Previous ITC Educational Agenda

Note: All Educational Sessions are presented at no cost to government employees.

First Day KEYNOTE ADDRESS

December 5, 2007

Changing the World: The Future of Technology

Key Note Presenter: Robert H. Samson
Vice President
World Wide System Sales
Systems and Technology Group

Abstract

The complexity of today’s world of porous borders, stagnant economies, new superpowers, threats of global terrorism, and disease outbreaks mandate that governments and institutions innovate and collaborate to find new solutions. They need to harness new technologies – supercomputing, embedded devices, open source, grid computing – to meet our greatest challenges. Some of these challenges include: an aging population and workforce… security… national/state/local competitiveness…and the expectations of educated consumers, and increasing financial pressures.

The innovative use of technology is changing the world. It’s changing the way we do business, it’s creating new economic opportunities, and it’s changing the way we fight disease…the way we fight crime on main street and fraud on Wall Street…the way customers connect with products and products connect with suppliers…the way we heighten our knowledge of the atmosphere and probe deeper into our planet’s core…and the way we address our energy needs and environmental issues.

The solutions to today’s critical issues in the delivery of water, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, space exploration and education are realistically in sight. The discontinuities we have witnessed in information technology have set the stage for the dramatic changes ahead for the public sector.

There are three key areas where innovative technology is changing the way government serves its citizens. First, changes brought about by the Internet and discontinuities of technology are making governments more citizen-centric. As a result, we will see new, faster and easier ways for government to meet the expanding needs of citizens. Second, we will see new and innovative ways for government to facilitate collaboration between the public and private sector to help businesses expand into new markets. And third, citizens have increased security demands, not just regarding borders and ports and customs, but also
for safe and secure IT infrastructures. In response, governments are increasingly seeking more innovative ways to meet these demands.

In healthcare, one of the most critical areas of change that is taking place is the move toward electronic medical records. Another critical area where we will see major change in the coming years is in health and wellness management.
There will be greater – and much needed — collaboration among health plans, governments, pharmaceutical companies and providers. There will be more biosurveillance and strategic incident management systems established to monitor the spread of disease and protect the public.

In education, more and more schools and universities will be developing On Demand environments built on open standards that enable easier and faster access to applications. Now teachers, administrators, students and parents can easily communicate and collaborate with each other across the network.

There are other important areas of technology that will have an impact on both the public and private sectors and they include: fighting and preventing crime… protecting the environment…doing business differently which includes technologies that foster greater collaboration…nanotechnology which is revolutionizing the electronics industry…

We are living in an unprecedented time. The information technology industry continues to accelerate at a faster and faster pace. And when government and businesses use the right technology innovatively – innovation that matters -- they develop products and business solutions that are changing the world in ways we could only have dreamed about a few years ago.

2nd Day KEYNOTE ADDRESS

December 6, 2007

“Use Quantitative Risk Metrics to
Help Improve Security and IT Efficiency”

Key Note Presenter: Peter Tippett
Vice President for Research and Intelligence
for Verizon Business Security Solutions,
powered by Cybertrust
and the Chief Scientist of ICSA Labs.

Keynote Discussion

Dr. Tippett will present recent data from Verizon Business’ Network, Underground, Labs, and Risk Intelligence operations, and will show how enterprises can get more information security “bang for the buck.” He will describe the common logic errors, organizational issues, compliance drivers and market issues that often lead enterprises to do unnecessary and ill-advised information security work while missing out on “low-hanging fruit” countermeasures, processes, and technologies that can get the job done.

Dr. Tippett will provide a pragmatic discussion that highlights significant data collection, analysis and intelligence operations in seven main areas:
1. Threat and Vulnerability Intelligence
2. Underground Intelligence
3. ICSA Labs Intelligence
4. Forensics Intelligence
5. MSS Intelligence
6. Network Intelligence
7. Risk Intelligence

Web 2.0 - A New World of Communications
and Collaboration

Presenter: JR Magee
Cisco Unified Communications
for Cisco

We are on the cusp of a new era where the Internet is transforming organizations large and small, and creating an entirely new environment for today’s workforce to communicate, collaborate and achieve. A new era of economic growth, productivity and Internet-driven collaboration technologies are at the core of this transformation. Changing the very nature of work, these technologies are driving the rapid evolution of the workspace, where the desktop is complemented, and in some cases replaced, by smart phones and devices driven by a network-based platform.
As the value of information technology moves from the edge of the network into the core we will see a corresponding transition from transactional communications like phone calls and email to continuous collaborative experiences, similar to today’s social networking. Not only do we now expect to be able to connect to everyone from everywhere through every device—we expect it to be seamless, secure and simple. The intelligent network is what is making this possible.

Collaboration is the future. It is about what we can do together. And collaboration within and between organizations worldwide is accelerating. It is enabled by technology and a change in behavior. Geographically dispersed, cross-functional teams create a virtual boundary-free workspace to capture new opportunities created with consumer and providers from around the world. Investments in unified communications help people work together more efficiently. In particular, collaborative, information search and communications technologies fuel productivity by giving employees ready access to relevant information. Organizations are flatter and more decentralized. At the heart of these changes is the simple premise of connections and information.

Once upon a time, e-commerce and e-operations drove the Internet debate, but now it’s clear we have entered the second phase of the Internet. Although collaborative technologies and ‘Web 2.0’ have been around for many years, employing them throughout entire organizations will deliver a new generation of productivity and growth.

The Ultimate Leverage: Effective Use of
Shared Services

Presenter: Susan Hogan
Principal
for Deloitte Consulting

Presenter: Neil Brown
Director
for Deloitte Consulting

In a time of stringent budgets and a desire to be prudent with taxpayer money, government agencies are under pressure to look for ways to improve the productivity of their information technology services. Additionally, in order to meet the service demands of the modern citizen, it is imperative that government IT organizations be able to develop, deploy and maintain leading-edge applications. Of course this requires access to highly skilled specific, and sometimes scarce, technical skills. One of the ways to manage this issue is through an effective shared services model. Shared services is an organizational strategy to eliminate redundancy and optimize efficiency through the virtual or physical centralization of support resources with a focus of deploying these skills across several initiatives. Benefits from a shared services model include improved ability to leverage scale, enhanced service quality and consistent process, standards, and checks to improve internal controls and staffing flexibility. Ultimately, shared services enables you to deploy your resources, both people and money, on the most productive processes. Through the sharing of case studies and key findings from Deloitte Consulting’s 2007 Global Shared Services survey you will learn:

1) What shared services is and various technology service delivery models
2) The business case for shared services
3) Creating a shared services environment
4) How to best integrate shared services within your organization
5) The mistakes made by others

Security in a World of Windows

Presenter: Pete Nash
Chief Security Advisor
for Microsoft State and Local Government

This security briefing is intended to examine the changing role of patch management in the enterprise. We also will provide an update on investments being made by Microsoft to help you move beyond patching to a true layered security model.

NOTE: This presentation is intended to be non-product focused. While products or technologies are used as examples, it is very clear many alternatives exist to each. As well, 90% of the technologies used as examples are either a) free downloads or b) included in the Windows platform (like IPSec). The remaining 10% are future products whose pricing is TBD or about which we get many customer inquiries (i.e. our A/V strategy)

Agenda
1. Overall security and risk management framework

2. System integrity
a. Security Development Lifecycle
b. Patch management

3. Identity management
a. Trustworthy Identity
b. Metadirectory
c. Rights Management Services

4. Client protection
a. Anti-spyware
b. Anti-virus and spam

5. Server protection

6. Network protection
a. IPSec network segmentation
b. Network Access Protection

7. Summary, Q&A.

Intelligent Video Surveillance and
Identification Applications of the Future

Presenter: Edwin K. (Ed) Schaffner
Global Director, Physical Security Solutions
Unisys Corporation

Abstract

Identity is the core of any security solution. Since 9/11, governments, industry and academia have invested enormous sums into the development of new technologies to identify people. Their investments are paying off with rapid advancements in biometric technologies and related applications. From border and access control to the detection of criminal activity and the identification of the perpetrators, biometrics, video analytics and other high-tech solutions are quickly becoming the security tools of choice for creating a safer, more secure world. This presentation examines several advanced security applications of biometrics in intelligent video surveillance and alerting, identification and verification of identity, criminal investigation, and access control. It will provide the audience with an overview of recent advancements and a look at the future.

Performance Management in Government

Presenter: Barbara Brucker
Business Intelligence Architect
for Microsoft

Performance Management allows Government officials to monitor, analyze, and plan their business as well as drive alignment, accountability, and actionable insight across the organization.

Business executives can drive accountability and alignment across and up-and-down the organization.
Information workers can monitor, analyze, and plan activities with an integrated and collaborative solution.
IT managers can drive better adoption and compliance by enabling organizations to better associate business intelligence and corporate performance.
This session on Performance Management including scorecards, dashboards, management reporting, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation.

Performance Management provides Government officials with critical visibility into the factors impacting their business, allowing them to make decisions and take actions that drive better business outcomes. Performance Management empowers the broadest number of employees—executives, managers, and front-line employees—to contribute to plans and have better access to tailored information, helping them take actions that improve citizen relationships, reduce costs, and increase services. Progress can be monitored and analyzed through personalized scorecards through the familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office environment.

Integrated performance management - provides all of the functionality that is needed in a single, integrated application including scorecards, dashboards, management reporting, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation. With performance management, Governments can better understand variances between plan and actual, quickly analyze root-causes, and recast plans when necessary. Business users shape their plans the way they think about their business. Performance Management can help business users with the ability to define, modify, and maintain their plans easily. The application handles the sophistication of the company business processes (rules, logic, calculations, and workflows) while helping more users contribute to the performance management process.
This session will also focus on:
Flexibility to handle complex environments. Use a model-driven approach to make it easier to create corporate models for scorecards, analytics, and plans that can also be used for departmental-level performance management. Provide synchronized models up and down the organization as well as across departments, users can more easily get a consistent view of organizational performance.
Reducing complexity for IT and for the business. Enable Governments to broadly deliver performance management across the organization by rapidly bringing together the power of Microsoft Office and the performance, scalability, and security of common databases. also helps IT better support corporate governance through the ability the audit the performance management process as well as control versions and report on the processes.

The Future of RFID

Presented by: Jeffrey Irland
Unisys, Director
Enterprise Security Initiatives

Abstract
As if on a rollercoaster, RFID rocketed from relative obscurity to piquing absurd expectations to being declared a failure in recent years. The reality is that use of RFID has been steadily growing for more than 40 years and its prospects for future growth are tremendous. In this presentation, I will show how RFID is used today and what’s emerging for the public sector, including valuable new applications for establishing security credentials, tracking and managing high value assets (vehicles, PCs, servers, etc…) and supporting emergency management processes.

How To Set-Up a PMO

Presenter: Karen Sarabok
Principal Consultant, Owner
for Momentum

Presenter: Emily Iem
Senior Consultant
for Momentum

ABSTRACT
The increasing complexity of the business world necessitates an ability to coordinate, manage, and report on activities across the enterprise. There is a predictable course of growth for any organization: The number of initiatives increases. These initiatives begin to be dealt with in terms of projects (initiatives that deliver a single unique product or service) or projects (efforts impacting a number of business units and delivering a strategic business objective). The need to deliver these initiatives efficiently and effectively increases. Being able to manage these projects and projects individually is challenging enough, let alone managing across several projects and projects, many of which rely on the same subject matter experts and affect the same functional areas within the organization.

Coordination of projects and projects is only part of the battle to keep an organization competitive in today's marketplace. It is also critical to be aware of all of the projects and projects underway, as well as each one’s relative health. The organization must ensure that the most important projects and projects—those that best deliver value—have priority access to the necessary resources and will produce results within an appropriate timeframe.

Enterprise project management means managing all initiatives that are not part of day-to-day operations as projects or projects, as well as establishing the infrastructure and culture necessary to do so. That infrastructure is the project management office, a business unit focused on the efficient management of projects and projects within the enterprise. A project management office, in its most mature form, enables the enterprise to coordinate, analyze, report, and support its various projects and projects with the appropriate tools, techniques, training, coaching, and guidance.

The implementation of enterprise project management is a substantial undertaking, and it is essential to remember that all change, especially change involving the entire organization, takes time. The establishment of the infrastructure necessary to support this endeavor—the project management office—is only part of the solution. The organization must be prepared to allow its culture to evolve and to do business in a different way in order to succeed.

End to End Security for Devlopers

Tyler Muth, Solution Architect
Oracle Public Sector

Abstract
Given the number of recent security breaches, security is one of the most important concerns in the IT world today. Security cannot be defined by a feature or a product, it's a mindset that needs to be applied to all levels of critical IT sytems. This session will cover many aspects of security, including: physical security, social engineering, database defense-in-depth, web security, and identity preservation. More specific examples will focus on encrypting data on disk, securing data in the database, and web security including SQL Injection. These examples will use Oracle technology, but most of the concepts are broadly applicable to other popular database and web architectures.

Transform Citizen Services
with Electronic Government

Presenter: Dan Gilbert
Client Industry Executive
for EDS

Presenter: John Sindelar
Client Industry Executive
for EDS

Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sindelar will address the implementation of electronic government as a key strategy in delivering more effective, efficient and transparent government services to citizens worldwide.

Mr. Gilbert has helped governments around the world develop or improve their service strategy including Belgium, Canada, China, Italy, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States. Specifically, he will discuss citizen-centric government, the ability to improve public services while making more effective service decisions, the assessment of public value, and information technology’s role in government service transformation. He will discuss global trends in the citizen service market and the emphasis different governments place on IT-enabled transformation based on their policy agenda.

Mr. Sindelar joined EDS after 27 years in the General Services Administration, and working with the Office of Management and Budget, was a leader in helping to develop and implement federal policies key to the implementation of electronic government from 2001 to 2006. He will discuss policy development and electronic government implementation at the federal level that has particular significance for state and local governments needing to cut costs and increase effectiveness. He will provide an outlook for the future of electronic government efforts including the drive to create a shared service environment for common business processes through the effective use of technology.

From Here to There: Virtually
How to Transform Your Business
into a Virtualized Enterprise

Presenter: Stewart Hair
Managing Director, Infrastructure Services
for EDS Data Center Services

Transforming your business to the virtualized enterprise requires planning and consideration of your risks and the benefits. With each aspect of your business, what adjustments need to take place? What are the financial, cultural, server operational support modeling and tooling changes that you need to consider to get that holistic view of your transformation? In today’s presentation, we will discuss benefits and risks in each area as well as the needed adjustments to the conventional model that will provide you with a stronger view of what to consider when moving to the virtualized enterprise.

The Business Value of IT

Presenter: Guy Cavallo
Government Technology Advisor
for Microsoft State and Local Government

Description

Companies today realize there has never been a greater need for IT to become –and be seen as a true asset that delivers ongoing business value. Software has moved from not only being a tool to help people communicate and work better together, but a platform that connects people with the information and business processes they need to make better decisions. In this session Guy Cavallo will discuss the importance of IT delivering value to information. The demands upon IT’s resources seem to be never ending, yet while IT works harder the level of departmental dissatisfaction with IT’s services continues to rise! When IT is considered a cost center vs. a strategic partner – you will constantly find yourself facing this battle. To become a strategic partner IT must move from the role of being just a backlogged department to building strong business ties with each operating department. This session will highlight how to maximize the business value that IT brings to your organization, along with a look at current industry trends and how to select the ones that will have the largest positive impact on government service delivery.

This session will highlight how to maximize the business value that IT brings to your organization, including key areas such as:

IT Governance
Should you be a “ Green IT”
Outsourcing
ITIL and other Methodologies
IT and Government Performance Management
Impact of Industry Trends

Each one of these areas can will impact the organization’s perception of IT services, so planning and preparing for the future will go a long way in demonstrating the business value that IT brings to your government organization.

Implementing New Technologies:
Bringing Your County Office into the Twenty-first Century

Presenter: Bill Welge
President and COO
RecordFusion

Abstract
This presentation will provide information on how to enhance your office by using new records management technologies to improve efficiencies and increase effectiveness.

You Will Learn How To:

Incorporate state-of-the-art tools such as automatic and advanced indexing, optical character recognition / intelligent character recognition (OCR/ICR), redaction, electronic recording and electronic certification.

Streamline daily workflows with record management software. Use workflow technologies to transform paper-based processes into efficient, cost-effective electronic processes

Build in checks and balances to improve record accuracy and decrease fraud

Offer enhanced methods of record searching both in your office and online

Increase your revenue stream by offering constituents online services and give the public direct access to view important records

Hope for the best but prepare for the worst with a comprehensive disaster prevention and recovery plan

Who Should Attend:

This seminar will be valuable to any county official or staff member who is looking to improve their office process. We will address the needs of Recorders of Deeds, Registers of Wills, County Clerks, Clerks of Court, Assessors, Treasurers, and other officials who are seeking to automate their records management workflow.

IT Performance Metrics

Presenter: Steve Clay
Principal Consultant, Owner
for Momentum

Presenter: Bari Dzomba
MSIS, CCSPA, Senior Consultant
for Momentum

ABSTRACT
Whether in the private or public sector, organizations in today’s era of accelerated change need to increase their pace of decision-making and to ensure that their decisions are achieving continuous improvement toward strategic goals. Decisions need to be articulated by unambiguous objectives and well-defined measures need to quantitatively demonstrate progress against those objectives.
IT Performance Metrics is a primer in the terminology of metrics, the characteristics, selection and collection of performance measures and the metrics development process within IT services organizations. With effective implementation of the concepts presented, agencies can demonstrate increased mission effectiveness, efficiency and accountability.

Constituent Relationship Management

Presenter: Tammy Zeoli
Manager, Integrated Technology Solutions Group
for RSM McGladrey, Inc.

Presenter: Michele Juliana
Business Development Manager, Integrated Technology Solutions Group
for RSM McGladrey, Inc.

State and local government agencies know that tax payers and voters are keeping close watch on them. That's what makes working in local government so rewarding. But it also creates challenges as agencies try to keep in touch with constituents (who want fast results) while delivering the most services for the fewest tax dollars.
Citizen/Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) tools offers local government a powerful, affordable way to build closer relations with constituents while driving greater efficiency. All by using processes similar to those widely adopted in the private sector.

This session will cover tools and processes that offer powerful and flexible help for important tasks such as contacting constituents, license and permit processing, grant writing, economic development, and more.
CRM solutions for government
Here is a sampling of these solutions:

CRM
Correspondence and targeted outreach management Organize and track the handling, delivery, and storage of electronic messages from your constituents and within your offices. Improve outreach awareness and service while trimming costs and boosting citizen satisfaction through constituent segmentation and targeted campaigns.
311 Call center management Ease frustration by giving your employees quick, reliable access to the critical information and tools they need to address caller inquiries. Reduce costs through caller self-service options, consolidated customer information from disparate enterprise systems, and automation.

Case and contract management Route case assignments quickly and assign them to appropriate case workers. Streamline the evaluation process by electronically storing forms, applicant histories, past agency actions, and more.
Citizen contact and issue management Service constituents more effectively through better collaboration across city, county, and state government boundaries.
Grant management Simplify grant processing with a standardized, electronic system that follows all legislative grant management directives and provides streamlined access to important information.

Utilizing Workflow to
Improve Business Process Efficiency

Presenter: Scott McCabe
Chief Operating Officer
for IMR

Presenter: Mike Bilardo
Director Government Solutions
for Hyland Software

Synopsis:
This presentation will provide information on how to implement a successful business process analysis for the purpose of improving a business process to improve efficiency, costs and constituent services.

This presentation will focus on how to use Workflow technologies to transform old, paper based processes into new efficient, lean, electronic based processes. We will walk through several examples used throughout government and define areas where workflow can be used to streamline the process. We will examine the critical components of a successful workflow deployment and discuss the core elements of business process automation. We will discuss real case studies where government entities have been successful in implementing this technology to realize real tangible benefits for their organization.

What you will learn:
1. What is workflow and why it is a critical part of an ECM solution
2. Common business problems without workflow
3. How workflow can used to automate, streamline and expedite business processes.
4. Key business and organizational benefits of workflow.
5. What is Business process Automation and Business Process management and how to start a Business Process evaluation in your organization?
6. Key components of a successful business process analysis and workflow deployment.

Who Should attend:
This information will be valuable for any organization looking to evaluate their business processes with the intention of implementing a successful business automation program. Anyone looking to realize the extraordinary value of business process re-engineering and how it can truly change the way you do business.

Next Generation Servers

Presenter: Dr. Bernard S. Meyerson
IBM Fellow
VP Strategic Alliances and CTO
IBM Systems and Technology Group

Future generations of servers must address a multitude of emerging customer needs. Among these are the accelerating demands for capacity, growing complexity of distributed environments, shortages of space, power and cooling and increased staffing demands in a market competing for limited skilled resources. The unprecedented growth and complexity of applications and data will require continued improvements in price and performance and IT infrastructures that can be more easily managed and sustained over time. Future platforms must further enable the consolidation and Virtualization of data and computing resources to drive capacity utilization far beyond today's levels, some as low as 10% for servers. For a broad range of applications, suppliers and customers must embrace a transition to open Linux hosting environments to leverage cost improvements while achieving enhanced security, virtually limitless scalability, and enterprise-class capabilities. This transition is well on its way. Accomplishing these priorities will require dramatic investments in research, creation of more self-managing and self-healing system technologies, and development of new skills and thinking to support and exploit what is coming at a very fast pace. Will you be ready?

The Green Data Center

Presenter: Steve Sams
Vice President, Global Site and Facilities Service
for IBM Corporation

Energy consumption in data centers has doubled in the past 5 years. Despite efforts to consolidate, industry server and storage shipments are projected to increase dramatically in
the next decade. Business drivers such as compliance tracking, email archiving, data warehousing, business intelligence and legacy system replacements have fueled the growth of
enterprise class servers and storage subsystems. While much more efficient than the technology they replace, today's and tomorrow's systems will require significant resources for power and cooling that must be planned for and have practical limits to their availability. In just about every data center or server farm, electrical and cooling systems must be upgraded to meet this demand. This session will outline current best practices and industry trends for planning and building scalable, efficient, "green" facilities that will enable consolidation and reduce operating costs.

Why Virtual Client

Presenter: Naresh Malik
IBM Global Technology Services
Integration Sales Leader, End User Services
Workplace Optimization Consulting Services

Adoption of server based client computing can provide the Commonwealth and other organizations with many benefits. Virtual Client Solutions can immediately improve system
security by removing most data and hard drives to a data center environment you control. The
traditional desktop replacement cycle and process completely changes as does the traditional
role of desk side support. Availability and administrative efficiency improves as can the
serviceability of user devices that may be installed over a wide geography. Most customers
today are aware of the benefits of virtualization and have deployed it in their data centers.
Now, these virtualization technologies are being deployed in new ways to address client based
computing. Find out where Virtual Client computing can work for you.

Enhancing Application Delivery and Performance in a Shared Services Environment

Presenter: Parish Lathi
Application Networking and Datacenter Specialist
for Cisco

Organizations face growing challenges as they continue to modify and develop new applications to keep pace with changing business processes and regulatory requirements. Influential trends including globalization, shared services, virtualization, identity/intellectual property theft, service oriented architectures and web-based applications are changing the way applications and infrastructure need to be architected.

In this environment, organizations are increasingly concerned about performance, availability, security and total cost of ownership related to managing a growing portfolio of applications. As your workforce continues to become more distributed, staying connected and delivering application performance across wide area networks can become increasingly difficult and expensive. As you centralize applications, compute and storage resources to reduce capital expenses, ensuring service and business continuity is critical. Increasingly sophisticated threats demand protection be engineered into the application architecture. And IT organizations have to perform these functions with little to no increase in cost.

As applications grow more complex, organizations are seeking new avenues to deliver greater flexibility, scale and performance while developing best practices around infrastructure-application integration. Managing today's complex application and network deployments requires a range of solutions that provide application-to-application integration and application-to-client delivery and optimization. Like most public sector entities, it's likely that you are struggling to keep up with the demands of today's business models, including:

Increased use of the Web to access customized information
Consolidation of data centers for compliance and cost control
Distributed organizations needing secure, fast access to corporate data
Growing complexity of application infrastructure required to support more complex application deployments
The need to improve scalability, availability, performance, and security of applications without disrupting operations

The network can alleviate these problems by improving the way content is delivered or by offloading functions that previously lived within the applications. With shared services environments you can deliver, secure, and optimize applications to run across networks, integrating systems that were not designed to work together.

This session will focus on how a new generation application infrastructure can benefit both the data center and the remote office by:

Reducing costs through resource optimization
Enhancing productivity by delivering superior application performance for all users
Accessing centrally hosted applications, servers, storage, and rich media in a common managed form
Enabling LAN-like performance across wide area links to support video streaming, software distribution
Delivering higher levels of security across the application and network infrastructures

PA-STARNet: Pennsylvania’s Radio Network
the Next Generation of Public Safety Communications

Presenter: Charles Brennan
Deputy Secretary for Public Safety Radio
Office of Public Safety Radio (OPRS)
Governor's Office of Administration
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Abstract

The Pennsylvania Statewide Radio Network, PA-STARNet, is an IP-based wireless network for both voice and data communications serving commonwealth government and Pennsylvania’s emergency response community. PA-STARNet today offers radio coverage over more than 91% of the state. The system will eventually serve both as the primary means of radio communication for every major state agency, and as the backbone for state and county interoperable communication during emergencies.
The presentation focuses on progress in the development and use of this important public safety asset. It includes information about agenciy use, data applications running on the network, and plans for the future. It includes as well an account of how PA-STARNet increasingly serves Pennsylvania counties and Regional Counter-Terrorism Task Forces for interoperable communication with state government.

Project Delivery Excellence
A Practical Program for Continuous Improvement

Presenter: Nidhi Srivastava
Director - Quality
for TATA Consultancy Services Limited

Government at all levels (Federal, State, and Local) is concerned about timely and successful implementation of their information technology projects. In the past few years, many government agencies have identified a lack of qualified project managers as one cause of project failures. Poor project management is generally accepted as one of the causes of project failure. The following factors are also at play leading to failures and delays;

Lack of User Involvement
Incomplete Requirements and Specifications
Changing Requirements and Specifications
Lack of Executive Support
Technology Incompetence

The challenges to project success require a comprehensive methodology that minimizes the risks/challenges and is designed to insure success. This session will provide insight into the techniques and methodologies used by a CMM Level 5 company with a forty year record of success with 96% of all project delivered on time and 98% of all projects having no Severity Level 1 or 2 deflects. The session will address the critical management tasks and the metrics used to measure, monitor and control the project and the project team during the entire project lifecycle. The session will provide insight into Continuous Improvement and a list of practical actions that the meeting participants can use in their information technology initiatives.

Communicating with Video on the Web

Presenter: Luke Kempski
President
JPL Productions

Learn how government agencies can use live video webcasting and on-demand videos to communicate with employees, constituents and other key target audiences. In this session, we will use example applications to discuss various approaches to increasing the value of your website with video. Representatives from Commonwealth Media Services and JPL Productions will demonstrate how you can inform, persuade and educate using the power of video. After attending, you will have a broad understanding of the benefits, technology and the requirements to successfully use video on your website.