A lesson from Boeing's aggressive outsourcing strategy, supervision of work increases with outsourcing

Boeing's 787 has been plagued by multiple issues that many will point to an over aggressive outsourcing strategy driven by zealous executives who saw a path of lower costs.  SeattleTimes reports on Boeing's annual investor conference.

Like Albaugh, McNerney reiterated Boeing will do more work in-house on the new jet than on the Dreamliner and try to protect its expertise in composites technology.

McNerney said Boeing's attitude with the 787 had been "outsource it ... get rid of the cost of supervising it."

"You end up realizing you need more cost to supervise outside factories," he said. "Unfortunately we paid billions upon billions in the learning process."

Boeing has kept the wing production in house, and now added the horizontal tail to be brought in house for the 787-9.

At lunch with Wall Street analysts later, Albaugh said Boeing has decided the horizontal tails on the next version won't be made in Italy, as they are for the initial 787-8 model.

Engineers will perfect the method for producing the horizontal tail at the Development Center beside Boeing Field, and will do early production runs there to mature the process.

How many IT projects do you wish you had the support to be done in house vs. outsourced?

Next Advisor for GreenM3 NPO, Peter Horan, pushing the edge of the network to be close to customers

Our first industry advisor was Mike Manos, our next is Peter Horan. Peter is unknown to most of the data center audience as he is an executive who has worked on the edge of innovation, not in the hub of data center activity.  Peter does have data center experience as the Sr. VP executive for InterActive Media at the time of ask.com's data center construction at Moses Lake, WA.  Chuck Geiger was CTO of ask.com at the time, and stated.

“Moses Lake is an ideal location due to its cooperative business environment, access to low cost, renewable power and superior network connectivity,” said Chuck Geiger, Chief Technology Officer of Ask.com. “With these inherent benefits, Eastern Washington is the right choice for Ask.com as we expand our computing infrastructure to support our growth and expanded search services.”

Peter has had the executive's view of building a large data center, yet he has some very innovative, forward thinking ideas and a powerful network.  Which brings up a presentation that Peter made discussing the "Edge of the Network."

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I've known Peter for many years, including his time as Sr. VP/Publisher of ComputerWorld, CEO of DEVX.com, about.com, allbusiness.com, and was an obvious candidate for the GreenM3 NPO.

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Here is a video where Peter presents the ideas to get closer to customers.  In the same way Peter encourages the audience to get close to customers, the goal of GreenM3 is to build a closer connection to customers, using open source techniques.

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A person who we want to talk to in Peter's network is Chuck Geiger.

Chuck Geiger
Partner - Technology

Chuck has significant experience running some of the largest online transaction product organizations and most visited sites in the world, including as CTO of Ask.com, CTO of PayPal, VP Architecture of eBay, and executive positions at InterActive Corp., Gateway and Travelocity.


At InterActive Corp, Chuck was responsible for managing a consolidated data center strategy for IAC portfolio companies including Ask.com, Evite.com, CitySearch.com, Ticketmaster, and Match.com. Chuck also was responsible for the technology organization at Ask.com including Engineering, Architecture, Program Management, QA, IT, and Operations.


At PayPal, Chuck was responsible for the product development organization which includes Product Management, Design, Engineering, Architecture, Operations, IT, QA, Project Management, Content, and Localization, running a team of approximately 550 professionals.
At eBay, Chuck was responsible for the migration to the new generation system architecture and platform.

BTW, Peter's day job is Chairman of Goodmail.

About Goodmail Systems

Goodmail Systems is the creator of CertifiedEmail™, the industry’s standard class of email. CertifiedEmail provides a safe and reliable means for consumers to easily identify authentic email messages from legitimate commercial and nonprofit email senders. Each CertifiedEmail is sent with a cryptographically secure token that assures authenticity and is marked in the inbox with a unique blue ribbon envelope icon, enabling consumers to visually distinguish email messages which are real and sent from email senders with whom they have a pre-existing relationship.

We welcome Peter's passion for technical innovation and the environment.

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Lesson learned from Apple’s iPhone SDK agreement disclosure, beware of the Freedom of Information Act if a US gov’t agency signs

Having been an ex-Microsoft, I learned this lesson if you have a gov’t agency sign an NDA or confidentiality agreement watch out for Freedom of Information Act.

The act explicitly applies only to federal government agencies. These agencies are under several mandates to comply with public solicitation of information. Along with making public and accessible all bureaucratic and technical procedures for applying for documents from that agency, agencies are also subject to penalties for hindering the process of a petition for information. If “agency personnel acted arbitrarily or capriciously with respect to the withholding, [a] Special Counsel shall promptly initiate a proceeding to determine whether disciplinary action is warranted against the officer or employee who was primarily responsible for the withholding.” [6] In this way, there is recourse for one seeking information to go to a Federal court if suspicion of illegal tampering or delayed sending of records exists. However, there are nine exemptions, ranging from a withholding “specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy” and “trade secrets” to “clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” [6]

The Electronic Freedom Foundation used this to get a copy of Apple’s iPhone SDK agreement reports NetworkWorld.

EFF publishes iPhone developer agreement

By Dan Moren, Macworld
March 09, 2010 02:02 PM ET

If you've followed the news of App Store rejections over the past couple years, you may have wondered what exactly is engraved upon the stone tablets that govern the terms of Apple's App Store and developing for the iPhone. The trouble is we haven't been able to tell you, as the agreement itself contains terms that prohibit publicly discussing it. But on Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legally obtained and published a copy of the agreement for the first time.

In order to do so, it had to take advantage of a legal loophole. EFF noticed that NASA had created an application for the iPhone, and NASA--being a government agency--is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. EFF requested a copy of the SDK agreement and a revision dated March 17, 2009 was provided.

If you have confidential information you may want to think about your disclosures to federal gov’t agencies.

The author makes a closing statement.

For my part, as somebody writing about these issues, the most frustrating part of the agreement has been the ban on public statements. I can see why Apple believed it was in its interest to keep the agreement private, but in the long term I think it's done more harm than good, both in terms of contributing to the perception of Apple as overly secretive and by gagging developers from speaking publicly about their issues. Apple's platform remains wildly popular despite what some consider Byzantine restrictions--the company shouldn't be afraid of a little discussion.

And some of his points are why for the Open Source Data Center Initiative we are have adopted the practices of openness and transparency for what we will be doing.

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A different interpretation of “Open Source” in an Intelligence Analysis scenario that defines how GreenM3 works public data

I ran across the term Open Source Intelligence.

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence.

This description fits what I have been telling others about the various data center sources of information. 

“If there is a public publication of information, we are open to look at and provide feedback on the value we see in the information.”

Which is a pretty good description of how this blog has been run, commenting on public available information.

The description goes on to clarify the difference vs. open source software.

In the intelligence community (IC), the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software or public intelligence.

Sources of information are:

OSINT includes a wide variety of information and sources:

  • Media: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and computer-based information.
  • Web-based communities and user generated content: social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.
  • Public data: government reports, official data such as budgets, demographics, hearings, legislative debates, press conferences, speeches, marine and aeronautical safety warnings, environmental impact statements and contract awards.

We have seen helicopters flying over Apple data centers, and world wide maps of Google data centers.

  • Observation and reporting: amateur airplane spotters, radio monitors and satellite observers among many others have provided significant information not otherwise available. The availability of worldwide satellite photography, often of high resolution, on the Web (e.g., Google Earth) has expanded open source capabilities into areas formerly available only to major intelligence services.
  • Professional and academic: conferences, symposia, professional associations, academic papers, and subject matter experts.[1]
  • Most information has geospatial dimensions, but many often overlook the geospatial side of OSINT: not all open source data is unstructured text. Examples of geospatial open source include hard and softcopy maps, atlases, gazetteers, port plans, gravity data, aeronautical data, navigation data, geodetic data, human terrain data (cultural and economic), environmental data, commercial imagery, LIDAR, hyper and multi-spectral data, airborne imagery, geo-names, geo-features, urban terrain, vertical obstruction data, boundary marker data, geospatial mashups, spatial databases, and web services. Most of the geospatial data mentioned above is integrated, analyzed, and syndicated using geospatial software like a Geographic Information System (GIS) not a browser per se.

OSINT is distinguished from research in that it applies the process of intelligence to create tailored knowledge supportive of a specific decision by a specific individual or group.[2]

I wonder how much OSINT has started searching twitter and Facebook.

In the Open Source Data Center Initiative I anticipate we be using this type of description for what we will be doing.  Part of the challenge for the data center industry is there so much information out there, it is hard to make sense of it for an organization that doesn’t have a full staff of experienced professionals.

Here is where I got the idea for Open Source Intelligence.

kapowtech

Complimentary Online Seminar:

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Online Seminar

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Date: Thursday, March 18, 2010
Time: 11am Eastern; 8am Pacific
Duration: 1 Hour

Hello Dave,
Al Qaeda uses online videos to recruit and train. Other terrorist networks use audio files to disseminate messages. China circulates propaganda via video. The Internet is exploding with multimedia; streaming video, audio, images, PDFs and more. Open Source Intelligence needs to account for and take advantage of all advanced media types. But how?
Learn how you can:

  • Capture streaming video for on-demand classification and detailed examination
  • Automate extraction of multimediaOSINT and all contextual data
  • Transform complex data sources into accurate information for advanced analysis
Please join this free online seminar and see a live demonstration of Kapow Technologies’ advanced web harvesting capabilities in use at US Intelligence Agencies, extracting from sites like YouTube, China.org, Al-Jazeera and MySpace.
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