A Nation of the People and IP Addresses

CIO Insight predicts top '07 IT trends

CIO Insight publishes its top trends for 2007, broken into four areas - strategy, management, security and technology.

Topping the management list was the belief that lines between business and IT will continue to blur. As for security, the experts saw no decline in the number of threats facing the information technology enterprise.

Business process improvement and service oriented architectures were the top trends on the strategy and technology lists, respectively.

The web site publishes some push back here, including agreement that one crucial trend was overlooked: how to find and keep good IT employees.

NASCIO releases state health IT report

NASCIO has just released a compendium of state health IT efforts. Listed for each state, according to the introduction on the association's publications page, are standard descriptions, ranging from executive orders to legislative-driven initiatives to public/private or public/non-profit partnerships.

Gartner to IT: Give up some control

According to Government Technology, Gartner is calling on IT departments to give up some control:

Speaking at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo in Cannes, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research at Gartner explained that while many of IT's responsibilities are still mission critical, IT organizations need to bend to the realities of and opportunities associated with consumer, Internet and fast-emerging technologies if their businesses are to prosper.

'Without a doubt, consumerization is the single most significant trend impacting IT in the next ten years,' said Sondergaard. 'However, it is not really about new technologies -- virtually all of them are available today. It is about attitudes towards and usage of technology. There is a societal shift taking place which, when combined with access to and acceptance of newly affordable technology, is driving change in usage and the business model. Companies will have to come to terms with a fundamental change in traditional business models and drivers.'

GovTech: Strategic Progress in New York

Government Technology reports on New York's progress implementing its 2006 strategic plan. Part of the progress includes a new, fully funded data center. The article also provides some added information on the planned statewide public safety wireless network and VoIP telephony.

CIOs pursue Capitol agenda

According to Government Technology, state government CIOs visited Washington recently during the NASCIOs sixth-annual D.C. fly-in. One of the issues on the agenda was federal funding complexities. The group has just published a call to action on the issue, States Need Reform in Federal IT Funding:

Currently, the general guidelines attached to federal programmatic funding do not promote enterprise IT shared solutions, infrastructure optimization or the integrated channels of services sought by citizens. The state IT landscape has changed significantly, yet federal grant funding guidelines do not reflect this new environment. As millions of new federal dollars are spent on IT that supports human services, public health, justice and homeland security, a change in attitude toward enterprise IT solutions and flexible commingling guidelines with specific cost-allocation options could greatly improve the return on every federal dollar spent on information systems in the states.

According to Doug Robinson, executive director for NASCIO, "A total of 36 separate meetings were held. Of those, 30 were with Members of Congress or their staffs, 4 were with federal agencies..."

The organization also recently published this brief on the position of chief information security officer (CISO) and will likely follow up with a survey.

Massachusetts still on open source track

Peter Quinn may have left his position as the CIO for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but the cause for which he may be most remembered lives on. CIO since January, Louis Gutierrez, according to Government Technology's Public CIO, is backing the OpenDocument push too.

Tod Newcombe, writing in Chief Information Blog:

'Our action is to do what we are doing right now, which is working toward the goal. We believe in the utility of open standards,' Gutierrez told News.com. His stance comes in spite of a report that heavily criticized the process behind the decision by the Information Technology Division (ITD) to standardize the state government on the OpenDocument format by January 2007.

Microsoft's Office application will not support OpenDocument in its 2007 release. IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems, however, back the competing OpenDocument standard.

But rather than remove MS Office from the commonwealth's computers, ITD is looking at an Office plug-in that would permit employees to save and circulate documents in the OpenDocument format, according to Newcombe's blog post "Open Mass."

While the issue may be in flux, there is one development could tip the scales back toward the status quo. A new governor will be elected in November.

Public SIP Telephone Network

I keep writing about WiFi phones while wondering when they'll move beyond mere curiosities. This Om Malik post, which displays a new clam shell WiFi phone from D-Link, also introduced me to a new term, "PsipTN," that may hold part of the answer.

PsipTN stands for "Public SIP Telephone Network," a "global IP network capable of carrying voice, media, contents and a variety of hosted services while providing interoperability with all PsipTN Ready hardware IP end points and soft clients." The network is maintained by contributing members of PsipTN.org.

It's part of the emerging fixed-mobile environment. British Telecom launched a related service in June, BT Fusion.

NASTD members may download a recent presentation at the Western region meeting on the subject of fixed-mobile convergence here.

Earthlink WiFi phone?

Over at Om Malik's blog, Katie Fehrenbacher writes than in addition to developing muni-broadband networks, Earthlink is planning a WiFi-only phone. The company plans to sell voice and data subscriptions.

"Netroots" changing telecom lobbying game?

CIO Insight takes note of the so-called "netroots" action in favor of network neutrality, suggesting that the grassroots movement might be changing the nature of the lobbying game.

House votes down network neutrality

The House has voted down network neutrality in a 269-152 vote, according to Computerworld.