Silver Bullets isn't about understanding the technology of standard, interoperable data; it's about why the technology is important and how you can use it. If you care about effective operations, no matter your job title, this book is for you. Interoperable data is a major game changer for business and information technology, government and commercial, national and international organizations. This book will let you make it happen, versus wondering what happened and how you were left behind. As Frederick Brooks famously noted in The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, there is no single-approach solution - no Silver Bullet - that delivers significant improvements in productivity, reliability, or simplicity. But in Silver Bullets, Pete O'Dell shows how a single concept - standardized data interoperability - yields improvements in any industry to which it is applied. O'Dell builds his case by reviewing the past. From the Great Wall of China to shipping containers, from punched cards to the VISA network, standardization has fueled enormous breakthroughs. O'Dell investigates current data standardization including XML and the Common Alerting Protocol, using case studies to illustrate success stories ranging from homeland defense to diabetes management. Finally, O'Dell offers practical suggestions on how to get started with interoperable data and points to emerging leaders in commercial, governmental and not-for-profit fields. This accessible, plain-spoken book is full of parables, anecdotes and stories, delivering humor as well as insight. Reading it enables you to make practical decisions about your organization's future and growth. Silver Bullets shines a clear light into your inoperable future.

SILVER BULLETS

How Interoperable Data Will Revolutionize Information Sharing and TransparencyBy Pete O'Dell

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Pete O'Dell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-4075-8

Contents

Foreword..........................................................................................................xiiiAcknowledgements..................................................................................................xvChapter One A major opportunity to improve civilization..........................................................11An Opinion The top ten benefits resulting from the broad adoption of interoperable data..........................31Chapter Two Long-ago standards: things you'll recognize..........................................................37Case Study Jefferson Parish, Louisiana tackles Hurricane Gustav..................................................47Chapter Three Near-past lessons: standardized technology and computing...........................................49Chapter Four The beginning of standardized data transactions.....................................................61Case Study Using interoperable data to improve diabetes management...............................................71Chapter Five The emergence of Extensible Markup Language; (XML); a tour of major initiatives.....................73Chapter Six Two great interoperable data standards: CAP and KML..................................................91Case Study Golden Phoenix........................................................................................109Chapter Seven Interoperable data efforts: things you can watch, use, leverage, and adopt.........................115Chapter Eight Executing a data interoperability pilot (right now)................................................131Case Study External alarm interface exchange standard............................................................141Chapter Nine The far-flung future: where do we go from here?.....................................................145Chapter Ten Raves and conclusions................................................................................163Appendix A Chapter notes and suggested reading...................................................................175Appendix B Best of NIEM Awards 2009 Inaugural....................................................................187Appendix C World Meteorological Organization Members.............................................................193About the Author..................................................................................................195Index.............................................................................................................197

Chapter One

A major opportunity to improve civilization

We're only at the beginning of what we have to do here. -Bill Gates

We live in an accelerating world of information, innovation, and networks, with a rapidly increasing number of "Netizens" - people who communicate and interact with others through the Internet - for business, government, personal, and other purposes. More people can communicate directly with each other in real time today than in the cumulative history of man. An event that 30 years ago would have captured local front-page newspaper headlines can whiz by almost unnoticed today, because so many other incredible things are happening around the globe in parallel. Newspapers themselves are losing relevance as people increasingly use the web to gather and sort information from a broader range of new sources. When something exciting happens, we want to learn about it right now. The Internet gives us that immediacy. Just as important, we can participate; we can exchange comments and share knowledge about what's happening around the world, in real time.

My life span is a typical illustration of this high-speed rate of change. I grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, where our main communication methods were a telephone party line (which we shared with six other families) and the U.S. mail. Local access could be challenging if there were young girls on the party line, but everyone typically had a way to signal others if access was important. Long distance calls were tremendously expensive relative to the incomes of the day, so only emergencies and special events triggered a phone call beyond the local calling area.

Compare and contrast that existence with today - a mere 45 years later. I have at least three phone numbers, multiple email addresses, Skype, text messaging, instant messaging, Twitter, a rarely used Facebook account, a heavily used LinkedIn account, and more - most with free, unlimited, unconstrained usage plans. That's just to reach me. The world that I can reach is virtually unlimited, and I'm the weakest link; I have to figure out what I need and allocate my consumption to fit within my ever-more-jammed 24 x 7 days.

My friends and business associates span the world, so email that's important can show up anytime, not just during normal business hours - if "normal" exists for anyone anymore. Mix in your social life, and you have a recipe for a complicated souffl of capabilities and needs. Change the recipe slightly by subscribing to too many or irrelevant information feeds, and the whole information collection recipe turns into overload - it's a very delicate balance.

Even mere existence seems more complicated now. As I write this, we're in dangerous financial and economic times. Worldwide disasters are increasing, from deadly weather events (Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 Haitian earthquake) to man-made threats (the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Madrid train bombings, the London Under ground bombings, the Fort Hood shootings) to potential global health crises (the potential H1N1 pandemic) ... with undoubtedly more by publication time.

A recent congressional report predicted that we'll have either a biological weapon attack or a nuclear attack by terrorists by 2013 if we don't take precautions to prevent such acts. Statistically, your odds of survival as an individual are very good, but few of us take comfort in that. It's much more human to be concerned about acute events - a sudden, unexpected threat from an improvised explosive device (IED), a sniper, or natural disaster - than to pay attention to the chronic problems to which we grow accustomed. To use health as an analogy, people often put off dealing with a chronic high-risk factor (e.g., high blood pressure that may led to a fatal heart attack) but respond immediately to an acute event (e.g., a broken leg in a car accident). Interoperable data can help mitigate some of the acute risks, but you'll still have to watch your diet and go for a run.

Humans are the weakest link. As this accelerating technology unfolds, we find that humans are still the weakest link in the information processing chain. Many of us are literally drowning in information on multiple fronts. This problem manifested when the Internet first came into the mainstream - the number of web sites, email addresses, ecommerce opportunities and web resources exploded, and finding anything was tough, even for early adopters.

Search engines were invented to help with the problem of finding what you want and ignoring the overload, and few of us go many days (or minutes) without using Google. (Google is the winner in the unstructured search engine wars, at least for today. One false step, or missed technological generation, and Google will be yesterday's news, with a new company in the limelight. If you remember Yahoo, Magellan, and several of the other search engines that once seemed to have an unbeatable position in this market, it's easy to see how fast a market leader can come and go.)

More and more information is also generated by machines, from sensors to transactional systems, automated feeds such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and others. Sensors alone will have an exponentially expanded presence in the coming years. Far lower costs, greater capabilities, and faster and more broadly available wireless networks for data collection will contribute to an explosion of sensor data that may or may not be publicly available, useful, or timely, but will be out there nonetheless. The potential gains that could be realized for harnessing sensor-generated information flow are huge - similar in scope to harnessing rivers to produce electricity through hydropower. Sensors almost uniformly use structured data formats for communication.

With better information, you can make enhanced decisions. With faster information, you can make accelerated decisions. Combine these two critical elements, and the improvement effect is multiplied versus additive. Reducing the elapsed time between an event's onset and your organization's decision about responding to it is usually very important, whether the event is foreseen or a complete surprise.

The major problem is getting the right information at the right time in the right format, on the right device, so that it can affect decision-making for the better when processed by the right human decision-maker. The solution (or the mission, if you prefer) is to use technology to improve and simplify emergency and business communications, while minimizing data overload and the opportunity for human error. Interoperable, structured data is a key to accomplishing this mission. How we move forward with standardizing data and its associated issues is a topic that will evolve with time and have different implications for people depending on their context and position, all impacted by a broad set of individual variables.

Accurate information is a key weapon in the fight against uncertainty and indecision. Better, faster, more focused and accurate information, hopefully confirmed by more than one source, allows you to make a better decision, and it's far superior to doing nothing or acting on unverified data. You probably knew that, but we'll look at how interoperable data can help.

360-degree threats and 360-degree life. Have you ever experienced an abrupt shift from one context to another? Imagine sitting in a major strategic meeting in an office, with your laptop open, and getting an email telling you a close relative just died, or that your child has been injured in a schoolyard accident. Your context shifts immediately. Global events such as 9/11 cause the entire world to stop and shift - they're a major shock to the system of perceived normalcy that we've built up.

These kinds of mass-impact moments have always occurred (the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, for example) but prior to the world-wide instantaneous news we have now, information was filtered first to news organizations (radio, TV, newspapers, etc.) and then to the public, sometimes country by country. When you got the information depended on where you were; it might reach you hours or days after it happened.

The world's largest-ever recorded earthquake (9.5 on the Richter scale) occurred in Chile on May 22, 1960, causing a tsunami and killing up to 6,000 people. News went out via the newspaper, radio and TV; some people may have not learned about it for days. The world's second-largest ever recorded earthquake (9.3) occurred on December 26, 2004, in the Indian Ocean, and the world watched via cell phone cameras in real time, as it happened. The speed of the world's communications is accelerating at greater and greater speeds. This bears repeating because it will have far-reaching effects on today's technological evolution, and in order to be the Wayne Gretsky of interoperable data, you'll need to watch how fast the "puck" is accelerating, and plan on meeting it. (Wayne Gretsky is a retired hockey player who famously credited his success to skating to where the hockey puck was going to be, instead of where it was).

Change is the only constant. Today, everything is in motion and requires continual reassessment. In the financial world of 2009- 10, corporations have been failing and scrambling for government bailouts. You can watch this happening in real time, on the web or on any one of 200 digital high-definition channels. All it takes is one bad report, and 20 minutes later the stock market is down 500 points. The rest of the world is becoming equally fluid and dynamic.

Government issues. While getting the right information at the right time is a formidable problem for individuals and organizations, it's particularly difficult for governments. In the U.S., for example, from the local town to the federal bureaucracy, there are at least 89,000 different jurisdictions. The U.S. government's reality of information sharing includes connecting federal, state, local, tribal, international, public, and private interactions (FSLTIPP). The failures of 9/11 vividly illustrated that the U.S. intelligence community was fragmented and disconnected from its operational capability. Little has been done to rectify this problem, despite billions of dollars spent.

This lack of progress is not for lack of effort and good intentions, but (as numerous blue-ribbon commissions and audit groups have proclaimed) there are few identifiable, usable, or applied end results. It is an intractable problem, and will take major efforts to move forward. Interoperable data can help make this work, as the cultural barriers are overcome.

First responders have been focused on radio, trying hard to get more interoperability from a platform that has faithfully served police, fire and other emergency responders over the last 50 years. Perhaps if we keep investing it will all work out, right? In reality, we need a new set of ways to get things done, but it's always tough to replace a method already in place with an evolved alternative without a forcing mechanism.

You'll remember that in the immediate days after 9/11, the U.S. was able to get a substantial number of things done because everyone was focused on the solution - not the problems, or the turf, the objections, or the cost. People and communities can respond to acute events cohesively. But for chronic problems, the response too often fragments into bipartisan bickering and political maneuvering.

Major issues surrounding interoperable data

Some of the biggest issues have little or nothing to do with the actual technology and data transactions, but are important to understand for a total context around the give and take of interoperable data.

1. Culture. Some organizations are just not oriented to sharing. Many decision-makers in the U.S. intelligence community and corporate America have been trained in a Cold War-spawned, "need to know" mentality. Despite the momentum generated after the failure to connect the dots around the 9/11 attacks, there's been little movement toward active, electronic sharing. (New government information sharing campaigns with catchy slogans, e.g., "Dare to Share" and "Responsibility to Provide" have been ineffectual, in my opinion). Sharing is hard, but the government is making it too hard and complicated.

2. Policy. Rules and policies governing the exchange of data can range from the simple to the sublimely complicated. Publicly available data might contain a simple disclaimer, while "sensitive but unclassified" information might be subject to a vast and confusing set of restrictions on use, reuse, safeguards, further dissemination, revocation, and a host of other complicating factors. A corporation might have sharing policies it enforces with supply chain partners, but applies loosely across the company. The rules for sharing and exchange are important to get right, and apply consistently.

3. Authentication. If you receive a set of interoperable data, how can you be sure it's authentic? What if the source had somehow been compromised and erroneous information integrated, which you then incorporated into your system, into future decision-making matrices, and exchanged with other entities - all in good faith? In certain cases authentication can be assumed, but in other cases it must go through a high assurance process, perhaps multi-factor authentication, encrypted data exchange, and/or other safeguards to ensure that the sender and receiver are both satisfied with the authenticity of the exchange. A thorough risk analysis of sources, and of the impact unreliable sources could have on your capabilities, is a primary element of establishing an information exchange.

4. Privacy. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is any data element that ties a transaction to an individual. Examples are your Social Security number, passport number, name, address, and telephone number. Any of these (and there are many others) can turn an innocent piece of data into something that can compromise an individual's privacy rights. To complicate matters, the rules defining and governing privacy rights can be vastly different on the sending and receiving ends of a single transaction. Imagine a passenger manifest list for an airline, shared across international boundaries with different airlines (for connections), commercial partners (for catering), and security organizations (terrorist watch list screening), and you can see a few of the issues that could come into play from a privacy standpoint. Sometimes the urgency of information overrides the privacy considerations of personal information. A good example of this is an Amber Alert for a missing child. In such a case, all kinds of PII may be released to the general public as quickly as possible in order to try to locate the child and ensure her safety.

5. Timeliness. Information can be originated, disseminated, and then changed or expired all in a moment, but also might last a lifetime. Knowing a storm passed three days ago would be irrelevant to most people, but a meteorologist might choose to aggregate that information into a much larger picture of climate change and fine-grained weather models.

6. Sensitivity. Information can be sensitive in a number of different ways, which can affect the way it is handled and disseminated. Over the years various federal agencies have implemented different (and often conflicting) policy and technology approaches. The result has been a massive hairball of confusion, which has resulted in reduced sharing, and also in people ignoring the inconsistent, confusing rules. The GAO (General Accounting Office, a key watchdog of government agencies) did a study that found over 100 different combinations of document markings and policies, just for the "federal sensitive information" classification.

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