is the lack of adequate access control in the user-data relationship.  This has been dealt with historically by host isolation and repetitive authentication processes. Now, “cloud” has stripped away that comfort food and replaced it with a bitter apple of application and data exposure with no mechanism to control authorization at the data level.  If you don’t know where your data is then you’d better have assurance as to who has access to it.  Sadly, this is not so and the best attempts by cloud providers to assure confidentiality, integrity and availability is reduced to only a very weak assurance of availability.  This cannot stand!

Authentication is not enough in a connected world.  Data has to be owned (private) or not owned (public) or specifically authorized (owned with digital rights assigned) and to do that we need to transform our thinking about identity management and access control.  Anything else is to simply put the infrastructures that we have built over the last 40 years into a remote data center and pay for access to it and this works only for information you don’t really care about. For information we do care about, our cost — both direct and indirect through increased risk — will skyrocket, just like the cost of health care since we outsourced it to “managed care” providers 40 years ago. We need transparent principles of least access (POLA) built into applications and the user-data relationship a very granular levels.  While there are a few brave researchers testing the waters, there is precious little effort in the cloud initiatives toward this.

So, what’s your data worth?

Photo courtesy of Courion

We are excited to announce the launch of Technically Speaking, DLT’s new podcast series dedicated to providing IT information to our public sector customers in an easy, listen-as-you-go format. TS will cover a variety of topics ranging from government IT initiatives to new products and solutions to any other topics that YOU would like to see discussed.

TS #1 | It’s All in a NIEM | A Conversation with David R.R. Webber of Oracle

On this debut episode of Technically Speaking, Van Ristau, CTO at DLT Solutions, talks to David R.R. Webber about the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), a program created to improve data-sharing across government agencies.

Mr. Webber is an Information Architect with the Oracle Public Sector team focusing on NIEM and developing interoperable information exchanges. He is also the technical lead for the CAM editor project, a member of the NIEM Technical Architecture Committee (NTAC) and a contributor to the NIEM work with the IJIS Institute.

Over the last 30 years Mr. Webber has provided XML, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and eBusiness consulting to a variety of eGovernment initiatives, most recently including eHealthcare, eVoting and education solutions.

Discussion topics include:

• Description and overview of NIEM and its current status
• NIEM’s significance to IT professionals
• Webber and Oracle’s involvement with NIEM

Evolution of NIEM and use of business rule techniques within the NIEM community

Additional Resources:

NIEM, CAM & the 7 “D’s”

National Information Exchange Model

CAM editor

IJIS Institute

Thank you for checking out our first episode of Technically Speaking. Have NIEM questions for Mr. Webber? Leave a comment on our SoundCloud page or email us at podcast@dlt.com.

About Technically Speaking:

DLT Solutions is dedicated to providing YOU with relevant and informative content, so we encourage you to submit your topics of interest by sending an email to podcast@dlt.com.

To ensure even easier access, Technically Speaking will be available on iTunes starting in May. In the NIEM time (yes, a terrible pun) and going forward TS will also be available on our SoundCloud. Be sure to check back early and often for future episodes of Technically Speaking!

Merriam Webster defines a hacker as BOTH “a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity” and “an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer”. Now, to some that may sound contradictory, but I believe it accurately bounds my Java skills. Somewhere in between, depending on how long it has been since I dove into a project. True Java professionals deserve all the praise they get ++. We hackers, though, tend to write programs on an as-needed basis, never quite attaining the distinction of being “adept”. And never having to face production deadlines for bullet-proof code. So that’s my excuse for taking a few months to get around to using some of the new features in Java 7, on which I’ll comment below.

• Switch Statements

We can now switch with strings! Switch statements are the alternative to multiple “if elseif elseif elseif” constructs. Rather than using obtuse integers to specify each case, we first declare the case to be a string and then use an actual word to identify the case. This can result in cleaner and more readable code. Very nice when passing arguments.

• Numeric literals now with underscores

When I first saw this, I thought “how nice”. Now it doesn’t matter how blurry my eyes are, I can still tell that the order of magnitude is correct. If there was ever a concession to late-night coding errors, this is it. Not a New York Times above-the-fold-item, but very, very nice. And thoughtful. For example…

int notsobig = 1000; can now become int notsobig = 1_000; and int prettybig = 1000000; can become int prettybig = 1_000_000; and int wowthatsbig = 1_000_000_000_000;

• Multiple exceptions

Another nice feature that improves code readability is the way multiple exceptions can now be handled. Instead of having a catch statement for each exception you can now catch them all in one block using a pipe separator. No more catch catch catch catch.

So those are three fairly easy-to-explain changes in Java 7. To download your copy of Oracle Java 7 and the latest NetBeans IDE (my preference over Eclipse) in one bundle and no fee, go to Oracle’s main Java website

Oh, one more thing; I have not tried using it yet but Java 7 includes JavaFX that you can use to write your own Android app – for the world, or to surprise your family (think of the fun you could have) and amuse your colleagues. Go for it!

“Why do we need this archaic, lumbering, anti-progressive weight around the fast, nimble, amazingness that is our business?  We can just go to FooCloud.com on our new, hot tablet and do everything we need to do without interference.  That’ll show those IT dinosaurs!”

IT folks spend their entire working life ensuring that you don’t know what it is we do for a living.  Not because it is too complex and not because it is unimportant, but rather because if you do need us, then something is broken.  We are often compared to electricians, plumbers and infrastructure maintenance. While those comparisons can be apt – we fix broken things you don’t or can’t fix – it misses a good amount of our responsibilities and doesn’t account for any of the challenges we face.  There also exist two major tribes of IT folks (Yes, I’m lumping all of the different specialties together):  Operations and Enterprise.  The differences between these two are subtle but important; it’s why I can’t fix my mother’s laptop, but I can design your brand new data center facility.

How Operations and Enterprise IT Differ

My background is grounded in Operations IT, which really means I made sure that the applications sold by a company stay running and making money.  Customers who can get to their web-based widgets happily fork over cash, but if my team doesn’t do its job– sometimes at the wee hours of the morning– there is a direct impact on the bottom line.  Since we are part of the delivery chain, we are visible and have input on requirements, new features and budgets because we are operating costs that need to be accounted for in pricing the services we deliver.  We buy the scalable servers, virtualization environments, high-end storage and automation and management tooling to run more efficiently. We are the people that build the cloud in the first place.

On the other hand, enterprise IT professionals are the folks who fix your computer and make sure your email shows up, even on your phone.  They make sure that finance has the tools to get the payroll out on time; HR can track vacation and sick days, employee development and raises; and that you can access the intranet and web to do research on your market segment or the latest cute cat videos from Starbucks.  This is IT as most people know it. This is also the IT group that has to “evolve or die” in the vitriol-laden exhortations to cloud.  This is the process heavy and hidebound dinosaur that can’t do something simple like let you do all of your work on your “tablet of the week.”

I am here to stand up for my Enterprise brethren and ask the punditry:  Why should we believe your vision of IT?  I’m not asking you for empathy as you rant, I’m telling you it’s just not as simple as you portray it. Bypassing IT will only result in more pain and suffering.

The Real Real World

Enterprise IT would love to be more responsive and deliver more services.  All we need to do to accomplish this is better requirements and bigger budgets.  Take a moment and think about all of the departments within your company.  Picture the number of different tools you use on a daily basis, then multiply that by the number of departments and then sprinkle in some specialty systems for employee management, facility planning, accounting, customer management and supplier management.

Next, add the hardware on your desk, the servers that support all of the aforementioned tools, the storage for all the data and documents and the multiple flavors of operating systems on all of those devices.  In the operations department, we could be talking 4-5 teams of 3-4 people each, all with different specializations.  Whereas the enterprise team may consist of 2-4 people. Total.

With all of those requirements and specialties, one may think that IT has unlimited funding.  In reality, IT usually doesn’t control their budget.  The “budget ask” is typically last year’s numbers plus some cost of living increases to “keep the lights on.”  Justifying a consolidation means getting the buy-in of numerous stakeholders and fighting for extra money.  As the saying goes, “He who has the gold makes the rules,” so new software requirements come down from outside stakeholders who often haven’t done any due diligence in how IT will support it and haven’t funded extra training or head count.  This is how an IT department begins to calcify — external pressure combined with internal friction.

Everyone I know in Enterprise IT shops, from CIOs to desktop support, would love to be able to support the new “hotness of the week.”  We all love technology and gadgets, which is why we do what we do.  We want to move to the cloud and remove the mostly tedious and repetitive work and ‘just doing’ the services users care about.  In fact, many of us have already asked for all of the bright, shiny automation tools that would allow us to push those tasks to machines and let us work on the interesting problems that would make IT better, faster, stronger. But Enterprise IT is already seen as just a cost center, taking money to support applications someone else has already bought.  Justifying additional tools for management and automation can prove difficult when competing with all of the other business needs.

People tend to underestimate the level of complexity in our wonderful, modern technological world.  Push a button on your cell phone and your email appears, yet there are literally hundreds of interactions and devices that all need to work perfectly to deliver that email. We can’t go to the bleeding edge because you will call us every time there is a hiccup or a bump because we can’t get budget for the tools to make it work.  Or because the internal network was built in 1990 when it was faster to type something by hand and walk a hard copy across the office instead of email it.

Going rogue has never been the answer.  Rather than aiming your ire at IT, help them find the choke points and assist them in making the changes we all want to see made instead.  Give them the ammunition to put together requirements and budgetary numbers to justify the project.  Cloud is an evolutionary tool that many of us in IT would love to add to the toolbox and apply appropriately, but throwing a new hammer at us is much different then helping us buy a new hammer.

More and more government agencies are using Autodesk software to improve communication and collaboration between agencies, gain cost effectiveness and improve the productivity of design and manufacturing projects. Here’s our lowdown of the top five ways  AutoCAD is being or can be deployed by agencies to improve workflow processes and reduce cost without sacrificing the quality of work.

Improves communication and collaboration between agencies.

• BIM tools facilitate a better relationship between contracting team members by improving communication. For example, a three dimensional image can be projected in front of the project architect, structural engineer, mechanical engineer, plumber and electrician, all at the same time. With key decision-makers examining the model simultaneously, any issues can be resolved right away.

Reduces cost

• BIM creates one model that can be manipulated in many useful ways that allow for a more advanced analysis of the specific drawing file. This enables the user to save time and money by identifying errors in digital rendering well before groundwork begins.

Increases productivity

• With shorter turnaround times for projects, defense agencies are able to use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate systems before they are built. Such solutions can significantly boost productivity and enable an accelerated manufacturing process that saves taxpayer dollars and meets mission needs.

Improves workflow processes

• AutoCAD can be used to help reduce the risk of costly design changes during the design process by bridging the gap between 2D and 3D modeling and providing digital prototyping. In other words users can seamlessly design, visualize and simulate systems before they are built.

Enables energy and conservation analysis

• By taking images of an existing building and combining them into 3D model, the software can produce reports on relevant factors such as the building’s predicted water use and natural gas use- as well as sourcing significant energy expenditures and identifying where savings could be realized. This allows the designer to put the necessary cost saving measures in place before the plans are finalized.

Read more about the implementation of AutoCAD software in these new case studies.

Related Articles:

7 Do’s and Don’t for a Realistic BIM Implementation

Teardown and Retrofit: A BIM Evaluation Gives the Answer