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Michael Porterfield
Email: michael.p.porterfield@nasa.gov
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Adrian R. Gardner’s Federal career is distinguished by over 20 years of federal service enabling mission capability and readiness within the Scientific and Defense-related sectors in an innovative and secure manner. Gardner was the recipient of 2005 Federal 100 award, which honors individuals from government, industry, and academia whose ideas and accomplishments had the greatest impact in shaping the missions, solutions, and results achieved by the government information technology community.
Gardner is a member of the Senior Executive Service and currently serves as the director of the Information Technology and Communications Directorate (ITCD) and chief information officer (CIO) for the Goddard Space Flight Center. As such, he has the responsibility, authority and accountability for ensuring that Goddard's information assets are acquired and managed consistent with agency and federal policies and procedures, and legislation; and that the center's Information Resource Management (IRM) strategy is aligned with NASA's vision, mission, and strategic goals.
Other recent IT leadership positions Gardner has held include:
An Air Force veteran, Gardner was commissioned as a Launch Control Officer in 1986 and served with distinction until he separated in 1989 and was honorably discharged in 1994. He received the Air Force Achievement Medal in 1987.
Alan Paller is director of research at the SANS Institute, a graduate degree granting institution and the principal cyber security training school. SANS' 115,000 alumni are technical security experts and managers holding responsible positions in cyber defense, offense, and law enforcement in more than 60 countries. Alan directs SANS research programs including the widely used Internet Storm Center - the early warning system for the Internet and the annual "Greatest Risks in Cyber Security" study. He also oversees NewsBites, the bi-weekly summary of the top news in security that goes to 210,000 people, and @RISK, and the weekly authoritative summary of all new vulnerabilities and all critical new vulnerabilities made known during the past week that goes to 120,000 people.
Alan has testified several times before both the House and Senate and in 2001 President Clinton named him as one of the first members of the National Infrastructure Assurance Council. In 2005, the Federal CIO Council selected him as their annual Azimuth Award winner recognizing the one person outside government whose vision and leadership have done the most to improve federal information technology. In 2007, eWeek and Baseline magazines selected Alan as one of the 100 most important people in the information technology industry.
Earlier in his career, Alan was an entrepreneur who built the first large computer graphics software company, took it public and merged it into a New York Stock Exchange company. Alan also created The Data Warehousing Institute, wrote two books: The EIS Book: Information Systems for Top Managers (Dow Jones, 1990), and "How to Give The Best Presentation of Your Life (ISSCo, 1978), and chaired more than 150 national and international conferences ranging from the CIO Perspectives conference put on by CIO magazine to the SCADA Security Summits in the US and Europe sponsored by SANS.
Alan's degrees are from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Andrea Norris is the Acting Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and also serves as the Deputy CIO and Director of the Division of Information Systems within NSF's Office of Information Resource Management. Her responsibilities include management of the Foundation's information management program and information technology (IT) environment, including policy, plans, governance, business applications, networks, help desks, telecommunications, data center operations, and cybersecurity. Prior to joining NSF in 2001, Ms. Norris was the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Management for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), providing senior leadership and management oversight of the agency's $2 billion investment in information technology. Prior to joining the Federal Government, Ms. Norris worked for Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Inc., where she supported a wide range of engagements delivering management and technical solutions to clients. Prior to joining industry, Ms. Norris served on the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (Grace Commission), a Presidential Commission that recommended how to incorporate private sector efficiencies in the Federal government.
Ms. Norris has a M.B.A. with a major in Information Systems Management from the George Washington University and a B.A. in Economics from the College of William and Mary.
Ms. Norris received a Presidential Meritorious Rank Award in 2008 for her outstanding sustained leadership, vision and exemplary record of service and achievement.A senior IT executive and philanthropist, Atefeh (Atti) Riazi has served in both the public and private sectors as CIO, managing large-scale technology projects.
Currently, as CIO of the New York City Housing Authority, Atti’s mission is to deploy technology to improve customer service, enhance operations, manage buildings through smart automation, and close the digital divide impacting public housing residents. Atti also serves as Executive Director of CIOs Without Borders, a global non-profit, focused on using technology for the good of humanity.
Earlier in her career, Atti served as CIO of global communications giant Ogilvy, with 497 offices in 125 countries, serving more than 2300 clients. As Ogilvy’s CIO, Atti was publicly ranked #44, by CIO Insight magazine, among the top global CIOs earning the firm a place on Information Week’s list of the most innovative 500 companies in using technology.
Prior to this, Atti occupied the CIO slot at MTA New York City Transit, North American’s leading public transportation agency, where she implemented the $1.5 billion automated fare collection system, MetroCard.
In her career, Atti has racked up an impressive number of innovations, using technology to transform organizations from top to bottom.
A graduate of Stony Brook University in electrical engineering, and the author of many articles and studies, Atti speaks frequently on issues involving technology, organizations, and work. She has delivered keynote addresses and seminars globally, and serves on the Board of major financial and marketing organizations.Brenda R. Manuel, NASA's Associate Administrator for Diversity and Equal Opportunity, is responsible for developing and directing the agency's equal opportunity, civil rights compliance, and diversity strategies, programs and processes. In this capacity, she establishes agency-wide policies on diversity and equal opportunity to ensure statutory, regulatory and fiduciary compliance with internal and external equal opportunity laws; and ensures consistency of approach to improve functional performance across the agency and create an inclusive workplace.
Ms. Manuel has focused on carrying out her responsibilities through the development and implementation of multifaceted, comprehensive and proactive Agency-wide programs and initiatives such as the Conflict Management Program and the Agency Diversity Framework. She has also implemented an external civil rights enforcement program, including an unprecedented Title IX onsite compliance review program for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), recognized by the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division as a model for other federal agencies.
Ms. Manuel previously served as acting Deputy Assistant Administrator for Equal Opportunity Programs and Director of the Discrimination Complaints Division. Serving in these roles, Ms. Manuel was responsible for managerial direction of NASA’s equal opportunity and diversity programs. She also directed NASA's agency-wide EEO complaints program with responsibility for policy development and interpretation, including administration of the agency's Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Program for EEO complaints.
She holds a bachelor's degree in business management from Howard University, Washington, D.C., and juris doctor degree from the George Washington University Law Center, Washington. D.C., and is a member of the Pennsylvania and District of Columbia bars.
Mr. O’Dell has over twenty-five years’ experience with program management and executive interface, large enterprise technical support and enhancement, high technology systems, information systems engineering, technical management, systems architecture and development methodologies. Accomplished in Enterprise Architecture, systems development, technology insertion, integration and implementation, systems analysis and design, and application of organizational and management skills.
Mr. O’Dell began his career serving in the military for almost nine years. Also during that time, he graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Management, completed a Master of Arts in Business Management in 1977, and fulfilled the requirements for certification as an IT professional in DoD in 1979. On his return to the civilian community, Mr. O’Dell leveraged his business degrees and technology training by providing information technology and programmatic support for technology development and insertion efforts at the American Automobile Association. Mr. O’Dell’s civilian technology experience continued through involvement in organizations as diverse as technology startup companies, to large technology integration and auditing entities.
Most recently Mr. O’Dell continues his government service by directing information technology services and infrastructure supporting the NASA Shared Services Center and performing as the Host Center CIO for the NASA End-User Support, as well as the NASA Enterprise Service Desk programs.Burt serves as the Chief Technology Officer in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) as well as the Solutions Architect for End User Services at MSFC. His main focus is to identify, infuse and sustain new IT technologies into MSFC’s environment. He also serves as the Desktop Team Lead and COTR for the ODIN Desktop Services contract at MSFC.
Burt holds a Master's of Science in Business Management/Information Systems and is a Certified Federal Enterprise Architect. He has managed and led consulting teams for large scale IT best practices development and Product Introduction projects in both small and large commercial companies, in international venues, and in the US Government arena.
Some companies he has worked for and assisted include Intergraph Corporation, ADTRAN, Delco Electronics, Loral Space Systems, Mentor Graphics, TRW Aerospace, and the Canadian Department of Defense. His experience involves working with Fortune 100 and 500 companies to improve their product introduction processes as well as their end user experience.
Burt has helped formulate IT governance policies and practices for the End User community at Marshall, the ARES program as well as he Agency. He has also served as a consultant with the I3P ACES initiative for End User Services. He is the sponsor of the Technology Awareness Campaign at Marshall that showcases all IT related services and products that are available to the Marshall User base while actively championing the introduction of new technology and processes within NASA.Candi Castleberry-Singleton is the Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer (CIDO) at UPMC, a $7 billion integrated global health enterprise with 48,000 employees. She is responsible for the UPMC Center for Inclusion in Health Care.
A former CIDO at Motorola and Sun Microsystems, Candi has an exceptional record of coaching senior executives to build sustainable inclusion practices for the workplace, marketplace, and workforce. An experienced strategist, Candi created The Integrated Inclusion Model TM, a systems integration model that transitions companies from traditional “bolt-on” diversity processes led by human resources, to integrated work processes that shift responsibility for achieving an inclusive culture to every employee.
Candi received an MBA from Pepperdine University, a bachelor’s degree in legal studies from UC Berkeley, and graduated from the Stanford University Human Resources Executive Program.Mr. Chad Fulgham was appointed as the FBI’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) in December 2008. Mr. Fulgham is responsible for the FBI’s overall information technology (IT) efforts, including developing the FBI’s IT strategic plan, operating budget, and managing all FBI IT assets. During his tenure, Mr. Fulgham has reorganized the IT Branch to be business-aligned and service oriented, secured a consolidated data center which will help the Bureau’s virtualization efforts, and oversaw numerous application development and retirement efforts to support mission requirements. Under his leadership, the FBI has also deployed an upgraded enterprise network, a next generation workspace with unified communication and collaboration tools, a systems management framework, and enhanced security technologies.
Prior to joining the FBI, Mr. Fulgham served as a senior vice president within the Information Technology Division of Lehman Brothers for four years. While serving in this capacity, Mr. Fulgham was responsible for the identity management, messaging, wireless, instant messaging/unified communications, and electronic communications compliance engineering teams worldwide and associated support teams in the Americas. Previous roles also included Program Manager of a global information security architecture initiative, head of IT Business Continuity, and Senior Manager for Windows server-based engineering and support.
Mr. Fulgham holds a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification governed by the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium. He received a Bachelor of Science degree with a concentration in Economics from the United States Naval Academy.Chung-Sheng Li is currently the director of Commercial System and Principle Investigator of the Research Cloud Computing Initiative in IBM Research Division.
His research interests include cloud computing, security and compliance, digital library and multimedia databases, knowledge discovery and data mining. He has authored or coauthored more than 130 journal and conference papers and received the best paper award from IEEE Transactions on Multimedia in 2003. He is both a member of IBM Academy of Technology and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Chung-Sheng received his BSEE degree from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1984, and the MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989 and 1991, respectively. He has been with IBM T.J. Watson Research Center since Sept. 1991.
Dr. Daniel Laughlin co-manages NASA’s Learning Technologies project, which supports the research and development of cutting-edge educational tools that combine NASA mission content with innovative technologies and best education practices. He is research faculty with the GESTAR located at Goddard Space Flight Center. His doctoral work in education at American University was focused on technology and metacognition.
Dr. Laughlin leads research and development efforts on virtual worlds and games in education for NASA Education. His work on virtual worlds includes collaboration on NASA’s presence in Second Life and OpenSim. He is the author of Overcoming Objections to MUVEs in Education in Vincenti and Braman’s Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments: Applying Dynamic Elements to the Modern Classroom. Dr. Laughlin is the project lead for the award winning Moonbase Alpha, a free multiplayer online game based on NASA’s lunar architecture.In her role as Agency Project Coordinator for the One Stop Shopping Initiative (OSSI), Darla J. Jones, who is employed by Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT), headquartered in Greenbelt, Maryland, is responsible for assisting the NASA Office of Education OSSI Sponsor and Business Owner in the implementation and coordination of OSSI:SOLAR efforts and activities Agencywide.
Jones has provided program management support to the Educational Programs Office at NASA Glenn Research Center for 11 years. She has managed and supported programs to inspire, engage, educate and employ students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). These programs provided pre-college collegiate and internships for high school students, and internships and scholarships for underrepresented/underserved undergraduate students.
Jones has government certification in project management and is an accomplished multi-project manager. She is the recipient of a Recognition Award for Leadership and Support to the One Stop Shopping Initiative; NASA Group Achievement Award for increasing the number of underrepresented minority students in NASA educational programs and the NASA Martin Luther King Diversity Award for working with her summer high school students to adapt toys for students with disabilities.
She has a Criminal Justice degree and is currently pursuing an Organizational Leadership degree from Baldwin Wallace College, in Berea, Ohio.Ms. Diaz is the Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As NASA’s DCIO, Ms. Diaz provides leadership to transform management of information technology capabilities and services to support and enable NASA’s mission. She is responsible for revitalizing the planning, development and operations of the new IT infrastructure program created to consolidate the $4.3 billion of Agency's IT and data services. As an experienced information technology executive, she is recognized as a top agent of change who has provided innovative, business solutions and developed strong partnerships between industry and government. Ms. Diaz’s strong collaborative leadership in NASA’s Open Government Initiative Plan, garnered a number 1 “Best in Government” vote for NASA.
Prior to NASA, as the Chief Information Officer for Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, she developed and implemented $1 billion of high-profile, ground-breaking scientific programs and IT infrastructure. As she served to provide new and effective ways to fight the war on terrorism, she also served as the senior advisor on IT interoperability, biometrics, geospatial, and wireless technologies. As Deputy CIO at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, she helped transform USPTO electronic commerce and managed complex IT initiatives to modernize business process and data exchange systems. During Ms. Diaz's tenure as Deputy Associate Administrator of Citizen Services at General Services Agency, she created the government's first electronic government-wide citizen portal and shepherded many public-private partnerships from concept to delivery. She has provided executive leadership to the President's Management Council and was the pioneer creating many of the first e-Government initiatives such as USA.gov (FirstGov) and USA Services. Diaz also helped blaze a trail to sub-Saharan Africa and Asia where she used her background in international business to help forge private-sector development, as an international consultant and with the U.S. Agency for International Development.Dinna LeDuff Cottrell is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center, in Hancock County, Mississippi. Mrs. Cottrell provides leadership, planning, policy direction and oversight for the delivery and management of NASA information and NASA information technology (IT) resources at Stennis Space Center. She also oversees IT services and operations for the center’s computing infrastructure, which includes application hosting and data center services, application development and sustainment, Web development and maintenance, telecommunications, desktops, audio/visual, video, IT security, electronic forms, records management, and documentation control.
Prior to being selected as the Stennis Space Center CIO, Mrs. Cottrell served as the center’s Deputy CIO. In this capacity she served as the center’s IT Operations Manager responsible for the day-to-day oversight and management of the center’s computing infrastructure to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of services to the agency and center. She developed policies and guidelines for customer support services. Additionally, she developed mechanisms to measure IT policy effectiveness and compliance. Mrs. Cottrell began her career with NASA more than 24 years ago as a co-operative education employee.
Mrs. Cottrell has received numerous awards and recognitions throughout her NASA career including awards for Outstanding IT Leadership. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is a charter member of the Slidell Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She has been married for sixteen years, and she and her husband, Christopher, have two sons.As Associate CIO for Enterprise Services and Integration, Gary Cox maintains responsibility for ensuring NASA enterprise IT services enable the NASA mission and are economical, secure and integrated. Areas of responsibilities include End-User Services, Communications Services, Web Services, Data Center Services, Enterprise Applications, Information Management, and Enterprise Service Desk Services. Mr. Cox joined the NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer in 2004 as Executive Officer, and served as Acting Deputy CIO from 2005-2006 and Associate CIO for Policy and Investments from 2008-2010.
Mr. Cox joined NASA in 1998 as contracting officer for the Earth Observing System Data Information System (EOSDIS) Program at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). He later served as Branch Head in the Information Services and Advanced Technology Division at GSFC, Agency Program Manager for the Outsourcing Desktop Initiative for NASA, and acting Chief Information Officer for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.
Before joining NASA, Gary served as Division Director at the U.S. Naval Academy, with responsibility for facilities support contracts and integrated business applications for the Public Works and Supply Departments. Prior to joining civil service, he served in private industry for 12 years as a multi-disciplined project manager.
Mr. Cox holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from the University of Maryland and a Master of Science in Computer Information Systems from the University of Phoenix. He is a graduate of the Council for Excellence in Government Fellows Program, NASA Leadership Development Program, NASA Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program, and Harvard Senior Executive Fellows Program.
He resides on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with his wife and enjoys golf and spending time with his grandchildren.As CTO for the Johnson Space Center, James is responsible for developing IT technology innovation strategies for NASA as well as ensuring that the various NASA Programs and Directorates have the IT tools and support to meet their missions.
Prior to working at NASA, James was a consultant to Fortune 100 companies and was a founder/partner of several entrepreneurial companies. He has also worked for Lockheed Martin, Panhandle Eastern, and the El Paso Company in various managerial positions. Involved in IT since 1976, James has experience in numerous areas including mainframe operations, applications programming, systems software, data center design & operations, disaster recovery, help desk, commercial software development, telecommunications, global networking, and security.
James holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and certifications as CISSP, CCNA, and CCDA.As the Technology Systems Integrator in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at NASA Headquarters, J.C. Duh is responsible for ensuring NASA IT systems are integrated with its IT infrastructure services across NASA, and follow the appropriate architecture, technical standards, and standard operating procedures in accordance with the guidelines set by the NASA enterprise architect and IT security policy. He also works with the NASA IT Chief Technology Officer to ensure advanced technologies are timely and successfully integrated into NASA enterprise IT services.
Dr. Duh has a Ph.D. and a M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Michigan, a M.S. degree in System Design and Management from MIT, and a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Taiwan University.
He previously served as the Programs and Plans Division Director at NOAA National Weather Service where he oversaw all the system development, modernization, and enhancement projects for NOAA/NWS. Before that, he had worked at various positions at NASA for over 20 years, including being the Principal Engineer for the Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Director for Special Assessment in the Office of Chief Engineer at NASA Headquarters.Dr. Jean-Pierre is presently working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as the Government’s End-User Services Manager where he manages the ACES contract. Dr. Jean-Pierre was a key part of the overall OCIO Information Technology Infrastructure Integration (I3P) implementation effort at NASA, including roles on the Agency Consolidated End-User Services (ACES) Product Development Team and the Source Evaluation Board to select the vendor for the Agency-wide $2.5 billion ACES contract. In 2003, Dr. Jean-Pierre was admitted in the Accelerated Leadership Program (ALP), a two-year leadership program, designed to prepare future leaders at NASA Goddard. In March 2005, Dr. Jean-Pierre graduated from the Accelerated Leadership Program and was subsequently assigned a Project Manager position where he managed the ODIN contract.
Since 2003, Dr. Jean-Pierre has been a part-time Faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University Graduate School of Business, the MBA program, where he teaches Management and Organizational Behavior, Managerial Strategy and Policy, Global Strategic Management and Cross-Cultural Management. Dr. Jean-Pierre has also served as an Adjunct Professor in Government at various universities such as Howard University, and George Washington University. This fall semester 2011, Dr. Jean-Pierre will be teaching “Managing People and Performance” in the MBA program at the Catholic University of America.
Dr. Jean-Pierre earned a Ph.D. in Public Administration/Public Policy and American Government, an MBA degree in Management from Howard University, a Bachelors of Science degree in Finance from Florida State University, and a Leadership Development Certificate from the Johns Hopkins University.
John Sprague is the End User Service Executive in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at Headquarters in Washington, DC. He has a Masters Degree in Computer Resource and Information Management, a Bachelors in Industrial Technology Engineering and is a retired Air Force Officer. His responsibilities include desktops/laptops, messaging and collaboration services, email, calendaring, instant messaging, file sharing, and smartphones located at 11 centers. He ensures these infrastructure elements are managed by setting the budget, appropriate architecture, technical standards, and standard operating procedures that enable the NASA workforce to be mobile and secure in accordance with the guidelines set by the NASA enterprise architect and IT security policy.
He is a Fellow of the American Council for Technology/Industry Advisory Council, occasional host and speaker for the National Capital Region HelpDesk Institute, an. holds numerous IT certifications.
In 2009, Jonathan Q. Pettus was named Director, Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He is responsible for leading the delivery and operations of information technology solutions to enable Marshall’s programs and mission, including the Center’s computing infrastructure, communications networks, and software systems. In 2005, Mr. Pettus was named Director, Marshall's OCIO, serving in this capacity until his appointment as Agency CIO at NASA Headquarters in 2007. At the Agency, he managed an integrated portfolio of information technology infrastructure and applications that support NASA’s human spaceflight, scientific, and aeronautical programs.
From 2002 to 2005, he served as the Director, NASA Integrated Enterprise Management Program (IEMP) Competency Center, an organization that supports NASA business systems for improving fiscal and management accountability. In 2000, Mr. Pettus was named manager of the IEMP. From 1997 to 2000, he served as implementation manager for the Integrated Financial Management Program, NASA's computerized business management model.
In 1987, Mr. Pettus earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics history from the University of North Alabama. He earned a master's degree in computer science in 1995 from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He was awarded a Distinguished Presidential Rank Award in 2010, a Meritorious Presidential Rank Award in 2008, NASA Medal for Outstanding Leadership in 2005, Medal for Exceptional Service in 2001 and 2006, and Special Service Awards in 1997 and 2001.Joseph Bradley is the Senior Director of the Global Markets & Planning Practice for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG). He and his team have provided financial and strategic research support to the top CXOs of several Fortune 100 companies, including British Telecom, Telecom Italia, AT&T, Comcast, Telmex, Telstra, Vodafone, and Bell Canada.
Bradley began his career as director of finance for the Ethnic Market Group at Pacific Bell, where he increased annual sales by more than 40 percent to a record level of $500 million. Later, Bradley became chief financial officer of network services, where he was responsible for financial management of an $8 billion expense program and $9 billion revenue target. With the acquisition of Pacific Bell by SBC, Bradley was appointed the vice president and general manager of the Data Communications Group at SBC. Bradley helped boost DSL revenues from less than $50,000 to more than $200 million annually. Bradley then accepted a position as Vice President Operations for C3 Communications. He was quickly promoted to senior vice president of operations for C3 Communications where he led the development of the first truly plug-and-play DSL deployment technology based on Nortel engineering. After his promotion to Chief Executive Officer, Bradley led the development of C3’s flagship product, Xpc. (a virtual computing platform).
Bradley holds a B.A. in economics with HGH honors from the University of California at Berkeley, and has completed executive management programs at several universities, including the University Of Pennsylvania Wharton School Of Business and the University of California at Davis.
Kaplan Mobray is an acclaimed author, thought leader, career coach and motivational speaker on topics ranging from personal branding, leadership, networking, public speaking and success. His presentations have been described as a life-changing event. For more than fifteen years he has led corporate marketing, advertising, and brand development initiatives for Fortune 500 companies. Kaplan speaks to a variety of audiences, including professional organizations, colleges and universities, sales forces, and corporations. Through his seminars and best-selling book, "The 10Ks of Personal Branding" Kaplan provides real strategies for real results in making the connection between your personal brand and your life outcome. He has been featured on CNN, CBS, NBC, FOX, BET, Ad Age, Businessweek and shared his message to NFL players at Super Bowls forty-four and forty five in Miami and Dallas. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and College of Arts & Sciences, Kaplan was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 by the Network Journal Magazine and received the 2008 Rising Star Award by the National Association of African Americans in Human Resources (NAAAHR). Kaplan is a sought after executive lecturer and leading advisor to top business school professors. He has been widely quoted in the media and is a frequent speaker at professional conferences. Prior to his professional speaking career Kaplan served as U.S. Diversity Programs leader at Deloitte. He continues to serve as a consultant to many Fortune 500 companies and serves as a brand coach to professional athletes. In his personal pursuits, Kaplan is a professional saxophone player. He serves on the national board of ALPFA, the nation's largest Latino business professional association and is active in charitable and civic organizations. Kaplan resides in West Nyack, NY with his family. Visit the author online at www.kaplanmobray.com
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 1997. Her column BoomTown originally appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and also online at WSJ.com.
Previously, Ms. Swisher covered breaking news about the Web’s major players and Internet policy issues and also wrote feature articles on technology for the paper. She has also written a weekly column for the Personal Journal on home gadget issues called Home Economics.
With Walt Mossberg, she currently co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech conference with interviewees such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many other leading players in the tech and media industries. The gathering is considered one of the leading conferences focused on the convergence of tech and media industries.
Previously, Ms. Swisher worked as a reporter at the Washington Post. She is also the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web,” published by Times Business Books in July 1998. The sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future,” was published in the fall of 2003 by Crown Business Books.
She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.Kelly Carter is the Headquarters Chief Information Officer and Director of the IT and Communications Division. She has served in her current position since January 2009. Prior to that, she was a program analyst in the Headquarters Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation from 2005-2008, providing analysis of strategies, plans and budgets for mission support activities including workforce, infrastructure, information technology, and acquisition.
Carter transferred to NASA Headquarters from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2004. Her positions at Goddard included Chief of the Information Services Division, Associate Chief of the Logistics Management Division, and several positions in the Goddard procurement organizations.
Carter has a bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration from McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland.Kent provides thought leadership in shaping institutional policy and in participating in the national discourse on issues of strategic concern to the academy – whether privacy, security, copyright or what it means to be a citizen in the digital realm. Recognized as an expert in illegal file sharing, data breach incident response and related topics, he has been frequently invited to share his experiences at conferences and in publications. He works in close coordination with the campus IT governance committees and broadly across the campus and the University of California system; and collaborates with colleagues at other institutions, participates in national associations and sits on various advisory and policy committees.
His primary interest continues to be in the application of emergent technologies to people’s lives and in the protection of civil liberties in cyberspace.Kevin D. Jones works with NASA centers to create strategies for internal social media & networking technologies and then implement and manage them. His focus is on performance improvement using Enterprise 2.0.
Kevin has a Master's degree in Instructional & Performance Technologies from Boise State University and a Bachelor's degree in business from the University of Oregon. He speaks several times a year at conferences as a keynote speaker and in sessions regarding using social technologies within organizations.
Larry Quinlan is a principal at Deloitte LLP and serves as the Global Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and as U.S. CIO for Deloitte LLP. As CIO, Larry has responsibility for all facets of technology including strategy, applications, infrastructure, support, and execution. He leads the worldwide technology organization.
Larry has been with Deloitte since 1988 and has served in a variety of leadership roles, including Global CIO for Deloitte Consulting LLP and National Managing Principal for Process Excellence. As Process Excellence leader, Larry led the US enterprise-wide effort to increase margins and effectiveness through continuous process improvement using the Lean Six Sigma methodology.
Larry holds an MBA and a BS in Industrial Management.Mr. Sweet earned a BA in 1978. He began his NASA career at the Johnson Space Center in 1987 where he served as supervisor and manager for over 23 years. During his career at NASA, he held positions as Branch Chief in the Center Operations Directorate, Publications and Administrative Services Office Manager, and Division Chief in Information and Applications Services, Information resources Directorate. Mr. Sweet completed a formal detail in 2002 as Deputy Director in the Public Affairs Office and a rotational assignment in 2005 at NASA Headquarters in the Institutions and Management Office. In July 2005, Mr. Sweet was selected as Deputy Director for the Information Resources Directorate. He was then named Acting Director and Acting JSC Chief Information Officer in September 2006.
February 2007, Mr. Sweet was named Director, Information Resources and JSC Chief Information Officer. He is responsible for developing and implementing the Center's strategy for institutional information systems in accordance with Agency and Center policies and standards. Under Mr. Sweet's leadership, the Information Resources Directorate provides a broad range of information products and services to the Center including institutional computer and telecommunications networks and systems; mission imagery acquisition and distribution; production and distribution of the Center's scientific, technical, administrative, and historical information in the form of publications and other hardcopy documents, imagery, television, and graphics; development and implementation of automated systems for processing, storing, and retrieving research and administrative information; correspondence management; mail distribution; and management of the forms, records, management directives, and Privacy Act programs.
As Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Officer, LaVerne H. Council oversees Johnson & Johnson’s global IT group. In this capacity, she is responsible for managing information technology and related systems for the $61.6B Johnson & Johnson worldwide enterprise. In this role, she is a Member of the Corporate Global Operating Committee and her organization includes more than 250 operating companies and over 4,000 information technology employees.
Ms. Council is a proven thought leader with a demonstrated track record of achievement that includes a wealth of global experience in information technology, supply chain strategy, and business operations. She was the chief architect of the company’s Innovation and Health I/T Strategy and she is currently leading the development and implementation technology strategies for Innovation and Emerging Markets.
Before joining Johnson & Johnson, Ms. Council was Global Vice President for Information Technology, Global Business Solutions and Development Services for Dell, Inc. She developed and implemented business growth solutions, created a global development model, and managed the global quality process through the implementation of Capability Maturity Model strategies.
In her previous experience, Ms. Council was a partner with Ernst and Young and led the company’s Global Supply Chain Strategy practice. She also held leadership positions focusing on infrastructure engineering, networking, security, and enterprise application interfaces.
She holds an M.B.A. in Operations Management from Illinois State University. She also has a B.S. degree in Business from Western Illinois University, graduating with highest honors.
Linda Y. Cureton is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As NASA CIO, she provides the requisite leadership to transform the management of information technology (IT) capabilities and services to support and enable NASA's mission. She ensures that the Agency's information resource management (IRM) strategy is in alignment with NASA's vision, mission, and strategic goals. Accordingly, Ms. Cureton ensures the development of integrated IRM strategies, including standards, policies, NASA Enterprise Architecture, IT security, management, and operations. She has the responsibility, authority and accountability for ensuring that NASA's information assets are selected, controlled and evaluated consistent with federal policies, procedures, and legislation.
Ms. Cureton was appointed as the NASA CIO in September 2009. Prior to this appointment, Ms. Linda Y. Cureton served as the CIO of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and led the Information Technology and Communications Directorate. As the GSFC CIO, Ms. Cureton was responsible for ensuring that GSFC's information assets are acquired and managed consistent with Agency and Federal Government policies. She was responsible for ensuring that the Center's Information Technology strategy aligns with NASA's vision, mission, and strategic goals.
Prior to her arrival at GSFC, Ms. Cureton was the Deputy Chief Information Officer of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and led the Office of Science and Technology as Deputy Assistant Director. The Office of Science and Technology is responsible for providing leadership in the innovative and efficient application of science and technology used to collect, clarify, and communicate information needed to reduce violent crime, collect revenue and protect the public. As the ATF Deputy CIO, she was responsible for ensuring that the use of Information Technology for the Bureau's mission and business requirements fulfill customer and stakeholder needs.
Previously, Ms. Cureton served in executive positions at the Department of Energy and the Department of Justice.
As a strong advocate for the practical application of technology, she has served as a member of organizations such as the Government Information Technology Investment Council, the American Council for Technology, and Women in Technology.
Ms. Cureton earned a Bachelor of Science Degree from Howard University in 1980 graduating magna cum laude with a major in Mathematics and a minor in Latin. She also received a Master of Science Degree in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1994, and a Post-Master's Advanced Certificate in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. She performed extensive research in numerical analysis and has been published in the "Journal of Sound and Vibration."
She currently resides in Maryland with her husband and mother.Lucas is a civic entrepreneur in Washington, DC and has a talent for identifying emerging opportunities and building bridges between organizations. He started his professional career as a military officer, having graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point with a major in systems engineering and a minor in Chinese, and served five years in US Army including a one-year deployment to Iraq. He also a graduate of the US Army Ranger School, Airborne School for parachuting, and earned the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
Lucas serves as the President of the Board of the Open Forum Foundation which designs conferences and cross-sector partnerships for improving public participation between citizens, federal agencies, and Congress. His company, OnlineTownhalls , builds software to help citizens apply critical thinking and deeper deliberation in governance, education, media, and politics. He also serves on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, a network of 1500 individuals and organizations working in the fields of public engagement and conflict resolution. He is also one of the organizers of the federal OpenGov Community which focuses on improving public participation, government transparency, and inter-agency collaboration.
Lynn Tilton is Chief Executive Officer and Principal of Patriarch Partners, LLC, a private equity firm and holding company managing 75 companies with annual revenues of more than $8 billion. Ms. Tilton is a passionate proponent of saving American manufacturing jobs by saving American companies. Since 2000, she has bought more than 150 companies, many of which were on the brink of closure or liquidation, and in so doing has saved over 250,000 jobs.
Tilton's portfolio includes such brands as Dura Automotive, American LaFrance, MD Helicopters, Rand McNally, and Stila Cosmetics among many others. In 2009, she was honored with the Turnaround Atlas Leadership Achievement Award for her work in distressed investing, in 2010, Automotive News named her one of the 100 Leading Women in the Automotive Industry, and in 2011, Ms. Tilton was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Living Legends of Aviation Hall of Fame, the first female in history to receive such distinction. Under Ms. Tilton's leadership, Patriarch has become the largest woman-owned business in America with over 120,000 employees.
Ms. Tilton's career spans 30 years and encompasses private equity, operational turnarounds, distressed asset management, financial engineering, and senior management. In addition to her role at Patriarch, Ms. Tilton currently serves as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MD Helicopters Inc., a leading manufacturer of commercial and military aircraft.
Ms. Tilton founded Patriarch Partners to develop innovative financial solutions and to manage and monetize the distressed portfolios of financial institutions. The platform later evolved toward direct fund investments focused primarily upon the acquisition of companies undergoing crisis and pervasive change. Under her direction, Patriarch has positioned itself as a proactive partner to companies during periods of operational, industrial and economic transformation. Patriarch provides liquidity, time and strategic support, frequently saving US companies and US jobs.
Prior to founding Patriarch Partners, Ms. Tilton held positions at Morgan Stanley, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Oppenheimer and Merrill Lynch.
She earned a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University.
Malcolm D. Jackson is EPA's Assistant Administrator for the Office of Environmental Information and Chief Information Officer. In this dual role, Mr. Jackson is responsible for IT operations and security, information quality and collection, and access to environmental information including the Toxics Release Inventory. His leadership focus includes IT strategic planning and governance, IT investment management and government transparency.
Malcolm D. Jackson was appointed to serve this role by President Barack Obama. Prior to being confirmed by the Senate in June 2010, Mr. Jackson served as the Senior IT Business Unit Director of CIGNA Group Insurance. At CIGNA, he managed all IT aspects that supported short term disability, long term disability, life and accident insurance products and services. From 2006 to 2008, Mr. Jackson also served as the Senior IT Business Unit Director for CIGNA Insurance Corporate Business Functions. During this tenure, Mr. Jackson directed the development of IT applications for Human Resources, Finance, Legal and Public Affairs, and Investments. In addition, Mr. Jackson had IT oversight for Corporate-Owned Life Insurance, Reinsurance, and Settlement Annuities.
Prior to joining CIGNA Insurance, Mr. Jackson held various positions in the areas of IT, engineering, marketing and general business management at Monsanto, Quaker Oats, General Dynamics, and Shell Oil Company. He has a broad business background which included consumer packaged goods, defense contracting, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and the oil and gas industries. Throughout his career, Mr. Jackson has developed expertise in IT strategy, large-scale enterprise resource planning, performance metrics development, and business process re-engineering.
Mr. Jackson was a Board member of the Children's Literacy Initiative in Philadelphia and the Jackson State University National Alumni Association, where he chaired the membership committee. Mr. Jackson holds a B.S. from Jackson State University and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University, J.L. Kellogg School of Management.
Max Peterson is Vice President and General Manager, for Dell Federal’s Civilian Agency and Intelligence business. Mr. Peterson is responsible for serving the information technology needs of federal clients and federal systems integrators using Dell’s full suite of products and services. His customer-focused account teams ensure federal customers receive responsive, accurate information about IT products and services designed to meet their mission requirements. Dell Federal’s technical, contract management and service organizations deliver cost competitive IT solutions with best-in-industry performance, easy acquisition alternatives and outstanding support. Your mission is our priority.
Mr. Peterson is a government industry veteran with over two decades of experience. He joined Dell in May of 2007. Prior to joining Dell, he was vice president, federal sales for CDW-G and vice president, public sector for Commerce One. Among Mr. Peterson’s government IT accomplishments, at Commerce One, his organization was responsible for many e-government “firsts” such as Navy Seaport and GSA’s FirstGov.Gov citizen portal.
Mr. Peterson earned both a bachelor's degree in finance and master's of business administration in management information systems from the University of Maryland. He is an active member of the Industry Advisory Council, the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and past board member of the Government Information Technology Executive Council.
Michael J. Bolger is the Chief Information Officer at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. His organization of 130 civil servants and 700 contractors is responsible for development, integration and operations of the information technology and communications systems and services at the Center. Additionally, he is responsible for ensuring that information systems are acquired and managed in accordance with federal requirements and agency policy.
Bolger began working for NASA full-time in 1987. He spent 9 years as a software engineer working on teams that developed and maintained software used in Space Shuttle processing. In 1995 he performed a 7-month detail in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. In 1996 he assumed a key leadership position as a member of the Checkout and Launch Control System project management team, originating business approaches and processes for the large-scale, real-time development project. Beginning in December 2002, as an office chief and Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative, he managed a team of NASA and Air Force personnel responsible for technical contract management of the $2.8B Joint Base Operations Support Contract. He assumed his current position in July 2006.
Bolger grew up in Oxford, Ohio. He graduated from Indiana University in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics. He earned a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Central Florida in 1999. He lives in Merritt Island with his wife Samantha and three children.Michael W. Carleton serves as Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a role that carries the additional title of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Technology (DASIT). He embarked this position in July 2007.
As CIO, Mr. Carleton oversees the Department's use of information technology to improve program performance and to manage risk. Under the leadership of Mr. Carleton, the Office of the Chief Information Officer leads the Department’s information technology capital planning and investment control, enterprise architecture, information systems, electronic government, and information resources management programs in collaboration with all organizational components of the Department.
Mr. Carleton returned to HHS after serving seven years as CIO of the General Services Administration (GSA), where he consolidated infrastructure operations, improved the agency’s customer facing Web presence, strengthened computer security, and implemented capital planning and investment control and enterprise architecture planning programs.
In his earlier days at HHS, he served as Deputy Director of the Office of Information Resources Management and CIO for the Office of the Secretary. Mr. Carleton holds a Master of Science in Information Resources Management from Syracuse University and a Master of Public Administration from Northeastern University. He is also a distinguished alumnus of the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College and the Society for Information Management International's Regional Leadership Forum. He is a past president of the Capital Area Chapter of the Society for Information Management.As Deputy Director, Office of the MSFC CIO, Mr. Rodgers is responsible for the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center (NEACC) located in Huntsville, AL, at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The Competency Center is an organization consisting of 63 NASA and approximately 325 contractor personnel providing integrated business process and technical support for the Agency's enterprise administrative/business applications. In this capacity, he is responsible for the continued evolution of NASA's installed SAP and other Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) solutions, the Agency's enterprise application integration architecture for business systems and operational responsibility for the NASA Data Center (NDC). Prior to his current position, Mr. Rodgers served as Deputy Manager for all information technology aspects of NASA's initial SAP implementation project that delivered an integrated financials solution currently used by all 10 NASA sites. Mr. Rodgers has worked in various information technology positions at NASA for the past 22 years including playing a key role in the Agency’s innovative network and personal computer services outsourcing initiative.
Mr. Rodgers graduated from Auburn University in 1987 with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and 1988 with a Masters degree in Business Administration.Orus is a Senior Manager with Grant Thornton’s Advisory Services practice in McLean, Virginia. Orus’ experience includes FISMA compliance, SSAE 16/SAS 70 audits, Trust Services audits, IT control assessments, and physical/information security assessments. He has extensive experience conducting technology assessments for clients both within the commercial and Federal industries. Orus has led FISMA assessments of large Federal entities as well as government contractors providing him a unique perspective from both sides of the table. Orus serves on Grant Thornton’s Cyber Security committee where he participates in guiding the Firm’s direction in Cyber Security. He is also a frequent speaker on Cloud Computing risks and strategies, including a recent presentation on Cloud Computing Audit considerations at the 2010 ISACA North America Information Risk Management Conference.
In addition to being a Certified Information Systems Auditor, Orus is a member of the Institute of Internal Auditors, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association and the High Technology Crime Investigation Association. He has worked in public accounting for eleven years performing IT audit and security assessments in a breadth of industries. He received his Master of Accounting and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a major in Accounting from West Virginia University.Pamela Eyring is the President and Director of The Protocol School of Washington®, the only nationally accredited business etiquette, image and international protocol school in the nation. Armed with more than two decades of operational protocol and educational development, Ms. Eyring brings in-depth knowledge and skill to the etiquette and protocol industry. Formerly the Chief of Protocol at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, (and the first civilian to hold the post), she has planned and directed military, government, international and civic ceremonies, conferences, special events and Presidential visits. She was also the Executive Development Program Manager for the Education and Training Branch of Headquarters Personnel.
Ms. Eyring presents seminars and briefings to government executives, Fortune 500 companies, academia and numerous associations. Clients include AMTRAK, Bank of America, Boeing, FBI, Louis Vuitton, NASA, Tiffany & Co., International Public Management Association, and George Washington University.William R. (Randy) Humphries, Jr. serves as the Acting Chief Information Officer at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. He is responsible for managing and implementing information technology at Glenn. His responsibilities include managing administrative telecommunications, desktop computing, computer graphics and visualization; computer modeling and simulation; and high-end computing and networking.
From 2006 to August 2010, Humphries served as Deputy Director for Glenn's Space Flight Systems Directorate. He was responsible for planning, organizing, and directing activities required to manage, conceptualize, develop, and integrate space flight and ground systems in support of NASA’s exploration and science objectives. Before coming to Glenn, Humphries served as manager, Exploration and Space Operations at Marshall Space Flight Center.
Humphries joined NASA in 1991 working instrumentation on the Space Station Freedom program. He has held positions of increasing responsibility including lead instrumentation engineer for the space shuttle main engine, subsystem manager for the solid rocket booster project at Kennedy Space Center, manager for space shuttle propulsion upgrades and deputy director of the Program Development Directorate at Stennis Space Center.
During his career, Humphries has demonstrated exceptional skills in leading people, forming internal and external collaborations, and using keen business insight. His key accomplishments include successfully managing the implementation of the $3 billion Space Shuttle Safety Upgrade Program, leading the on-schedule launch of the $700 million Agency Pluto mission, and assembling a new organization at Marshall to support ISS and space exploration.
Humphries received his bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1982. His awards include NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal and the prestigious NASA Silver Snoopy Award.
Ray O’Brien was recently named to the CTO position at NASA Ames Research Center. Prior to this assignment, O’Brien was project manager for NASA’s Nebula cloud computing initiative. In this role, O’Brien managed the progression of Nebula from a pilot platform to a NASA capability that is planning to undergo an Agency review to validate operational readiness. During his term as project manager, Nebula’s Nova fabric controller was chosen as one of the two foundational components of the Openstack open source cloud initiative, along with Rackspace’s Cloud Files object store capability.
O’Brien joined NASA Ames Research Center in 1982 working as a contract programmer-analyst and later as a tech support specialist. In 1989 became a NASA employee and has since served in many positions, including project manager, branch chief, and division chief. During his career at NASA Ames, O’Brien has been responsible for supporting a wide-range of information technologies.Dr. Richard L. Klobuchar brings 30 years of experience in large-scale project planning and execution, cloud computing and storage, electronic records management, enterprise and security architecture, high-performance computing, digital libraries, electronic commerce, open systems standards, expert systems, neural networks, search and retrieval, and object-oriented programming.
At SAIC, Dr. Klobuchar is currently Moderator of SAIC’s Cloud Computing Community of Practice and provides leadership in cloud computing assessment; cloud security, privacy and risk assessment; cloud governance/standards; applications development and migration; as well as SAIC’s cloud vendor “ecosystem”. He is a charter member of both the TechAmerica Federal Cloud Computing Advisory Committee and FedRAMP Committee (Federal Risk Assessment and Management Program). For NIST, he currently co-chairs the NIST Cross-cutting Business Use Case Committee developing use cases for federal agency consideration under the Federal Cloud-First strategy.
Rick Grandy is a Senior Manager with Lockheed Martin and is the Manager of Cyber Security at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Hanford site. MSA provides essential services, including IT and cyber security, to DOE Hanford and Hanford site cleanup contractors. Mr. Grandy has an extensive background in enterprise Information Technology including applications programming and design, project management, infrastructure engineering and operations, records and information management, new technology planning strategic planning and cyber security. Mr. Grandy has developed and/or supported several major application systems in the nuclear field including systems controlling the refueling of a fast test reactor, systems tracking nuclear waste storage, and a real-time system performing non-destructive examination of nuclear reactor components. As Lockheed Martin’s Cyber Security Manager at the DOE Hanford site, Mr. Grandy has implemented several key improvements to the cyber security program including a comprehensive set of cyber metrics, enhanced incident detection, web application security testing and has established a penetration testing program.
Mr. Grandy served as a Director with the Washington Technology Industry Association from 2004 until 2009. Mr. Grandy is CISSP, GPEN and PMP certified, holds a Bachelor of Science in Earth Science from Whitworth University and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Washington State University.Robin Miller Dixon has been the Head of the Knowledge Resources and Library Services Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, for the past six years. Ms. Dixon manages both The Goddard Library in Greenbelt and the Wallops Flight Facility Technical Library at Wallops Island, Va. In addition, she is the COTR for the Library’s Contract, and Goddard COTR for the NASA’s Translation Services Contract. Ms. Dixon has been a Librarian at NASA Goddard for 20 years, the first four years as a contractor. Prior to NASA Goddard, Ms. Dixon worked in Special Collections, at Howard University Libraries and as Project Manager for library contracts in other Federal Agencies, including a library project at the Executive Office of the President.
In 2006, Ms. Dixon received a NASA Honor Award, for her leadership of the GSFC Library. She has also received several other Goddard Awards including Team Awards and Diversity Enhancement Awards. Ms. Dixon, along with entire NASA Goddard library staff won the honor of being named The Federal Library of the Year in 2002. Ms. Dixon has been a speaker at several conferences, including Computers in Libraries, The Military Librarians Conference, and at the American Library Association Conference (ALA).
As the University's Chief Information Officer, Ron leads the Information Services organization in offering academic and administrative computing, networking and telecommunications, Web, instructional and classroom technologies, and library services to the University. His recent accomplishments include completion of the design and construction of the University’s Harrington Learning Commons, Sobrato Technology Center, and Orradre Library; start of roll-out implementations of VoIP telephony, digital signage, and IPTV technologies campus-wide; and a data quality/business intelligence initiative.
Ron has been affiliated with Santa Clara University since September 1976, and is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering. Prior to being appointed CIO in 2000, he served in administrative capacities as Director of Information Systems (1984-1990) and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs (1990-1992).
Ron holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has published in the areas of satellite image processing systems, human-computer interaction, applications of technology to education, and the impact of information technologies on organizations. He has been the principal investigator on 16 externally funded grants, and has consulted for Silicon Valley industries, state and federal government organizations, and other universities. He has been honored by the University with the President's Special Recognition Award in 1995 and the Brutocao Curriculum Innovation Award in 1997. Ron has held visiting appointments at Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, served as an adjunct professor in the Santa Clara University School of Law and organizes workshops on information technology leadership for the University's Executive Development Center.Shari Slate is Chief Inclusion and Collaboration Strategist for Cisco's Americas Region. She is responsible for making inclusion relevant in the revenue generating arm of the business and leveraging inclusion to create value for Cisco, its partners, and customers. In addition to driving an inclusion strategy designed to attract and select new talent, develop and engage existing talent, and create an inclusive environment within the sales organization, Shari's team leads thought leadership focused on the tangible business value of inclusion and the links between inclusion, collaboration, and innovation.
Prior to joining Cisco, Shari served as Chief Diversity Officer and Director of Global Community Affairs at Sun Microsystems. Shari received The Network Journal's 2009 "40 Under Forty" Achievement Award as well as the prestigious Star Award for sales excellence earlier in her career at Xerox. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis from Mills College.
Stephanie Smith is the enterprise integration and operations manager for the HP NASA Agency Consolidated End-user Services (ACES) program. In this role, Smith is responsible for all Information Technology Infrastructure Library Version 3 (ITIL V3) processes for service delivery to end users. Her team executes service delivery with emphasis on optimizing cost and time efficiencies in ITIL V3 processes, use of automation tools and knowledge databases, and HP’s Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) approach for end-to-end service management for the NASA ACES program.
Smith joined EDS, now HP, in 2003 and supported the HP Navy and Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) account by serving as the site transition manager for one of the Naval Nuclear community shipyards and evolved to the program manager for the entire Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (NNPI) program. She has successfully delivering more than 125,000 seats and supporting infrastructure across NMCI.
Smith has also facilitated workshops for Lean Six Sigma assessments for process improvement projects and has developed and led the transition plans and proposals for two U.S. Government agencies.
Mr. Jimenez is CSC's Chief Diversity Officer, reporting to the Chairman, President and CEO and to the Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, with responsibilities for advancing the diversity and inclusion program within CSC. He is responsible for working closely with Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders and sponsors and CSC executives globally to develop business initiatives allowing CSC the ability to attract diverse talent in all markets.
Previously Mr. Jimenez was President of the Strategy and Development division within CSC's North American Public Sector (NPS). He was responsible for strategy development, high growth market segments, innovation and intellectual property programs, delivery assurance, communications, and government relations. Mr. Jimenez was also responsible for the formulation and execution of mergers and acquisition strategy for the NPS. Prior to NPS, he served as President of the Enforcement, Security and Intelligence division of CSC's Federal Sector. Mr. Jimenez has extensive experience in the national and military intelligence communities. Prior to the acquisition of Nichols Research and Welkin Associates by CSC, Mr. Jimenez was President of National Programs for Nichols and Vice president and Business Unit Leader of Welkin.
In earlier assignments, Mr. Jimenez has been senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of a computer and security engineering technical services company and Director of Strategic Planning and Advanced Concept Development of multiple national security classified programs. He has a Master of Science degree in Management from Troy State University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington. Mr. Jimenez is a member of the board of directors of the Fairfax County Court Appointed Special Advocates, the Armed Forces Communication and Electronics Association Intelligence Committee, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the National Military Intelligence Officers Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Association of Former Intelligence Officers, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the INSA Governance Committee, the Hispanic IT Executive Council, the Hispanic College Fund, and TechAmerica.Tamra Hall, Ph.D. is currently Vice President, Executive Partner in Gartner Executive Programs. In this role, Dr. Hall provides professional coaching and one-on-one consultation for Public Sector CIOs and CTOs on the full range of IT issues from strategic planning to tactical implementation of emerging technologies as mission enablers.
Dr. Hall has over 20 years of experience optimizing enterprise operations and facilitating the transfer of technology into business practice. With a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology, she is a recognized expert in the cultural, policy, workforce and business process issues that must be addressed to take full of advantage of technology insertion. Dr. Hall is also an acknowledged authority in evaluation methodologies and metrics to assess the impact of work practices and technologies on business outcomes. She has advised and established close working relationships with senior Government IT officials and is a frequent invited speaker on organizational transformation, innovation, the next generation workforce and technology transfer. Through application of industry best practices, she has guided her client’s most ambitious transformation programs.Thomas Z. Strybel has over 20 years of experience in human factors research focused on assessing human performance, and in training and mentoring human factors students. He is a Professor of Psychology at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) and Principle Investigator/ Director of the Center for Human Factors in Advanced Aeronautics Technologies (CHAAT, formerly Center for Study of Advanced Aeronautics Technologies, founded in 2005.), CHAAT is the result of a five-year, $5m award from NASA for the establishment of a NASA University Research Center for advancing research in aeronautics' human factors and increasing student participation in human factors and other STEM disciplines, especially those students from under-represented groups. He is the co-founder of the Center for Usability in Design and Accessibility (CUDA) in 1995 and developed the Masters of Science, Human Factors Program at CSULB in 2004.
Dr. Strybel was Principal Investigator of a $3-m four-year NASA award for the establishment and management of a consortium of universities and private industry focused on the development of situation awareness measurement methods that can be used to evaluate NextGen automation tools and air traffic management concepts. He has had numerous contracts for human factors' work from private organizations such as The Boeing Company, and Addison Wesley Publishing as well as other government organizations (e.g., Veteran's Administration).
Dr. Strybel has an active basic research program in audiovisual perception and an applied research program in aviation human factors.
Timothy Campos is a business oriented technical leader with an emphasis in enterprise systems and application hosting services. With over 18 years of industry experience in both Software Engineering and Information Technology, Mr. Campos has unique understanding of the challenges in both developing and applying Information Technology. Mr. Campos is currently the CIO at Facebook, the world's largest social network. Prior to Facebook, Mr. Campos served as the CIO and Vice President of Information Technology at KLA-Tencor. Under Mr. Campos, KLA-Tencor completed global implementations of SAP R/3, SAP CRM, MatrixOne, and PeopleSoft, as well as several infrastructure initiatives. Mr. Campos has a Masters in Business Administration from Columbia University and a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is on the board of directors for the Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley as well as the advisory board for several Silicon Valley startups. Mr. Campos has a Masters in Business Administration from Columbia University and a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is on the board of directors for the Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley as well as the advisory board for several Silicon Valley startups.
Tom serves as the IT Chief Technology Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where his mission is to identify and infuse new IT technologies into JPL’s environment. He leads a collaborative, practical, and hands-on approach with JPL and industry to investigate emerging industry IT technology trends that matter especially to JPL, NASA, and large enterprises. He is also leading adoption of the relevant emerging technologies at JPL.
Some of these include and cloud computing. extreme collaboration, social networking, mobility, cyber security, eco-friendly IT, IT consumerization, big data, data visualization and interaction, and the changing human behavior and expectations for computing. In short, enabling people to work with anyone from anywhere on any data and using any device.
Tom has led remote teams and large scale IT best practices development and change efforts in both small startups and large commercial companies, in international venues, and in the US Government arena. He has been both a frequent producer and consumer of advanced collaboration and engineering tools and practices as his ventures have always included a highly distributed workforce that required advanced collaboration practices.
Emerging technologies such as Cloud Computing promise to make this easier, but will they? One thing is certain: IT will be transformed to Innovating Together or go out of business.Dr. Tsengdar Lee manages the High-End Computing Program from NASA Headquarters. He is responsible for maintaining the high-end computing capability to support the agency's aeronautics research, human exploration, scientific discovery, and space operations missions. Lee is also the manager of the NASA Weather Data Analysis Program, focusing on the transition of research results into the operational forecast centers and the acceleration of operational use of research data. Two major activities include the multi-agency Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation and the Short-term Prediction Research and Transition Center.
Lee joined NASA in 2001 as the High-End Computing Program Manager for the Earth Science Enterprise. He was responsible for the Earth science computational modeling needs, primarily focusing on weather and climate modeling. Between 2002 and 2006, Lee also managed the Earth Science Global Modeling Program. He funded research efforts to study the global climate change, weather forecasting, and hurricane prediction problems.
Prior to 2001, Lee held positions as Senior Technical Advisor with Northrop Grumman Information Technology and Senior Staff Engineer with Litton PRC. He worked on the Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) project for the National Weather Service. He was responsible for the rapid development, integration, and commercialization of the AWIPS client-server system. Lee also was a principal engineer on the effort to develop the AWIPS network monitoring and control system.
Lee received two graduate degrees from Colorado State University, a PhD in Atmospheric Science in 1992 and an MS in Civil Engineering in 1988.
Valarie Burks joined NASA in February, 2011 as the CIO for IT Security/CISO. Prior to joining NASA, Ms. Burks served as the Associate CIO for Cyber and Privacy Policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture where she managed IT security, FISMA reporting, security awareness and outreach, security training, privacy, governance, risk management, strategic security oversight, and audit and compliance. Ms. Burks launched USDA’s 1st C&A Center of Excellence to improve and mitigate system risks, streamline security service costs, and improve the quality and standards for USDA IT systems. Her previous IT management work at GAO, OMB, and other federal and private sector organizations infused her technical skills with a results-based customer approach to IT Security Management.
Ms. Burks received her Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She also received her Master of Science Degree in Computer Systems Management from the University of Maryland, University College.Known simply as FlyGirl, Vernice “FlyGirl” Armour went from beat cop to combat pilot in 3 years. Within a year she found herself flying over the deserts of Iraq supporting the men and women on the ground. After serving two tours overseas, she had become America’s First African American Female Combat Pilot. After returning home, she realized that many people wanted to create breakthroughs in their own lives, they just didn’t know how.
From her experiences, she created a 7-step process called the Zero to BreakthroughTM Success Plan. She now travels extensively sharing this message through her keynotes, coaching and seminars. She is your battle-tested speaker and ignites audiences with a dynamic spark that can’t be extinguished.
As featured on Oprah Winfrey, CNN, Tavis Smiley, NPR and others, Vernice “FlyGirl” Armour’s fresh style and presentation methods have inspired hundreds of organizations and individuals. Vernice ultimately impacts organizations and individuals with an understanding of the passion and leadership required to excel. Through her keynotes, executive and group coaching, seminars and executive retreats, Vernice conveys her message of Zero to BreakthroughTM utilizing her unique insight and life strategy: “You have permission to Engage…CLEARED HOT!”Wayne brings a diverse history to the Open Forum Foundation that seems to have uniquely prepared him for the issues that the Open Forum Foundation focuses on (of course, it helps that he founded the organization). Wayne’s history includes a BS Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MS International Relations from New York University. He has years of entrepreneurial experience in manufacturing engineering, computers, web design and coding, electoral reform, and a smattering of other things. He has travelled throughout most of North America and Europe and is working on the rest of the world. Wayne is impassioned by people, how they relate to one another, and the role that governments play in creating or limiting the opportunities available to the average person.
You can easily find Wayne on the web through Twitter (@wmburke), LinkedIn (/wmburke), and the open4m.org website. See you there!As chief of the NAS Systems and Engineering Branch, William (Bill) Thigpen oversees the staff and activities involved in operation of the division's supercomputing systems. Thigpen has led several key system development efforts, including deployment of the Pleiades and Columbia supercomputers, both ranking among the world's fastest and most capable systems at the time of installation. Thigpen also serves as the contracting officer's technical representative (COTR) for the primary support contract in the division, and oversees all activities performed under the contract.
In addition, Thigpen is the Deputy Project Manager for the High-End Computing Capability Project, the funding vehicle for providing supercomputing resources and services for NASA missions. Thigpen was a member of the President's High End Computing Revitalization Task Force and has chaired and served on numerous panels focused on high-end computing and grid technologies. He also led a large Y2K compliance effort at Ames Research Center.
Before joining the NAS Division management team in September 1999, Thigpen worked for Sterling Software, Inc. at the NAS facility, leading the advanced systems development group and managing technical teams that provided high-speed computing capabilities and services to NASA researchers. His 17-year career supporting government contracts included software engineering and mission support management. Thigpen holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Nebraska.
Collaboration is key in making any organization thrive in today's challenging environment. But collaboration is much more than simply working together. True collaboration requires bringing together diverse skill sets, viewpoints and experiences in order to fully leverage the collective strengths of the group. Collaborative tools and technologies can act as powerful accelerants in the process. New theories on enhancing collaboration and enabling adoption of these technologies point to the role that inclusion plays in fostering the necessary competencies, knowledge, mind set, and behaviors. Chief Information Officers focused on enabling technology adoption and Chief Diversity Officers focused on creating highly inclusive environments have an opportunity to explore how a more collaborative relationship can drive tangible value across the organization , and ultimately fuel both collaboration and innovation.
IT + IM = IR: The Goddard Library Repository was created to store, distribute, and preserve the digital resources of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) for the information needs of the Goddard and NASA communities and the general public. And while it is the goal of the Goddard library to provide access to, manage and preserve Goddard's knowledge assets, this goal cannot be accomplished without the collaborative efforts of Center staff and officials. In order to populate the Goddard Library Repository, the Library staff has worked with The Science Directorate, The Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer and the Technical Information Management Branch at Goddard. This presentation will give some background into the IT and software that is the foundation of the Repository, demonstrate some of the functionality of the resources and provide some thought and lessons regarding collaboration on IT projects, specifically designed from an Information Management perspective, yet expected to meet IT security regulations and protocols, and maintain copyright and intellectual property guidelines and laws. CHPS. More Than Just a Tasty Snack: CHPS is JPL's collaboration platform that leverages the economy-of-scale business model while providing JPL and its partners a reliable and highly capable working environment. CHPS (Collaboration Hosting Platform Service) combines a technical infrastructure, a governance framework, and collaboration services to provide content management, search, communication, reporting, analysis, and web hosting capabilities. Utilizing SharePoint as its platform, CHPS has scaled to support a diversity of projects such as the JPL information portal, a video storage/streaming library, and team/line organization collaboration sites. A selection of professional networking tools, provisioning interfaces, and ready-made workflows is made available to platform users. This presentation will provide insight to architectural considerations, technical implications, design tradeoffs, and lessons learned for JPL's implementation and deployment of CHPS. IT and NASA Libraries? : Glad You Asked!: As the NASA Libraries transition into providing more and more content to NASA Researchers electronically, the methodology and procedures for acquiring information, distributing information and answering research inquiries is also transitioning to electronic means. The majority of information researchers and engineers need to do their work is provided at their workstation, facilitated by the Information Managers on their Center. While Information Management (IM) provides the material or content, IT provides the means, enabling easy access to the information needed for NASA to accomplish its Mission. Collaboration between IM and IT strategies and goals is essential to providing efficient and effective information services across the Agency. This presentation will discuss some of the IM tools that are being implemented to leverage expertise and provide better resource sharing across the Agency. Additionally, there will be a discussion of the opportunities, benefits and roadblocks in the collaboration venture between IM and IT. Join us in a discussion of how IT has enhanced access to Scientific and Technical information and participate in brainstorming ideas for overcoming obstacles to accessing and sharing NASA resources across the Agency, what we have done so far by working together, what we can accomplish in the future, and what IT challenges we still face going forward.
The One Stop Shopping Initiative (OSSI) is an Agency-wide strategic communication tool designed to reach Education stakeholders, including students, faculty, mentors, project managers, and industry partners. OSSI provides internship and fellowship awareness and user friendly access to special features such as the Student Online Application for Recruiting (SOLAR) Interns, Fellows, and Scholars, NASA Student Ambassador Virtual Community, Student On-line Research Journal, Special Event Announcements, Feature Stories and Videos and much more. OSSI brings together NASA Education, Human Capital, Diversity and Equal Opportunity Offices, and Mission Directorates, with competitively selected Business Management and Broker-Facilitators as strategic partners, to reach, engage and support eligible students and afford them access to learning opportunities that may lead to employment opportunities in either NASA or the nation's STEM workforce or allied professions.
The consumer world is full of the talk of smart phone and tablet applications, using the new interaction of voice, data, location, positional awareness, pictures, and augmented reality to provide novel capabilities for on-the-go users. Mobile Enterprise Applications are quite different, however, from consumer information applications. Enterprise applications must be integrated with internal systems, synchronize two-way information flow, and provide security and support. Based upon lessons learned, this talk will discuss step-by-step the issues in developing Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAP) apps. Each decision point in developing a vision and requirements for a mobile development will be detailed and discussed, including: device independence, cross-platform development, developer-friendly environments, internal app stores, device and application management, security, backend systems integration, communication band widths, service and support.
Dick will review the current state of identity in the cloud and discuss which trends are vitamins, painkillers or Viagra. Identity in the cloud is not only about authentication and authorization, but also mashups that answer "Who is this?" and "What do I have in common with them?"
With cyber threats by nation states against U.S. government agencies on the rise, the Obama administration has made effective cybersecurity a strategic priority. A 2009 report from the Homeland Security Department's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) documented a vast increase in breaches in the Federal Government in the past two years, from 5,144 cybersecurity incidents in agencies in fiscal 2006 to 18,050 in fiscal 2008. The reality is, while today's threats and networks are dynamic, most security offered to date has been staticleaving you blind to the network. And while your network security solutions may be new, chances are they are based on outdated assumptions. How can you truly protect your network if you can't see what is running on it, don't know what to protect, and can't identify the threats facing you? During this session, Martin Roesch, Founder and CTO of Sourcefire® and Creator of Snort® will clearly show why today's network security isn't doing an adequate job and discuss some of the key considerations for agencies as they strive to improve their cybersecurity and implement key aspects of the 20 Critical Security Controls that are part of a major overhaul to the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Mr. Roesch will point out why network security must be intelligent to be effectiveproviding full network visibility, relevant context, and automated impact assessment and IPS tuning. Mr. Roesch will also show why network security must adapt to dynamic networks and threats in real time. Finally, he will share some of his vision on where network security is heading in the future.
High-fidelity modeling, simulation, and analysis, enabled by supercomputing, are becoming increasingly important to NASA's mission to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. While scientific and engineering advancements used to rely primarily on theoretical studies and physical experiments, today computational science is an equal partner in such achievements. In addition, computational modeling and simulation serves as a predictive tool that is not otherwise available. As a result, the use of high performance computing is now integral to the space agency's work in all mission areas. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center is the Agency's primary supercomputing facility, consisting of 1.2 petaflops of computational capability, more than 7 petabytes of filesystem, 45 petabytes of tape archive, a 245-megapixel visualization wall, and high-bandwidth connectivity to other NASA centers and partners. The NAS facility also provides full-service support to scientists and engineers in the areas of application porting, performance optimization, large-scale data analysis and rendering, and multi-terabyte data transfers. In my talk, I will briefly describe our fully-integrated supercomputing environment, focus on its impact in several NASA mission areas, and discuss some pacing challenges to be overcome to make the next revolutionary advances in this field.
Social media is more than marketing communications. It is more than Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is also more than the enabling technologies - wikis, blogs, social networks, etc. Social media is really about engaging communities, internal and external to your organization, in new ways to achieve otherwise impossible enterprise value. It is about strategy. It is about thriving, surviving or disappearing in a new age of human behaviors fueled by mass collaboration. In this session we will discuss some of the major key issues NASA is facing in pursuing social media including: what is really transformational about social media, how is mobile computing amplifying the importance of social media, how are organizations employing social media for mission value, what are the major success criteria and common pitfalls, and how do you contribute to and move your social media capabilities forward.
NASA's computing portfolio includes a range of capabilities that span desktop computing to high performance computing and meets the mission as well as business needs of NASA users and programs. Over time, computing needs change and it is now necessary to update our understanding of what computing is necessary for NASA to optimally execute its mission. With limited resources, this understanding will help to insure that investments are well aligned to accomplish as much science and engineering as possible. In addition, a new computing paradigm, cloud computing, has emerged in the marketplace and is gaining tremendous acceptance in industry. Cloud computing is maturing very quickly, with vendors demonstrating increasing performance and added features like data base as a service and new models for data storage. It is prudent to understand where NASA might best leverage this new technology to increase our capacity to accomplish the missions. The NASA Office of the CIO and the Program Executive for High End Computing Capability (HECC) are engaging a systematic analysis of NASA's computing needs to broaden our understanding of the current state of computing needs, to understand the proper investment strategies and to identify the best way to integrate cloud computing technology into the NASA portfolio. This briefing is intended to make the NASA computing community aware of this analysis, describes the process being used for this analysis and demonstrates some prototypical results from initial iterations.
Every day, organizations make many thousands of decisions. The cumulative impacts of these decisions, both large and small, can dictate success or failure. Savvy organizations are exploring new ways to enable better decision outcomes at all levels that align with key sources of value. This is not about decentralizing decision-making, but rather increasing the average decision intelligence of every decision taken in the business through the use of collaboration technologies. This presentation from Joseph Bradley, Chief Economic Officer, Cisco - Internet Business Solutions Group will examine how leaders are working to out-decision rivals in the face of operational complexity, shifting competitive dynamics, and information overload. Discussion will center on emerging decision-oriented innovations, and how collaboration technology increases both the criticality and the feasibility of faster, better decision-making.
This session will focus on examples of innovative designs and uses of technology in academia to support NASA's mission. All of the examples are supported by funding from two of NASA's Office of Education projects: Minority University Research and Education Program and the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.
The Cloud, "Big Data" and Supporting a Major Ground Data System on $5 per Day: The collision of declining Earth science budgets and increasing Earth-orbiting satellite science return downlink volumes creates intense pressure on everyone involved with the project from the principal investigators in the proposal phase to ground data system operators to the final science consumers scattered around the world. Add shortened processing and distribution requirement times and you have an nearly impossibly constrained problem. Is the Cloud the solution. We'll explore this topic and find out what can be done and for what cost. We'll see where $5 a day takes us and more. Evolution to the cloud- the role for NASA's network: NASA's mission requires that information be exchanged among various locations and operational units with a high degree of reliability and security. Information comes from many sources including scientific data, flight data, personnel information, video content, and many others- each with its unique capacity and application requirements. Adoption of cloud computing offers the promise of application uniformity for each mission need while also delivering economies of scale.
Innovation is a deliberate acceleration in the rate of change. But many organizations suffer from group think which can stifle the pace of innovation. Gartner sees organizations increasingly seeking innovations from "outside the wall," extending connections and possibilities through people, patterns, behaviors and trendspotting. Opening innovation to individuals, providers and communities beyond your walls can reshape thinking, challenge assumptions, accelerate development and propel your organization forward. This keynote will explore how to develop and pursue a strategy of open innovation including overt management of requisite cultural shifts. The presentation will also examine how organizations are succeeding or failing with open innovation. Great ideas, great partnerships and compelling open innovation environments are of little consequence if the organization can't deliver in development. Innovation is not an end in itself. Successful innovation programs are aimed at producing specific outcomes and value. Programs without goals flounder and fail, in innovation as elsewhere. Risks inherent in innovation programs must also be addressed. Deliberate acceleration of change increases the potential for unplanned consequences for the enterprise. When risk is about reducing loss, it's an afterthought. When risk is considered in the light of innovation, it's about putting the tools and processes in place that make it safer to go fast. Innovation is a numbers game. Expanding inputs to ideation and broadening your field of view creates more possibilities and greater chances for success.
There are recognized opportunities and challenges in NASA's Cyber Security Program. While there is no perfect security, and threats and vulnerabilities change faster than our assurance posture, NASA's strategic objective is to protect our information and information systems to ensure that the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all information is protected commensurate with mission needs and associated threats. This presentation will discuss some of the threats to NASA's information and information systems and current and future initiatives to improve NASA's cyber security posture. These activities include meeting the Federal mandates for continuous monitoring, increasing security awareness, implementing the cyber security strategy, building and leveraging a Portfolio of IT Security Services, complying with the requirements of the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and enhancing IT Security training, outreach and communication with internal and external users/partners.
What is IT like in a University setting? How fast does one ride the waves of the future with a population where instant access is a way of life and technology is viewed as being slow? This panel examines IT at three California universities, discussing advancements in IT on campus and methods used to explore strategies and emerging technologies where digital natives outnumber digital immigrants.
As NASA works to achieve a more diverse workforce, how do we ensure that it is a truly inclusive work environment for all segments of our employee population? How do we reach and fully engage all segments of our workforce population and our customer base, including the workforce of tomorrow? This introspective look at the implications of diversity and inclusion efforts at NASA will focus on their importance in creating greater innovation, productivity and employee engagement. The role of the IT community is a critical component of these efforts and will be explored.
The top leadership challenges within the government IT today somewhat mimic those found in private industry; but are compounded by the complexities associated with doing business as a federal agency. This requires that IT leaders build and maintain a highly skill, effective and motivated workforce to delivering on a complex mission with an increased sense of urgency in a somewhat chaotic environment of a relatively new federal Department. In the words of Grace Hopper, these dynamic leaders "manage things - and lead people". Each presenter will address their top leadership challenges as they discuss their roles in engaging the mission of Homeland Security (DHS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Security Agency (NSA), and National Science Foundation (NSF). Imagine building, maintaining and incenting invocation that ensures access to the right person of the right information at right place from any device across a relatively new federal agency, where the right person works within in one of the 4.3 million employees across the 24 federal agencies, is one of 800 thousand officers across the 18 thousand police departments, is one of the 60 thousand first responders that works and lives right next door, or is one of the over 300 million citizen. eligible to apply for a myriad of benefits. DHS is actively implementing both Public and Private Cloud Strategies, migrating systems to two data centers, centralizing network infrastructure, and implementing continuous monitoring to address the ever present cyber threat. Panel members will speak to the leadership challenges of implementing Enterprise wide initiatives using a systems-of-systems approach focused at strengthening the Departments overall posture.
Monsters in the Closet - A Case Study of Internal Social Media Implementation at Marshall Space Flight Center: In this time of rapid change and innovation, quick, real-time collaboration and easy people connections are essential for any business, including NASA. Luckily the tools of social media are ready for us to improve collaboration and connections inside the workplace. Many government entities are beginning to see value in standing up an internal social networking tool. They see the benefits o. collaboration, uncovering the skills of the existing workforce, teaming, open communication and much more. However, bring up internal social media at NASA, and you are immediately faced with a closet full of cultural and policy Monsters. Although all adults know that Monsters don't really exist, overcoming these perceived challenges seems very real. How can we address policy issues surrounding IT security, records management, appropriate use, privacy and accessibility. Likewise how do we address cultural perceptions like, adoption goofing-off and generational gaps? Marshall Space Flight Center recently, successfully implemented an internal social media tool, branded ExplorNet. In the process, we did not adjust a single existing policy or write a single new policy. Though Marshall encountered many policy and cultural Monsters, we were able to address each obstacle and overcome them to experience over 1.7 million hits in ExplorNet's first month. This presentation is a case study in how Marshall befriended the cultural and policy Monsters. Enabling Productivity with Collaboration and Social Media Tools: Collaboration among individuals, teams and organizations is a driving requirement to the success of nearly every project. Social networking capabilities facilitate collaboration by enabling immediate and controlled information access to a broad audience through real-time participation to a distributed team. The challenge to IT providers is to determine the features of collaboration and social media that provide value to the user, understand how these enabling capabilities serve the creation and development process, and address the desires of a diverse user community in terms of a multi-generation audience, technical background, distributed location, and familiarity to social networking. Finally, given all these interesting parameters, the IT provider must deploy a straightforward solution that brings value to the end users in an intuitive and familiar way. At JPL, we have introduced a collaborative and social media application that combines many key features to support the needs and demands of our users. This presentation will discuss the challenges of deploying tools to meet these demands, overcoming perceptions about social networking, communicating the value and capabilities to a diverse audience and improving our competitive position in an ever-changing IT landscape.
Recipients of the education IT awards will present.
In response to the new Federal Government IPv6 mandates from OMB, and the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool, NASA is embarking on a transition to fully support IPv6 throughout the agency. Network and computing equipment with IPv6 capability has been in place for some time, however, actual use of IPv6 has not made it beyond basic prototyping. A NASA IPv6 Transition Plan has been established that is modeled on experience and recommendations provided to the agency IPv6 Transition Managers by the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN). This presentation will discuss the framework of the IPv6 Transition Plan, a preliminary schedule, and some of the milestones NASA will achieve during the first few phases of the IPv6 Implementation. It will also include current experiences and identify areas that appear to be key challenges to the implementation based on NASA's recent participation in World IPv6 Day.
Innovation is viewed as the application of an invention to meet a perceived need. The burden of proof lies on the innovator to prove the value of their work. The questions become "Will the innovative solution have a positive impact on information technology that is far-reaching and possibly affect the quality of our lives?" and "Can innovation be measured?" Many believe that innovation and creativity cannot be measured. If the two cannot be measured, the struggle to gain respect will never end. Creativity can never be harnessed. Without creativity, innovation cannot flourish. Without creativity, compelling new technologies that have relevance on where information technology is heading can never be developed. The impact of BIG ideas changing our world becomes obsolete. Industry partners will discuss innovations related to those BIG ideas capable of changing our world as we know it today. They will acquaint the audience with some of the innovative activities in their labs with their research team(s). During this discussion, participants will understand how these innovative activities impact how we do business, live, and become sustainable.
Cybersecurity is a multi-faceted topic which requires attention to a variety of issues in order to develop a comprehensive security posture. In the past, approaches to cybersecurity have focused primarily on perimeter defenses, network security, and platform hardening. While such efforts have improved cybersecurity by reducing the vulnerability of organizations to a variety of threats, criminals have now shifted their efforts to a more vulnerable component of an organization's IT presence: their applications. In this presentation, we will provide attendees with an overview of application security, using web applications as the framework for our discussion. We will discuss the impetus for the increased threat from criminals to web applications, provide a broad overview of a web application and the inherent vulnerabilities, and discuss some specific threats and how they tie into risk to organizational risk. We'll complete our discussion by providing a live demonstration of a website hack and discuss some high-level tactics and strategies for risk mitigation.
As budgets are tightened and missions become more cost competitive, everyone is looking for ways to lower the cost of mission operations. This presentation will discuss one such option undertaken by JPL. The Mission Infrastructure Service (MIS) is a shared IT service infrastructure that provides high-performance hardware and dynamically provisioned IT resources on a virtual machine. By eliminating the initial hardware investment and reducing system administration costs, the total cost of ownership is sharply reduced. Projects no longer have to worry about the IT infrastructure used to support critical mission operation that requires large amount of servers and workstations, nor do they need to keep and store excess servers and workstations. Now they can subscribe to the MIS and pay for what they use only when they use it.
Cloud Computing is a disruptive technology that has completely revamped industry's approach to IT, and the journey has just begun. By providing secure and effective access to virtually limitless capacity, cloud computing has the potential to serve as the enabler to numerous NASA missions. In fact, several NASA mission, including Mars Exploration Rovers and Mars Science Laboratory and are already soaring in the clouds. What potential does cloud computing hold for NASA? Is it real? Does it make economical sense? And how should we really approach it? In this workshop, we will ask thought provoking questions and hear insights from industry and NASA leaders with extensive hands-on experience in cloud computing. Join us to discuss its near-term and long-term impact on and potential for NASA. The panel will be followed by a birds-of-a-feather session where everyone interested in cloud computing and it's many related areas will interact in an informal setting.
The Academic Competitiveness Council cites informal education as one of three integral pieces of the U.S. education system. Indeed, studies show that Americans spend as little as nine percent of their lives in school, yet the rapid pace of change in our world forces the need for people to continue to learn. A 2009 NSF report notes that there is an “emerging sense that informal environments can make substantial contributions to science education on a broad scale.” The same report focuses on four venues in which individuals learn science in informal environments. everyday experiences, designed spaces (e.g., museums, libraries, etc.), programs for science learning (e.g., youth groups, camps, etc.), and science media. Digital environments pose their own special pros and cons for informal learning. While people turn to the web more and more, many people—and organizations—still do not have access to high-speed internet or have firewall issues. Nonetheless NASA has dived enthusiastically and headlong into engaging website, social media and gaming as well as new technologies for museums such as 3D projection systems, domes, spheres, and multitouch applications. Visualization of key concepts and NASA data are unique areas of expertise and opportunity. Our session will discuss a few of the issues involved in IT in informal learning environments as well as briefly showcase a range of current NASA IT products in STEM informal education.
High End Computing represents an essential IT tool for the advancement of many critical engineering and scientific disciplines within NASA. The High End Computing Capability Project provides the essential hardware augmented by a suite of value added services balanced to provide an optimal return on investment to NASA. Run out of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at the NASA Ames Research Center, HECC provides access to Pleiades, a large traditional HEC cluster with over 100,000 cores and over 1 petaFLOP peak performance and Columbia providing nodes with from 512 to 2048 cores. Augmented by 9 petabytes of spinning storage and close to 50 PB of archive storage, HECC is sized to meet the most demanding scientific and engineering challenges of the agency. Adding to the facility capability are two visualization and data analysis environments, both connected directly to the supercomputers through InfiniBand. A suite of customer-focused services designed to optimize the effectiveness of the high-end computing environment complements the hardware. There are four technical groups: systems, applications performance and productivity, data analysis and visualization, and networks; and three support groups: user services, security and facilities to provide this service oriented environment. . This presentation provides an insight into the hardware environment, the complementing services, and how they meet NASA's demanding engineering and scientific needs.
The Sciences and Exploration Directorate (SED) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center brought a new building online in 2009 that did not provide a computer room. With a Federal call for agencies to consolidate data centers and information technology, the SED also faced a requirement to move servers from the legacy building with minimal impact to the IT services the affected organizations offer the science community. With no computer room to accommodate the existing physical server farm, the solution was to virtualize the servers that support several SED Web sites, including the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archival Research Center (HEASARC), the Astrophysics Science Division websites, and the Solar System Exploration Division websites and the Astronomy Picture of the day website. Additionally, data pipelines for the Swift and Suzaku missions and other functions have been virtualized to accommodate this paradigm with plenty of compute power to spare. From a technical perspective, the Sciences and Exploration Directorate Virtual Machine Environment (SEDVME) has been a success. The remaining challenges faced are either political or are associated with establishing affordable long term funding models. Historically, projects are heavily funded shortly before launch. IT hardware assets are procured at that phase. Project leaders have had a greater sense of control when the IT asset resides in their domain. Virtualization requires rethinking in terms of procuring services rather than hardware and a mindset of viewing IT as a utility. This presentation will discuss the success story and the remaining challenges of the SEDVME.
In this fast-paced briefing you'll see evidence of major shifts taking place in the practice of security, in the manpower needs those changes engender, and in the ways security effectiveness is measured. You'll see the future of FISMA, how organizations reorganize security after major intrusions demonstrate the ineffectiveness of current processes, and how capable people can make the greatest difference in reducing the risk of damage from cyber attacks.
As the International Space Station (ISS) reaches assembly complete and the ISS National Laboratory becomes a reality, it is key for NASA to make interactions between crew and ground research and operations personnel as close to an actual "office" environment as possible. Operations onboard the ISS are supported by dozens of specialists on Earth, who continuously update the astronaut work plans and provide technical information for operating equipment and experiments. This requires the Mission Control Center (MCC) flight controllers to constantly move information between the orbiting space vehicle, to the MCC network, and then out to the "office" IT environment on Earth. The ISS office environment includes public and private entities around the globe. For years, the MCC personnel have manually uplinked, downlinked and distributed this information on a 7x24 basis. Since 2008, the Orbital Communications Adapter Management System (OCAMS. project between Ames Research Center and Johnson Space Center, has been developed to automate this ISS information transfer. OCAMS is the first application of multi-agent systems integration technology to be used in NASA's mission operations environment. OCAMS acts to coordinate all file exchanges between the ISS crew/computers and ground. The system reads and validates requests via an API between the applications and even awaits approval of protected operations. OCAMS interacts with a specialized MCC FTP program for uplinking and downlinking data to the ISS. OCAMS logs traffic, delivers files to ground locations and notifies personnel of completed operations. Though OCAMS automation, the ISS operations team has reduced ISS staffing requirements.
The bottom line is that we have to move into action from where we are! Decide what you want, put your stake in the ground and execute! Vernice calls this making a commitment to the commitment. Give your organization the boost they need to come together as a team, understand how their objectives support the overall strategy, and accomplish the mission achieving the desired results!
A Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) is usually defined as the most senior executive in a Federal organization responsible for information technology (IT) and computer systems supporting the goals of the organization. In order to be successful, IT leadership has been and will continue to be of paramount importance. The CIOs face challenges as they strive to run a cost-effective operation and maintain both short-term and long-term strategic success. What is the role of a Federal CIO? Plan for innovation while being perceptive and realistic. Promote a broad technology agenda in order to maintain a modernized infrastructure. Expand the business impact of IT by driving new initiatives. Be imaginative and use ground-breaking techniques to maintain an innovative IT workforce. A panel of Federal CIOs will have a lively conversation focusing on specific lessons learned in three areas. Innovation and Emerging Trends, Infrastructure & Modernizing Techniques, and Influencing & Inspiring All Generations.
The customer experience is important to the success of an organization. A customer that is dissatisfied will tell two times more people about a bad experience than a satisfied customer will. NASA's IT organizations have many diverse customers. Do you know who your customers are and if you are meeting their needs? Are you truly delivering quality customer service and enhancing the customer experience? This presentation will allow you to reflect on and enhance your customer service skills. It will also stress the effects of service quality on satisfaction and loyalty to customers. And finally, we will meet some of NASA's IT users and hear about their experiences.
To provide efficient and effective access to enterprise information that meets stakeholder needs and supports mission success, NASA is implementing the Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P) that will transform its IT Infrastructure and application services from a Center-based model to an enterprise-based management and provisioning model. The scope of I3P is broad, entailing consolidation and central management of IT services in the areas of Tier 1 service desk and ordering, web services and technologies, enterprise business and management applications, integrated network/ communications services, end user services, and data center services. To successfully implement this program, NASA IT is undergoing some significant changes in the areas of IT Governance, IT Service Management, and organizational roles and responsibilities. Utilizing the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 as a framework, NASA will perform IT service integration utilizing the ITIL methodologies, processes, and standards to ensure success. Mr. Gary Cox, the NASA Associate CIO and the I3P Program Manager, will discuss the I3P concept of operations, the current status of the I3P, and the challenges and accomplishments in implementing the I3P.
The new CTO for IT office will be discussing information technology innovation and approaches to technology infusion at NASA. Specific subjects include nurturing and leveraging innovation wherever situated, the difference between sustaining and disruptive innovation, and repeatable frameworks for channeling innovation into new or modified service offerings.
It is said that good judgment comes from experience - and that the requisite experience comes from exercising bad judgment. This talk explores several information system compromises of companies and government organizations. Through the analysis of someone else's tragedy, the audience will learn some common practices of hackers as they infiltrate, exfiltrate and trash their opponents' networks.
High-fidelity modeling, simulation, and analysis, enabled by supercomputing, are becoming increasingly important to NASA's mission to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. While scientific and engineering advancements used to rely primarily on theoretical studies and physical experiments, today computational science is an equal partner in such achievements. In addition, computational modeling and simulation serves as a predictive tool that is not otherwise available. As a result, the use of high performance computing is now integral to the space agency's work in all mission areas. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center is the Agency's primary supercomputing facility, consisting of 1.2 petaflops of computational capability, more than 7 petabytes of filesystem, 45 petabytes of tape archive, a 245-megapixel visualization wall, and high-bandwidth connectivity to other NASA centers and partners. The NAS facility also provides full-service support to scientists and engineers in the areas of application porting, performance optimization, large-scale data analysis and rendering, and multi-terabyte data transfers. In my talk, I will briefly describe our fully-integrated supercomputing environment, focus on its impact in several NASA mission areas, and discuss some pacing challenges to be overcome to make the next revolutionary advances in this field.
Organizations are not accustomed to managing talent that is at a pre-college level. Although organizations have programs, such as internships, few if any have an organized approach to assimilating 17-20 year-old students, many of who recently graduated or are graduating from high school. Organizations tend to follow process-oriented procedures for managing talent'very much resembling supply-chain procedures of the 1950s (Cappelli, 2008). It is time to examine alternative supplies of new talent in the US. Workforce Opportunity Services (WOS) is a non-profit social venture that provides a new and innovative supply chain of workers in the US. WOS uses an outsourcing-to-employment model that trains high-school graduates through long-term academic, social, and professional support. It targets minority and traditionally under-served populations in the high technology industry, building the IT skill sets of these individuals while enlarging the pool of local skilled IT workers. The foundation of the WOS mission is to attract less financially fortunate students, who may be a better long-term fit for the corporation and compete effectively on price while providing corporations with college-trained talent at a young age. Students get their degree part-time while working first for WOS. This approach can help reform the higher educational system which is still geared towards a college graduate as the right of passage into the workplace. Further, it can help support the growing number of jobs that require off-hours, or workers that may need to work from home or from a distance.
This is an exciting time to be involved in IT! But does our involvement end when we clock out for the day? How do we remain relevant when IT Consumers are treated to a smorgasbord of tools and resources that continue to evolve at an accelerated pace? 21st century IT Consumers are living in the Cloud and have the ability to drive innovation from the individual to the global stage. This talk goes beyond an assessment of tools, but rather explores the behavioral aspects of our technology driven culture.
In this talk Atti Riazi explores the technological advancements and the implications of technology, both positive and negative and focuses on how technology has sociopolitical impacts, shaping and forming the organizational terrain in ways that often go undetected for years. These impacts ultimately need to be understood and integrated. How does the IT community recognize the unintended consequences of technology? How do we go beyond only see the visible bugs and seeing those largely invisible risks waiting to surprise us? Technology is changing everything around us and we must take responsibility for managing the social and cultural changes new technology drives. The talk will cover our understanding of the various levels of risk, not only in North America but globally. Technology issues are broad and far reaching from genetic engineering to Information technology.
One of a CIO's toughest challenges is implementing the right enterprise IT solutions that improve overall productivity and effectiveness, support the agency's mission, and save money, all while being delivered with a high quality of service. Frequently, Agency CIOs turn to outsourcing components of the enterprise IT infrastructure to achieve these goals. As I3P becomes a reality, ITIL V3 is frequently touted as the panacea for ensuring that IT vendors will work together seamlessly. ITIL is an evolving framework for optimizing the management of ongoing IT and business support services. It is a series of processes, based on industry standards and best practices, which have evolved from a focus on the stability and efficiency of the IT infrastructure to the alignment of IT to meet the business outcomes of the organization. ITIL is critical to ensuring consistent delivery of services that balance performance, quality and cost to deliver desired business outcomes. This session examines how critical ITIL V3 is in helping to ensure the successful delivery of enterprise IT services to NASA and managing the multi-vendor I3P environment. The value of ITIL is highlighted in the delivery of the Agency Consolidated End-user Services (ACES) Program. HP, one of the world's most experienced ITIL practitioners will implement ITIL V3 processes as part of its ACES transition, to help deliver a more effective transition and service delivery.
The Technology Systems Integrator from the NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer, Dr. J.C. Duh, will moderate a panel of Enterprise Service Executives who each will give a short presentation on their IT Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P) service area, its associated contract, and how their service area is integrated with the other service areas. The End User Service Exec will discuss the Agency Consolidated End-User Services (ACES) contract. The Communication Service Exec will discuss the NASA Integrated Communication Services (NICS) contract. The Enterprise Applications Exec will discuss the Enterprise Applications Service Technologies (EAST) contract. The Web Services Exec will discuss the Web Enterprise Service Technologies (WEST) contract. The Enterprise Service Desk (ESD) Executive will discuss how ESD provides the single point-of-contact for all NASA IT customers across all I3P service areas, and the Data Center Executive will discuss NASA's plan for consolidating data centers. The last 30 minutes of this session is set aside to discuss related questions. Comment cards will be available at the session to collect comments, suggestions, and questions from the audience, and the I3P Program will follow up with an e-mail reply to all questions being raised.
NASA recognizes sharing best practices and cross-pollination of ideas can improve operational efficiency, reduce duplicate efforts, and drive more effective communication of its capabilities to potential clients and partners. With the revitalized focus on mission technology develoment, outreach and knowledge transfer efforts the NASA Headquarters (HQ) Information Technology and Communications Directorate (ITCD) initiated the development of an "Innovation Ecosystem." The NASA Innovation Ecosystem is not one singular solution, but a composite of several transformational components that collectively drive and support innovation across NASA. The primary components include an Innovation Lifecycle framework providing a holistic approach to evaluating, incubating and infusing innovations identified from NASA and external relationships, a Technology Collaboration platform through which staff can learn about technologies under research and collaboratively share, request, and discuss knowledge, a Technology Showcase for a hands-on experience with technologies, and a Technology Engineering and Incubation environment for prototyping new solutions. Supporting components consist of the integration and management of internal and external relationships which allow research opportunities to feed additional program components, integration of existing communities of interest for sharing information with targeted groups, development of a marketing and communication strategy for educating staff and potential partners about the multiple technologies, trends and other innovation outputs, and finally the creation of the NASA Technology Innovation (NTI) Advisory Council, comprised of internal leaders representing all Directorates and some external representation which guides the research agenda and provides strategic vision for the program as a whole.
Clouds and virtualization offer powerful new ways to manage and use digital information, but they also create new complexities for government agencies in meeting the fundamental challenge of getting the right information to the right people over an infrastructure that they can trust. Infrastructure becomes virtual, not physical. People access infrastructure from devices that are outside of IT's direct control. Information moves with incredible speed across networks and the cloud, making it hard to know where sensitive information resides. With an IT infrastructure that is virtual and shared via the cloud, organizations must learn new ways to achieve visibility into risks, threats, and compliance performance. The technologies needed to establish this level of cloud control and visibility already exists. Many government agencies are applying these technologies in creative ways to build trusted clouds that can meet the most rigorous security and compliance requirements while delivering the flexibility, fluidity, and massive scale that hold such promise for organizations worldwide. Before any agency can take advantage of the cloud's agility, efficiency, and cost benefits, they need to first ensure the cloud can be trusted. Attendees to this session will come away with a deep understanding of how to achieve security in their cloud in two vital ways: Sufficient control over cloud security and compliance to adapt to any type of workload, even mission-critical ones. Giving IT teams the ability to directly inspect and monitor conditions in both internal and hybrid clouds.
This presentation describes a specialized search and data integration system developed for the International Space Station (ISS) Mission Control Center (MCC). The system, called XSearch, helps flight controllers, mission managers, and engineers to locate mission information relevant to ISS operations and trouble-shooting. This information (in the form of action-tracking records, anomaly reports, console logs, flight rules, ISS inventory records, meeting minutes, etc.) is spread across multiple, stove-piped MCC databases, document repositories, and web sites; XSearch enables a uniform cross-source search of this information. In addition to full-text search and data integration, XSearch provides extra value-added functionality by augmenting user search results with cross-references to other relevant MCC information. This auxiliary information provides users with additional context for understanding and interpreting the primary search results, thereby enabling more informed decision-making. Auxiliary information is found by performing text analysis of the results and identifying either cited or similar documents and/or records. XSearch has been in daily use by ISS flight controllers since July 2008, and now searches 15 distinct sources of MCC data including over one million ISS mission control database records and documents. To enable rapid search, XSearch replicates, integrates, and warehouses information created in MCC data sources on a dedicated XSearch server, where citation detection and similarity analysis is performed. Some of the technical and non-technical challenges associated with building and deploying XSearch include executing a cross-Center collaboration, accessing remote computing resources, satisfying access control and security requirements, ensuring system performance and maintainability, and negotiating with stakeholders and data owners.
Generations that grew up using social media embrace the constant exchange of thoughts and ideas with their network of friends. An avid Facebook user rarely spends days working in isolation on a project, but instead reaches out to friends for input, validation, and even kudos along the way. Since 2006, the NASA Enterprise Applications competency Center (NEACC) has been applying the concepts of Agile concepts of self-directed teams provide an opportunity for constant feedback, knowledge sharing, and transparency. They also allow key stakeholders to be more engaged with the teams that provide their services. With the implementation of the EAST contract, the Agile framework has been extended beyond the realm of Application development to the arena of Applications operations, including daily maintenance activities. While the shift hasn't been without challenges, the move away from the isolation of cubicles to an environment that promotes teaming and collaboration has been a positive one. This presentation describes how and why the NEACC is applying Agile concepts to form strong teams that learn from the Facebook generation and that should appeal to tomorrow's workforce.
There is a huge need for Government organizations, at every level, to better manage and harness data as they serve the needs of their citizens. During the development of "Watson," various analytics technologies were developed that can be used to make sense of unstructured information in order to bring new insights in a variety of fields -- from the Government 2.0 envisioned by the White House to health care, social services, energy, water resources, transportation, food safety, customs, border protection, financial markets, education, and more. Through the use of these advanced analytics, Governments can be better equipped to understand their constituent needs, the impact of related services, evaluate more effective ways to deliver offerings in the era of tightened budgets, and be more accurate and targeted in subsequent planning and IT investments. This presentation will provide an overview of the "Watson" development process, highlight some of the advanced analytic technologies used, and provide examples of where they could be used.
From major IT projects to the smallest enhancement, a frequently overlooked yet critical success factor is the end-user experience. Testing and training are crucial elements in the software development lifecycle, but they do not necessarily provide insight into the opinions and desires of the user base. While obvious tweaks in an application can help improve the user experience, holistic efforts to improve usage and efficiency cannot be successfully accomplished without a comprehensive program of empirical data gathering. Identifying appropriate users, targeting audiences with scripted exercises, capturing keystrokes, heat-mapping/eye tracking, interpreting study results, "fly changes", and directing effective corrective actions - these are the important elements that play key roles in reaping the benefits from successful usability studies. The NEACC will share their own lessons learned during the implementation and operation of Agency business systems. The NEACC will also demonstrate a typical usability setup and provide the audience with best practices they can use to begin incorporating usability into their own projects.
Enterprise Architecture Assessments can yield a wealth of knowledge about an organization and its utilization of IT resources. Bridging the gap between business management and IT requires a methodology than can establish assessment parameters in terms that the business can understand and produce measurable results that business leaders can take action on. This presentation covers the creation of an Enterprise Architecture Assessment methodology based on the merger of the industry standard Zachman and DODAF architecture frameworks, NASA NPR 2830.1: NASA Enterprise Architecture Procedures, CMMI, and best practices from across government and industry practitioners. This presentation will provide examples of how the produced methodology can be used to formulate an Enterprise Architecture assessment based on targeted questions about the business that the business sponsor desires answered. Through posing specific questions to business leaders and assessing their responses the Enterprise Architect can easily identify the information that is needed and how this information relates to the assessment objectives and the broader enterprise. This will allow for more accurate scoping and identification of the skills needed and most importantly clear communication of expectations between the business sponsor, the IT organization, and the assessment team. Additionally this presentation will cover how an organization can determine the maturity of their Enterprise Architecture practice and identify how to improve the organization maturity based on defined objectives tied to a CMMI based maturity model.
The purpose of a security monitoring system is to provide real-time, up-to-the-minute security awareness of current threats, risks, and compromises. As with any monitoring system, there is a certain amount of false-positives. False-positives have a negative impact on monitoring systems by using valuable resources including taking time away from an analyst who has to investigate the false-positive. While traditional methods for reducing false-positives - removing intrusion detection rules not relevant to the site being monitored and creating filters for security event that are known false-positives - are very useful for reducing false-positives and should still be used, these methods do not scale in a dynamic heterogeneous network and require an analyst for upkeep. To keep the security monitoring system up-to-date with changes in the network and changes to intrusion detection rules while still minimizing false-positives, additional context is added to security events. The context may include user information (e.g., list of authorized hosts) or source and destination information (e.g., known hostile hosts, identified organization based on IP address) that provides additional data to the monitoring system for event aggregation and correlation. As existing rules and filters are updated to reference the additional context, the security monitoring system is able to make better decisions due to more data.
NASA's scientist and engineers need to focus on mission success; not worry about the stability and availability of computing infrastructure. Cloud computing makes it possible for the mission-side-of-the-house to quickly process and share discoveries without roadblocks. Cloud enables effective public outreach and collaboration with peers, provides "instant-on" IT infrastructure and the ability to quickly "scale up" compute, storage and bandwidth as demand rises. In this session, we will discuss specific use cases in which Nebula's cloud platform has enabled some of the Agency's science and engineering projects to move faster and better, while providing greater public outreach and collaboration. Discussion will include Nebula cases such as the iRODS project, Integrated Rule-Oriented Data Management System, a community-driven, open-source, data grid software solution, and WISE. Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which collects data and provides an important catalog for the James Webb Space Telescope as well as a lasting legacy for the Agency.
What has happened to the business etiquette skills in today's workforce. What do employees and management need to know in order to refresh their personal leadership skills. Our casual society has been focused on technology for so long that people are compromising their working relationships and possibly missing promotional opportunities. Participants will learn the key fundamental skills all generations should know such as today's acceptable handshake which is no longer gender related, greetings according to protocol, networking to improve the organization's image, cubicle courtesies, proper use of business cards and e-Etiquette skills in order to use communication devices and not be seen as rude and annoying to co-workers and customers.
There is a huge need for Government organizations, at every level, to better manage and harness data as they serve the needs of their citizens. During the development of "Watson," various analytics technologies were developed that can be used to make sense of unstructured information in order to bring new insights in a variety of fields -- from the Government 2.0 envisioned by the White House to health care, social services, energy, water resources, transportation, food safety, customs, border protection, financial markets, education, and more. Through the use of these advanced analytics, Governments can be better equipped to understand their constituent needs, the impact of related services, evaluate more effective ways to deliver offerings in the era of tightened budgets, and be more accurate and targeted in subsequent planning and IT investments. This presentation will provide an overview of the "Watson" development process, highlight some of the advanced analytic technologies used, and provide examples of where they could be used.
The purpose of this presentation is to update the community on the proposed updated technical standards which defines how we make Information Technology accessible to people with disabilities. After nearly a decade, an update of the Section 508 accessibility standards and technical provisions was released for public comment in March 2010. This major overhaul of what it means to be Section 508 compliant has important implications for anyone who procures, develops, or consumes information technology. Also, NASA-specific Section 508 activities, including this year's implementation of a new NASA policy for Section 508 implementation, NPR 2800.2: Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility, will also be presented.
Delivering business outcome is augmenting and/or replacing traditional fee-for-service business model and has become increasingly prevalent in areas such as strategic outsourcing, smarter planet solutions, crowd sourcing, knowledge marketplace, internet advertisements, and healthcare. The primary challenge faced by outcome based business model is the difficulties in providing a transparent and verifiable way for measuring the business outcome between the producer and the consumer without having to reveal too much proprietary information. The rapid penetration of cloud computing is fundamentally changing this landscape as cloud computing facilitated the standardization of service delivery and pricing: (1) Risk adjusted cost performance, which captures the variation of outcome, for system level metrics will receive increasing focus. This metric will either augment or subsume the traditional cost performance metric. (2) Fine-grained resource provisioning: Both resource provisioning and runtime management for system cluster, private & public clouds will be optimized for the heterogeneous workloads generated by vertically integrated solution platforms that will become increasingly outcome centric. (3) Emergence of cloud OS: Outcome centric management of datacenter resources requires capability for elastic partitioning computing resources among on-premise computing clusters, private and public clouds, resulting in the emergence of cloud hypervisor or OS. (4) Proactive Platforms: Outcome centric platforms and system management requires the system platform to be more situational and context aware of the environment and business requirements. Increase use of behavior models of the system platforms and the environment enables the HW/SW platforms to be increasingly proactive in responding to potential future events.
Focus on applying Design Thinking and user-centered design to create more innovative and effective solutions, touching on Experience Oriented Architecture, the "Art and Science of Experience Design" with UCD and Measurement and Analytics.
This presentation will discuss how e-mail and web browsing works, the associated threats, and how to reduce your risk when computing. A basic description of the e-mail and WWW protocols (SMTP, HTTP, HTML, etc) will be provided. How encryption can alleviate most of the problems associated with clear text e-mail. SSL/TLS, Entrust, and PGP will be discussed along with how and when they are protecting your information. Training will be provided on how to read a URL, recognizing Phishing/spoofing attacks and URL redirection. Why web servers use cookies and session tracking to keep track of state will also be discussed. Specific configuration examples will be included in the presentation that any person using a computer can learn to protect their work and home systems. This presentation can also be used by computer security professionals for security awareness training for end users.
Information technology will deliver solutions to support NASA's mission. These solutions will be an integral part of all mission-focused technology. Industry partners will play a major role in developing mission enabling technologies in support of NASA's vision to explore the universe. They will provide critical computing resources to NASA scientists and engineers. Industry partners will discuss how IT is impacting and changing how missions are supported at NASA and other agencies. Topics include interoperability, presentation of data, uniform assurance, user controls, storage, and safeguarding.
The forces of globalization, technological innovations, demographic shifts, and cultural change, combine to create new challenges and opportunities for leaders and managers of organizations, and give rise to many questions about how leaders and managers can powerfully engage and unleash the potential of increasingly diverse and increasingly global workforces: What are the trends telling us that we should expect about the workforce of tomorrow? How should companies and institutions be organized and aligned to empower their people to be productive, creative, and innovative? How do leaders and managers inspire and unleash creative potential towards innovative solutions to problems and challenges? What will it take to inspire and enable teams and organizations to be strategic, high performing, and prepared to push boundaries to innovate and succeed? In this presentation and Q&A, Analisa Balares, successful entrepreneur and innovator, and CEO of the Womensphere media network and global leadership community, will share some key insights into the global and macro trends that shape the present and future of diverse organizations, and what leaders and managers must do to succeed.
The pace of IT innovations has increased dramatically. Once IT consumers have tasted new capabilities that's delivered quickly and works well, they want more, they want it even faster, and they want it customized. The pace is snowballing and is driving a possibly insatiable demand for IT. This talk will investigate the current and future key growth areas of IT, the major challenges, some crucial opportunities, and propose practical and proactive steps on how we can tie this together to create a future for NASA that is truly limITless.
Genentech has an academic and strong employee culture focused on fostering innovation and collaboration. We believe that applying Genentech's risk-based business approach, IT will offer better services at lower cost and higher innovation and in 2007 following through on that vision, we adopted Google Apps as our collaboration suite for the enterprise. Since being acquired by Roche in 2009, the focus turned to interoperability and to make the collaborative 4A (Anytime, Anywhere, with Anyone, using Any device) vision a reality for the global organization. The goal was to build solutions that would work across systems without causing disruption to existing services while still maintaining high customer satisfaction and a user-friendly experience. The biggest challenge was calendar interoperability and in a large organization like ours, its probably the most painful of all because a lot of people across Roche and Genentech rely heavily on their respective calendaring system. We realized that innovation demands interoperability. This talk is about how we adopted open standards, collaborated with third parties, followed a release early and often approach to building cloud-based solutions and always relied heavily on getting customer feedback so that we could adapt and work on what was most important to the business. This presentation will also highlight the challenges we faced along the way, the lessons we learned and the organizational change management that it took to make this happen and last but not least, the unexpected benefits we are reaping from this approach and some of the next steps we are working on.
The Education BLAST OFF is an educational component bringing 300 young people into direct contact with leading edge computer technology. The education session will focus on innovative uses of technology in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Sponsoring organizations will each set up a learning environment showcasing the technologies they use to engage students. (For example, Raytheon, which has an ongoing initiative called "Math Moves You," will lead the math effort.) Students will be able to move among the presentations and speak directly with individuals who are trailblazers in their careers. IT leaders will discuss their responses to challenges during the lifelong journey to achieve their goals. In addition, the session will use Cisco's massive networking resources to create a large "telepresence" for the education session.
In addition to continued protection from spam and viruses, Federal agencies continue to express a high level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound messaging policies (for email and other communication protocols) that ensure information leaving the organization complies with internal rules, best practices for data protection and external regulations. In addition, organizations remain very concerned about ensuring that email (and other electronic message streams) cannot be used to disseminate confidential or proprietary information. This session will cover data loss prevention (DLP) and effective strategies for archiving Electronically Stored Information (ESI), focusing on the recently introduced principles of Controlled Unclassified Information and NARA's guidance on ESI.
Through the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), the Federal government has mandated that agencies consolidate data centers and migrate applications to cloud computing with the intent of saving money through energy efficiencies, reduced footprint and reduced maintenance costs. NASA has been assessing its portfolio of data centers and applications in order to formulate a plan of action and to understand complexities and constraints associated with various types of consolidation activities. This panel discusses a selection of data center consolidation related topics from the mission directorates that includes successes, plans and problems yet to be solved, with the intent of increasing awareness in the community about data center consolidation related issues.
Open Government at NASA: Since its inception, NASA has been devoted to educating the world about the wonders of our universe. The advent of the internet, coupled with President Obama's Open Government Directive, has enabled the agency to reach for new frontiers in involving the public in its missions, collaborating with groups both internal and external, and opening its vast stores of data in the interest of transparency. Learn how NASA is leading the government in being a Gov 2.0 agency, and how you can participate in this exciting endeavor. Inspire, Educate and Innovation: Drive Mission Performance through Open Government Tactics: For the past several decades, several initiatives have strived to drive towards a more innovative and open government, including the reinventing government initiative, the e-government initiative and now the Open Government Initiative. We now have an unprecedented amount of web based tools that make that maturation more realistic and easier than ever before. This session will focus on the power of Open Government tactics to drive innovation within the mission of NASA, including prizes and competitions, online public dialogues and consultations, public private partnerships, data release and visualization, employee and stakeholder ideation initiatives, and many more. Learning from the lessons of other Federal Agencies as they have piloted various programs to create a culture of innovation within their walls and with their stakeholders, this session will highlight tactics that NASA programs may want to consider leveraging to drive mission performance. NASA is uniquely positioned in the Federal Government to inspire, educate and innovate-Open Government tactics can help NASA programs to achieve those goals more effectively and quickly.
Social technology tools are just that - tools. They are intended to facilitate group collaboration and communication. These tools by themselves won't make a team more effective, nor will they increase communication or collaboration. These tools, if not used correctly, can be mislabeled as inefficient, ineffective and a waste of time. However, in the hands of someone who knows how to integrate an online community with a real-life community, these tools can be powerful. In this session we will talk about the building blocks to create effective online communities - from the role of Community Managers and how to create targeted purposes, to community behaviors which will sink or elevate any community and what to do about them. We will answer the following questions, plus more: How targeted does a community's focus need to be? Why won't they come if I just build it? Do I wait for something to go viral or is there another secret? What factors affect the community's usage? What skill set should the facilitator have to lead the integration of social technologies? What type of education or marketing might have to be done within my group? Do internal communities follow the 90/9/1 rule? Do we allow anonymous use or force named use? Do we moderate content or leave contributions wide open? Are there any case studies of good integration of social technologies?
Max Peterson will discuss the future of technology and how organizations like NASA can leverage innovation to become more efficient and sustain the United States' leadership in space exploration. During his remarks, Max will highlight how an efficient IT strategy can offer unparalleled opportunities to empower NASA to deliver on the organization's core mission.
The Education BLAST OFF is an educational component bringing 300 young people into direct contact with leading edge computer technology. The education session will focus on innovative uses of technology in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Sponsoring organizations will each set up a learning environment showcasing the technologies they use to engage students. (For example, Raytheon, which has an ongoing initiative called "Math Moves You," will lead the math effort.) Students will be able to move among the presentations and speak directly with individuals who are trailblazers in their careers. IT leaders will discuss their responses to challenges during the lifelong journey to achieve their goals. In addition, the session will use Cisco's massive networking resources to create a large "telepresence" for the education session.
Infrastructure Automation is the critical tool required for success in the cloud at any scale. In this session, Jesse Robbins, cofounder of Opscode & chair of O'Reilly's Velocity web performance & operations conference, will explain what Infrastructure Automation is, how it works, and provide case studies of organizations using it.
How do you know if your cyber security program is healthy. Is passing audits and the absence of "bad news" enough. The cyber security team at the Department of Energy Hanford site has implemented a detailed set of cyber security metrics that provide significantly better insight into the performance of the program. In developing these metrics, the team reviewed metrics and metrics guidance from a number of sources and selected the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Consensus Metric Definitions as the starting point. This session will discuss our evaluation of various metrics standards, why we selected the CIS metrics, the issues we discovered during our feasibility study and the lessons learned for getting a metrics program off the ground. The target audience is security practitioners who are interested in the real-life experiences of peers who are attempting to develop usable, affordable and actionable security metrics.
As NASA's science, engineering and mission requirements increase in complexity, the need to work effectively across distances and disciplines is increasing. The NASA Astrobiology Institute is pioneering innovative uses of technology to host scientific meetings with no travel required. These "virtual" workshops integrate high definition videoconferencing, real-time meeting software, web sites, blogs and online surveys to support collaboration between researchers. Recent workshops had over 500 registrants and connected participants from 19 videoconferencing facilities and desktops around the world. One survey respondent wrote of the experience, "The energy, money and time savings of this method of scientific communication is spectacular. I believe it should be encouraged and expanded." This talk will address the technical and organizational infrastructures that support virtual conferences, share best practices in hosting these events and outline how NASA might take advantage of advances in technology to increase scientific insight and communication.
Open source, part philosophy and part pragmatic methodology, brings numerous benefits to NASA software projects, including increased software quality, reduced development costs, faster development cycles, and reduced barriers to public-private collaboration through new opportunities to commercialize NASA technology. This inherently transparent, participatory, and collaborative approach is revolutionizing the way software is created, improved, and used. Although open source release has already provided numerous benefits to NASA, the full benefits of open source can only be realized if NASA is able to establish the processes, policies, and culture needed to encourage and support open source development. This will require expanding open source activities beyond releasing software only after completion and finding new ways to support two-way collaboration with an open development community throughout the entire software lifecycle. NASA is currently developing software in collaboration with the public on a limited basis in projects such as the Nebula cloud computing initiative and low cost small satellite missions. This session will explore what NASA has accomplished to date regarding the Agency's foray into open source and provide honest discussion on what steps the Agency needs to take to fully embrace what open source can deliver.
Managers of software projects, especially non-flight or IT related projects, can often feel out of control when faced with NASA's tendency to creep requirements and change scope. Our complex and fast-paced environments present both common and unique challenges. How do you ensure support from your sponsors and commitment from your partners? How do you take advantage of new advanced technologies while leveraging your existing investments? Software processes are nothing new, but the novel application of those processes can lead to new and desirable results. At JPL, adopting an industry standard process has been fraught with hurtles but has had a great payoff. Now, the same process is used by experienced managers, early career hires, and even students. How can you manage a portfolio of over 40 active IT software projects using PMI (Project management Institute) techniques, Agile Methodologies, and ITIL compliance? How can the same process be used on massive projects as well as those costing as little as $10K? "JUMP. A Scalable, Successful Approach to Software Project Management" will explore the lessons learned and the pitfalls to avoid when answering these questions. We will give examples of the procedures, KPI, reviews, and other key aspects of this novel application of the standard RUP process. We'll also discuss the lessons learned, pitfalls, as well as real-world examples.
My boss told me it was impossible - so I made it anyway, and we sold $25 million worth of that video game. Another boss, a famous professor, would not even look at my prototype - even though it could solve one of our major problems - because he had not thought of it himself. Let's face it: innovators are trouble-makers. They don't do what they are told. They think they have a better idea. And they have passion for their idea. They frequently can't even explain the idea coherently, much less prove in advance that it will work. I have no idea how to tell you how to have good ideas. What I can tell you is that having good ideas will threaten some people, and they will try to shut you down. I have actually managed to see most of the ideas I really cared about through to some kind of completion: enough to see if they were any good. Perhaps my stories will give you some strategies for how to keep your own cherished (and potentially world-changing) idea from being crushed by Mr. Big.
The Education BLAST OFF is an educational component bringing 300 young people into direct contact with leading edge computer technology. The education session will focus on innovative uses of technology in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Sponsoring organizations will each set up a learning environment showcasing the technologies they use to engage students. (For example, Raytheon, which has an ongoing initiative called "Math Moves You," will lead the math effort.) Students will be able to move among the presentations and speak directly with individuals who are trailblazers in their careers. IT leaders will discuss their responses to challenges during the lifelong journey to achieve their goals. In addition, the session will use Cisco's massive networking resources to create a large "telepresence" for the education session.
This session is for employees from NASA and other federal agencies that are looking to augment their department's remote participation methods and practices. A variety of tools and tactics are available to create deeper engagement channels for your off-site team members to contribute to projects more fully. These tools can be combined in simple yet powerful ways on small projects and large conferences alike to achieve greater return on collaboration. Wayne Burke and Lucas Cioffi of the Open Forum Foundation will discuss the methods they are using to engage the record number of participants who signed up to attend this year's IT summit remotely. They will also share their lessons learned during the dozen workshops and summits they have designed and facilitated for federal government agencies. We believe the best way to learn about collaboration is to experience it, rather than merely listening to us talk about it; come prepared for an interactive session which will feature a collaborative exercise and an opportunity for you to share effective practices from your workplace with other participants.
Certification and Accreditation of information systems is an essential component of cybersecurity within the Federal sector. Unfortunately, the process has also become derided as "security theater," requiring volumes of paperwork to document a wide variety of controls without regard for the actual risk to the organization. Further, it is considered by many as inefficient, requiring duplicative efforts across agencies for nearly identical systems. The FedRAMP program attempts to address some of these issues by extending the inherent efficiencies of cloud computing to the C&A process. In this presentation, we will provide attendees with an overview of the push for cloud computing within the Federal sector, how the FedRAMP program supports this initiative, how FedRAMP is intended to function, and the impact of FedRAMP on agencies and vendors. We'll conclude with some thoughts on the efficiencies and shortcomings of the program.
Airborne networks and IP-based platforms present new attack vectors and new security challenges to the community. SC-216 and other industry groups have performed studies and exercises demonstrating the security challenged that these new systems present to the community. This demonstration illustrates some of the technologies that DISA is using to define a new approach to Cyber Security and provide situational awareness and security posture assessments for airborne networks. There are many different attack vectors for terrestrial networks, and as many counter-defense possibilities for modern Security Professionals and Operation Centers. However, there are several game changers as the community moves to airborne networking. The first challenge is that these IT systems are mission critical and ultimate failure can result in injury or death of the crew and passengers. The safety of individuals on the plane and in the path of planes must always be the first consideration. The second game changer is the tenuous connection back to the ground. Unlike reliable wired ground connections, air-ground and satellite links are susceptible to a large number of interferences and equipment malfunctions that make the connections to the Operation Center un-reliable as a primary means of detecting and combating attacks. The third game changer is the cost of having a subject matter expert on site. For terrestrial networks, SMEs are readily available, but it is prohibitively expensive to staff or retrain crews for information security proficiency. The fourth and final game changer is the relatively low turn-over/change rate of the most critical components of the aircraft. This approach to locking down and securing next generation IP-based platforms with an autonomous security platform is the only practical approach to meeting the challenges of the Next Gen aircraft. This presentation will include a commercial demonstration of the system that DISA is using to provide these services.
Achieving Transparency and Accountability through effective Data Governance: Financial transparency and program accountability mandated by the FFATA and GPRA Acts empower citizens with information about how their tax dollars are spent. Collecting information in relationship to contracts, grants, loans, and other types of spending provide a broader picture of NASA's spending. Linking these costs to program outcomes provide insight into performance. The ability to look at performance across NASA in greater detail is a key ingredient to building public trust and supporting transparency. However, in the current climate of the twenty-four (24) hour news-cycle, a small mistake in reporting erodes public trust and casts doubt upon transparency. Information needed to support this type of reporting is typically decentralized and stored in an array of stove piped systems managed by various business units - thus accurate reporting relies upon effective integration of data. To avoid factual errors resulting from improper integration, our research has shown most agencies need a Data Governance program with the authoritative mandates to address the sharing of data in a consistent manner. These programs typically include Master Data Management (MDM) strategies such as Metadata Management (e.g., Enterprise Data Dictionaries) that promote a shared understanding of strategic information. Over the past several years, NASA has embarked upon a number of Enterprise Data Warehouses and targeted Data Governance initiatives that address data management and integration. This presentation highlights the need for a comprehensive agency-wide focus on Data Governance that ensures financial and performance information provided to Citizens, Congress, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the White House and other interested parties is accurate, consistent across the organization, and reportable in a timely manner. Mission-Oriented and Cross-cutting Business Use Cases for Federal Cloud Deployments: Spurred by the Federal Cloud-First mandate in the OMB 25-Point IT Reform Plan and the subsequent release of Federal Cloud Computing Strategy; NIST and industry are actively engaged in the development of technical and cross-cutting business use cases for cloud computing. The NIST cross-cutting business use case development effort is identifying common business functions (such as records management, collaboration and visualization, analytics, search/retrieval, document management, messaging, e-mail, geospatial, etc.) that are amenable for development, implementation, and integration into one of the four (4) cloud deployment models (private, public, community, or hybrid). NIST and industry are recommending that cross-cutting use cases be implemented in a cloud where they make good business sense and can securely leverage the five (5) NIST cloud characteristics (e.g., on-demand self service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service). Cross-cutting business use cases are expected to be most applicable for agencies with the following mission characteristics: 1) Large-scale, public, info dissemination mission; 2) Cyclical and seasonal set of IT requirements; 3) Large databases and statistical responsibility requiring large-scale scientific computing resources (to largely be on standby); 4) Episodic requirements which can benefit from rapid, on-demand cloud provisioning (e.g., emergency management). 5) eGovernment applications. 6) Information gathering and situational awareness; 6) Well-defined communities with regulatory responsibility. and 7) Well-defined business functions that can be typically out-sourced. The presenter currently co-chairs the Cross-cutting Business Use Case Subcommittee supporting NIST. He will present the latest findings and recommendations for federal agency consideration in migrating to a cloud-first environment.
The heavy lifting of architecting, building, integrating, testing and deploying the technical solution is done. It's time to get the story out to drive user understanding and adoption. To stumble at this phase puts the impact of all the work that came before it at risk. This session focuses on best practices that drive communications objectives at every stage of the IT lifecycle -- to fuel momentum of technical innovation across the organization, and in doing so elevating the profile of the talent behind it. The session will examine: How to craft the story: tips on how pulling together the story to make it memorable, engaging and actionable. How to drive adoption of it: leveraging traditional communications channels and putting organizational communications infrastructures to work for you. Pushing the story to social spaces: building a community around the program to create ripple effects in social spaces. Putting the people behind the story forward: elevating the profile the teams behind the innovation to drive greater adoption.
This session will describe three research threads that investigate how software tools can increase the quality of people's creative work, especially interface design and programming. The first explores leveraging online examples of creative work to empower more users to design new user interfaces and software programs, learners to acquire new skills, experts to be more creative, and programmers to engage in more design thinking. The second introduces techniques for designers to rapidly create novel user interfaces, explore more alternatives, and revise prototypes based on feedback. The third explores the psychological and social ingredients of design excellence; focusing on the role of alternatives and prototyping.
August 15, 2011
To all 2011 Summit Participants,
I’m pleased to welcome you to the Second NASA IT Summit. After the initial summit last summer, we decided that bringing together the IT leaders and professionals of NASA, our industry partners, other government agencies and outside experts was a terrific catalyst for boosting NASA’s IT progress. We expect even more synergy this year.
NASA faces new and changing conditions all the time. That’s what we do. As the Space Shuttle Program ends, we turn vigorously to the missions of tomorrow – the exploration of deep space; landing humans on Mars; spurring private enterprise to develop new vehicles to reach low Earth orbit; exploring our solar system and the cosmos beyond. In brief, we are committed to winning the future in space.
I know that NASA’s Chief Information Officer, Linda Cureton, and her colleagues have planned many informational workshops, presentations and demonstrations for you. I trust that you’ll have a rewarding time and leave the summit with renewed determination to make IT at NASA truly stellar.
Charles F. Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
Dear friends and colleagues,
Welcome! I greet you with an official welcome to the second NASA IT Summit, San Francisco, and to two and a half days that I’m positive will be enjoyable and enlightening, and will advance your understanding and practice of information technology.
For many of us, this will be a chance to see old friends and colleagues. For many more, it will be a terrific opportunity to establish new networks that will further facilitate our professional development and our public service in the years ahead.
This message is the first time—and it won’t be the last—that I can before a wide audience thank some of the many people whose hard work and dedication have made this Summit possible. Deserving top billing are the two co-chairs of the Summit: Karen Harper and Lula Wright, who have devoted so much time, thought and energy to pulling together all the strands of this event. And the members of the IT Summit Steering Committee, who have joined from every NASA Center to make this event happen, deserve gratitude and appreciation. Beyond a doubt, I thank NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, and the NASA CIO community, who have made available the resources, the people power and the logistical and moral support to scale the Summit. And a special shoutout to the folks at NASA’s Ames Research Center right down the road, near Mountain View in Silicon Valley, California. They have supplied valuable local contacts, know-how, practical support and “boots on the ground.”
I can assure you that the Summit we are about to attend will be both enjoyable and valuable. It will include cutting-edge perspectives on the future of IT. It will include some of the biggest and most influential firms in the worlds of hardware, software, and whatever comes next - and you know who they are. It will foster talks by brilliant innovators and business leaders and will feature a major track on education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). So when you see lots of young people at the Education Blast Off component, you’ll know they’re here both to learn and bring a youthful perspective to this event.
Immediately following the Summit proper, there will be a TEDxNASA event - kind of the icing on the cake - where both Summit attendees and others will brainstorm about greening the future. Beyond that, many NASA folks will be meeting in working groups to plan activities for the coming year.
So once again, I extend a hearty welcome and thank you for attending. Be productive, meet some great people, get out and ride a San Francisco cable car, and have a wonderful Summit!
Dear friends and colleagues,
Welcome to the second NASA IT Summit, where our focus is collaboration and innovation, and our theme is "Making IT Stellar at NASA." We strive to gather not just an individual IT community to share and exchange ideas. Rather, we seek a holistic approach to achieving the goals of IT. To that end, we welcome our partners in education, diversity, inclusion, workforce strategic planning, people skill building and leadership, who have come to share in this experience and contribute toward making this gathering a well-rounded experience for all participants.
Our first summit, held at the Gaylord National Harbor in Maryland in 2010, was a tremendous success. As the IT Summit Steering Committee began work on our second summit, we listened to your comments and suggestions and, as a result, we made changes. We’re confident that our program will satisfy the avid demands of our participants. Each hour is filled with attention-grabbing topics that are sure to make your task of selecting a session extremely difficult.
In a world driven by technology and the digital revolution, we hope our conference far exceeds your expectations. After last year’s successful Summit, the bar has been raised. However, the IT Summit Steering Committee accepted the challenge of continuing the momentum from the inaugural Summit.
We are also delighted that the first TEDxNASA event on the West Coast will take place at the conclusion of the IT Summit. TEDxNASA@SiliconValley 2011, with the theme "Extreme Green," will bring together thought leaders from a variety of disciplines to provide a unique opportunity for the exchange of game-changing ideas. The IT Summit fully supports TEDx’s green initiative. For example, we’re saving paper by making the IT Summit Program Book available only online.
The Summit provides a unique opportunity to honor NASA’s people for Excellence in Customer Service, Excellence in Leadership, Excellence in IT Security, Excellence in Team Achievement, Excellence in Innovation and Excellence in Infrastructure and Cost Savings. Last year, nominations were available only for civil servants. Based on your feedback, NASA contractors are included in this year’s award competition. The IT Summit Awards Luncheon at 11:45 August 17 will be a special time to recognize IT professionals for their outstanding achievements and contributions.
Enjoy the IT Summit. If you have questions, concerns or comments, please email either of us directly at Karen.L.Harper@nasa.gov or Lula.L.Wright@nasa.gov.
And please enjoy the WiFi.
Sincerely,
Karen L. Harper and Lula L. Wright
Co-Chairs
