Most enterprise technologists should see a continued payoff of the hard work in planning, architecture, documentation, development and configuration work that has been occurring over the last several years. Enterprise technologists were building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) long before SOA was over-hyped. And most enterprise technologists I know were investigating constructs of scalable, elastic Cloud Computing capabilities long before that became the dominate theme in trade journals, conferences and tech blogging. With all the hard work and progress seen in enterprises to date we could be in store for some very positive improvements in 2010.

Since our last interaction, the holidays have proved to be harshly unkind to the Intelligence Community (IC). First there was they "the systemic failure" to warn with regard to the bungled attempt on Christmas Day by Al Qaeda-radicalized 24 year old Nigerian Umar Abdulmutallab (a.k.a. Passenger 19A) to blow up FLT 253 over Detroit. Then six days later there was the tragically successful suicide bombing attack on the CIA's operating base in Khost Afghanistan by Jordanian triple agent Dr. Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi killing eight. As if these two events were not enough, on 04 January with the nation waiting for the President to be briefed by his national security principals on what was known about FLT 253, the U.S. Army's senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Major General Tim Flynn, published through a public sector think tank Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan where he called out military intelligence for not being relevant to the counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan.

Your family’s whereabouts are a military secret. Well, not really. However, treating them like they are can help keep you and your loved ones safe from the people who are constantly searching the Internet looking for information that would allow them to take advantage of an empty house.

ITT Corporation realigned its former Defense Electronics and Services segment into ITT Defense and Information Solutions on January 5. The move consolidates the business' seven divisions into three in an effort to streamline efficiencies and to respond better to its anticipation of future customer needs.

Information Technology in the federal enterprise does not work like it does in Hollywood. Although there are plenty of success stories to go around, federal IT is more limited and constrained than we would all want, for lots of reasons. Some of the reasons are just do to complexities and limited budgets. Some of the reasons are for security. Some of the reasons are because of the way the government funds its agencies and manages programs. And some of reasons are because we humans have designed things using the wrong models and implemented them to serve workflows that are flawed to begin with.