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?