Interior Department Strategic Plan Analysis

With summer kicking off the peak season for visiting national parks, Quantified Perception offers a snapshot analysis of the U.S. Department of Interior’s 2014-2018 Strategic Plan. Can we summarize a 56-page document in 150 words?

Content analysis reveals that the most common word in the Plan is “water," with 156 occurrences, not including compounds like “watershed.” The next most common word reflects the Department’s greatest public concern over the last few decades with “Indian,” “tribal,” and “tribes” aggregated for 147 occurrences. “Resources,” “land” (and “lands”) follow, with “strategy (and variations) rounding out the top five. The top twenty most frequent words, including the aggregate of “develop” and “development” are shown in the graphic below.

Do you think Interior has their strategic priorities straight? Contact QPL for a more complete list of the top 25 words in their 2014-2018 Strategic Plan at info@qpllc.com.

Cloud and Timesharing - Around we go!

“Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!”

If you remember those words, you probably remember…timesharing computer services.

As government – and the rest of the world – moves into a more comprehensive Cloud environment, the IT world looks more and more like it did in the 1970’s, in the days of the Teleprocessing Service s Program – that was “timesharing” services, when vendors provided a great deal of the computer services for agencies on remote computer systems.

In the Timesharing world, customers used commercial computers (Hardware as a Service) over commercial telecommunications lines (analogous to Internet connectivity) to perform their mission functions (Software as a Service), generally on the agency’s own data, which resided in the commercial data center (“Cloud”-like).

While not quite a perfect match, the analogy is awfully close to the way we are moving today. In those days of early “mass computing, commercial telephone lines were the communications backbone, evolving into dedicated telecomm lines from customer (client) to service provider (“server”).

There are lessons to be learned from those days. The same issues confronting us today were around then. There was a different spin on them, but it would certainly be worth a look to the past to see where there are lessons to be learned:

Security

Contracting

Service levels

Competition

Collaboration

Data transparency

Do you have any recollections that are relevant to our new Cloud World?

Darwin and Procrastination

Procrastination must be a Darwinian survival trait – it has been so thoroughly inculcated into our makeup. There have to be more procrastinators than go-getters in our world. If it was just an unfortunate condition, it would have been bred out of us millennia ago.

So the caveman who said “You guys go ahead, I’ll stay sharpen my spear and go on the hunt tomorrow,” missed the saber-tooth attack, so he got to procreate while his more expeditious brothers went to dinner.  When Leonidas went to the Pass, there must have been some temporizing Spartan who volunteered to be number 301, and was delegated to stay behind to protect the city. SO his children were able to pass along that postponing gene.

Dawdling no doubt infused the gene pool when procrastinators arrived late to the party, and got the best girls (or guys) because they weren’t as drunk as the early revelers. The winners in social, business, and political conflicts must have been dominated by loiters who stood aside while more hurried compatriots rushed forward towards genetic disaster.

Got any examples of your own? Post them here and we’ll see who agrees.

No rush. Do it when you get a chance.

Reuse those abbreviations!

Earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security released the “Executive Order 13636

Privacy and Civil Liberties Assessment Report.”

This report has some interesting attributes that distinguish it from most government reports. It has an interesting language, with much more equivocation than is typical in a government document. [More on that in a subsequent blog.] But the “PaCLAR” also continues the use of the term “SSA” – Sector Specific Agency – which was introduced last year by DHS in the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) 2013 to implement Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21).

Coining the abbreviation “SSA” (abbreviation – it is technically not an acronym unless it has its own pronunciation) is confirmation of the initial shortage that seems to emanate from the secret Government Alphabet Office (GAO) in DHS. Unofficial reports from DHS confirm the Policy of Alphabetic Conservation (PAC) being implemented to reduce funding to create new abbreviations and acronyms (AAA). The White House has an internal Directive on Directives (DoD) that mandates reuse of abbreviations rather than the creation of new abbreviations whenever possible. The General Specification for Abbreviations (GSA) has been called “a bold leadership policy.” The Administration is encouraging Congress to consider enacting an Abbreviation Control Act (ACA) to make the policy a legal mandate. A Federal Abbreviation Regulation (FAR) is being developed to Officially Monitor Brevity (OMB) as a part of a larger Energy Optimization Program (EOP). The Reuse Formula Initiative (RFI) is reported to be planned for public commentary (PC) under a larger Formula Organization Interim Authority (FOIA). Rumors abound that a Republican Congressman will be named by the White House to lead a bipartisan Dedicated Homonym Study (DHS). The reported objective of the study is to create a Unified Standard for Abbreviations (USA).

The overall effort is being termed by White House sources as the “April Initiative” (AI) to denote the Initial Optimization Abbreviation (IOA) on the first day of this month.