The cloud as a catalyst for complex adaptive systems

2012 Jan 9
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In GigaOm today, James Urquhart has another in a wonderful series of posts about cloud technology in the enterprise: The Cloud is Complex–Deal with It. He observes that the cloud seems to solve some Enterprise IT challenges while exacerbating others. In fact, the cloud also creates entirely new classes of challenges.

What’s interesting about his post is that he puts all of this into the context of complex system theory, or the analysis of how complex, interconnected systems interact to produce emergent behavior. Complexity theory provides a meta-theory that connects together natural behavior from catalytic reactions in chemicals to evolution and human biology to microeconomics and macroeconomics. Essentially, systems consists of agents that are constantly interacting–forming and reforming, disappearing and reproducing–to produce more effective systems. Enterprise IT is no different. Servers are organized to produce farms, farms into datacenters, and datacenters into networks. Functions forms services which form composite services which form applications which form user experiences and business processes.

The point he makes about the cloud is that it cannot alter this fundamental reality. Instead, the cloud makes a complex system into a complex adaptive system, which reduces the friction in the failure of one aspect of the system and the creation of new components. The point of the cloud isn’t to reduce complexity, but rather to enable greater complexity at higher velocity–and this is a good thing.

What strikes me about this article are a couple of implicit themes. One is that the cloud is merely an enabling technology. The cloud is only valuable in so much as it enables a service, application, business process, or user experience. Another is that value of the cloud can only really be unlocked as part of a broader way of doing business. If a business is never going to adapt, change, compete, and innovative, then the cloud isn’t really going to produce much value.

Almost every CIO and business leader I know sees 2012 as a year to form and execute on comprehensive cloud strategies. It’s no longer a question of if, but when and how. Understanding these two themes–and the broader idea of your enterprise as a complex adaptive system–is critical to forming a cloud strategy that will unlock business value worth orders of magnitude more than the costs.

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Themes for 2012

2012 Jan 2
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Between turning 35, planning for 2012, holiday parties, the holidays, and leaving for my annual trip to Russia to see my in-laws, I didn’t get any blogging done in December. As a result, my Klout score has fallen almost three whole points! The horror…

While I haven’t actually been blogging, I have been thinking a lot about the themes that I want to write about this year. Without further ado, here is my personal editorial calendar for 2012.

Theme 1: The National Piggy Bank grows up

I blogged a lot about the National Piggy Bank back in October and November. Since our National Piggy Bank Summit, we’ve been hard at work with a range of partners on a full launch of the National Piggy Bank program, as a platform to enable our most innovative thinkers and citizens everywhere to participate improving the citizen experience. I believe strongly that our public sector has to undergo radical, disruptive innovation. It’s exciting to see the coalition to do so grow. And I’m psyched to write all about it this year.

Theme 2: The Innovative Rebuilding of Government

One of my first blog posts ever was about the Creative Destruction of Government (). As the name implies, the blog focused on the urgent need for a new approach to the business of government, from concepts of operations, to technology architectures, to the way products and services are procured. As we enter the new year, I figure it’s time that I start laying out my personal views on what the next generation business and technical architecture for government should be.

Theme 3: Disruption in Education

As with government, I wrote many words in 2011 talking about the need for a new approach to education. In 2012, I’d like to lay out my philosophy on what education should look like. I’m not so much focused on the education reform movement, which tends to focus on the mechanics of how to change the way our existing public education system works, but rather describing as an innovator and technologist what the art of the possible in education will soon be for those brave enough to seize it, whether frustrated parents, private schools competing for students, or even public schools.

Theme 4: Startup America

In 1995, within a few weeks of graduating from high school, I started my first company, which was a tutoring company hiring my classmates at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and having them tutor other kids in Fairfax County. Since then, I started QED-Innovations, which became netDecide, while advising a bunch of other startups during the late 90s Internet boom and bust in DC. I then helped build Oakwood Global Finance in London before coming back to DC to found Synteractive. I’ve recently had a blast advising a new generation of start-ups such as Lemur and Cynosure. I’ve also had the opportunity to get involved with Startup America’s efforts in the Greater Washington Region. I’ve been involved in startups since I was 18. Driving innovation, disrupting markets and industries, and building organizations fascinates and energizes me.

Interesting, it’s an area that I haven’t really covered much in my blogging. So in 2012, another key theme for me will be describing the process of building a startup, what I think works, and what I’ve seen bomb disastrously, usually because I’ve done it myself.

Theme 5: What the heck Synteractive actually does and how we do it

Finally, as Chairman and Founder of Synteractive, I spend a lot of time in person pitching people on all the great things that we do for our clients. While our website does a great job laying everything out, I figure it will make my life easier if I describe everything in my own words, in a series of blog posts. Then when people ask me in the future I can simply forward them a link to the appropriate blog entry. At least that’s the theory! So you should all look forward to blog entries on things like the Scrum methodology, the fusion of strategy, design, and development, and share innovative ideas across industries to the benefit of our clients.
I’m of course also open to writing about whatever you guys find interesting. If I’m going to get my Klout score back up then I need people to actually read and share what I like. So… any feedback? Or suggestions on additional themes?

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Fareed Zakaria on America’s promise and our citizens’ solutions

2011 Nov 25
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Fareed Zakaria has a great column in this morning’s Washington Post about the promise that America still holds. He points out that America continues to dominate the world in many of the industries of the future and that America remains the premier destination for innovators and entrepreneurs around the world. Both of these arguments are true although we shouldn’t take it for granted that they remain so without sensible policies to support innovation.

At the end of the column he argues that sensible solutions exist for the problems our country faces. Our political institutions, however, have proven too corrupt and trapped by the narrow interests of political extremes and legacy institutions to implement these solutions. He ends though with an optimistic observation that citizens are starting to take matters into their own hands—from Americans Elect to No Labels.

Government provides so many necessary functions and there are problems that can only be solved by our public sector. I cannot count how many earnest public servants I have encountered who are dedicated to fixing the problems in our public sector. But now is a time when the public sector requires vast, disruptive innovation across the spectrum–from how we elect our officials to education and healthcare to efficiency in government and our national security. It is up to our entrepreneurs, our innovators, our policy activists, and citizens across America to drive the change we need to see in our citizen experience. At Synteractive, in partnership with Microsoft, we’re doing what we can to enable citizen engagement in public sector innovation through the National Piggy Bank. If you haven’t made a deposit yet, then this long weekend is a great time to do so!

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Esther Dyson talks sex, tech bubbles… and Health 2.0

2011 Nov 20
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I wanted to share a great interview with Esther Dyson on TechCrunchTV. While she covers a variety of topics including sex and whether we’re a tech bubble (she thinks we are), most of the interview covers Health 2.0. She does a great job of articulating a number of important themes. She explains how devices that provide streams of granular real time data will combine with analytics and social networks to change consumer behavior around health. As she puts it, she’s more interested in the market for preventing sickness, which is largely about changing consumer behavior, than the market for handling sickness, which is about drugs and hospitals and clinics and doctors. As I discussed in a blog post last month, the virtuous cycle of the Internet of Things, Big Data, Social Collaboration, and Cloud has the potential to drive tremendous innovation in so many industries, but particular the public sector.

Another important point she brings to life is that much public sector innovation is actually being driven outside the public sector. In the case of Health 2.0, the early adopters are consumers who care about their health and are willing to pay for new tools outside of their health insurance as well as employers who have a vested interest in their employees’ health that extends beyond simply reducing healthcare costs. The large regular insurance companies and government plans, even though they should have an incredible interest in reducing healthcare costs, find it extremely difficult to adopt innovative new approaches. In some cases, innovators and entrepreneurs need to blaze the path then let social advocates fight the legacy approaches and entrenched interests to make sure the winning paths get adopted.

If you have other ideas along the lines that Esther discuses, please make sure to deposit them into the National Piggy Bank, invest in other people’s ideas, and share the best with your social network.

As for Esther’s discussion on how investing is like sex and why she thinks it will ultimately be good for the economy when the present tech bubble bursts, I’ll let you watch the video.

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Thanks Fast Company!

2011 Nov 19
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Ben Schiller with Fast Company’s Co.Exist blog posted a great piece on the National Piggy Bank on Friday. It’s incredible to see the need for disruptive innovation in public sector getting attention so quickly after our Summit. Exposure like this only helps us build our community for radically improving the citizen experience.

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Electricity, ideas, and actions from the National Piggy Bank Summit

2011 Nov 18
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After taking a week away to recover from the National Piggy Bank Summit and the rest of Digital Capital Week, I wanted to share my initial thoughts on the energy in the room last Friday, some of the amazing ideas the Summit has spawned, and talk a bit about next steps.

The National Piggy Bank team—Mark Drapeau and Marci Neill from Microsoft and Petra Groat and I from Synteractive—have been bouncing around ideas for the National Piggy Bank for the last six months. We’ve thought about the role of entrepreneurs and innovators, policy makers and think tanks, and of course citizens. We’ve debated lots of different strategies and technologies for civic engagement and citizen sourcing. But we’d struggled with how to actually start a community. After Mark happened to share our brainstorming with Peter Corbett, however, Peter suggested that we host a Summit as part of Digital Capital Week to engage the Digital Capital community in solving the problem. Last Friday was an experiment and we were all holding our breath as people started trickling into the room.

Mark and I opening the National Piggy Bank Summit (thanks to Frank Gruber for the Instagram)

I’m happy to report that the experiment was a stunning success. I could simply discuss a few of the many ideas that came out of last Friday. I could throw out statistics like over 270 tweets during the Summit with #piggybank, which were tweeted and retweeted to over 220,000 people with over 900,000 impressions. I could even tell you to keep an eye out for upcoming coverage of the Summit in some high profile places. None of these metrics or validation points though can begin to describe the energy in the room, which was incredible and inspiring.

We didn’t select attendees or speakers on the basis of any preconceived views or ideology. We simply identified, invited, and accepted people with strong credentials as innovators and entrepreneurs who also had explore or experience in our public sector—whether education, healthcare, government, the foreign service, international development, or the military.

By halfway through the morning, however, Andy Mack from AMGlobal stood in front of the room and held in one the pen he used to provide his medical records to his doctor the last time he was sick in America and in the other hand the swipe card containing all his secure medical information that he used the last time he was sick in Africa, and the palpable sense of frustration and commitment to disruptive change was electric. As Andy Mack put it, America invented the technology in that electronic medical record card. America also provided the development capital to deploy that to remote parts of Africa. Yet we haven’t been able to do the same for ourselves because our legacy infrastructure and entrenched interests actually burden us in comparison to hungry and agile African countries.

The feeling in the room was electric. There was a palpable sense that all of us who care about our country—innovators and entrepreneurs, technologists and policy experts, advocates and everyday citizens—have to do more to drive disruptive innovation in our public services, whether that means sharing our best ideas, building new businesses or non-profits, or advocating for changes in policies.

Joe Sestak's keynote address (thanks to Bisnow)

Our lives as consumers have seen incredible advances over the past 10 years. The tools available to us as consumers are obsolete in a few years because faster and more usable ones are always around the corner, usually at a fraction of the price. Meanwhile, our lives as citizens are largely stagnant despite costing more and more each year.

In 2000, a state of the art mobile phone could make… phone calls. In 2012, a state of the art mobile phone can talk to me while it gives me directions and reminds me that I have an upcoming appointment, and for less cost than the phone from a decade ago.

In 2000, a technology startup would typically need to raise millions of dollars to even launch a proof of concept. In 2012, startups regularly build their products for a few hundred thousand dollars.

In 2000, the federal government required me to constantly fill out redundant forms—usually on paper—while spending around $30 billion on technology. In 2012, the federal government requires me to constantly fill out redundant forms—usually on paper—while spending over $80 billion on technology. Huh?!

The Summit didn’t simply produce electricity. It produced solid, actionable ideas with commitments from those in the room to take action. Some of the ideas that participants and speakers provided around ways the Piggy Bank can help drive change include:

  • Create a widget that provides continuously updated visualizations on exactly who is influencing policymakers and talking heads—whether through campaign donations or previous employment. The widget could be available to any media outlet—from television to bloggers—so that citizens can see immediately who is influencing their officials and “trusted” experts. How powerful would it be when two wonks are debating energy policy on CNN to see on the screen at the same time that one of them recently took a large research grant from an energy company while the other recently accepted a campaign donation from an environmental advocacy group?
  • Work with venture capitalists to host a pitch competition for business ideas that flow from the National Piggy Bank.
  • Connect to platforms like SeeClickFix so that citizens can not only report potholes to their local governments but can also suggest more disruptive ideas to their fellow citizens via the National Piggy Bank.
  • Connect to platforms like POPVOX so that citizens don’t have to simply respond to the legislation that their elected officials propose but can propose their own legislation to their elected officials.
  • Create a social currency for civic good so that people who do share ideas, start businesses, and advocate for policy changes are able to be recognized and rewarded for their commitment to their country and their fellow citizens.
  • Host more events that bring together often disparate communities of entrepreneurs, venture capitals, policy experts, and citizens to dive deep into specific areas like education, healthcare, government efficiency, citizen empowerment, or civic currency.

Mark and I are excited to work with the Piggy Bank team, our respective companies, our emerging partners, and the growing Piggy Bank community to bring these and more ideas to life. Some of the immediate things that we’re doing include expanding www.nationalpiggybank.org to include a blog, twitter feed, and more content. We’re also going to take the video from the Summit and release the various segments over the next few weeks. Finally, we’re going to take many more of the ideas that came from the Summit, think about them, blog about them, and further expand our community.

Douglas Neagele, Robert Puentes, Blake Hall, and Josh Wall on a panel discussing the state of innovation in America's public sector at the National Piggy Bank Summit (thanks to Bisnow for the photo)

We could never have had such a successful Summit without the contributions of rock stars like Joe Sestak, Jen Consalvo, Blake Hall, Jonathan Perrelli, Robert Puentes, Richard Boly, Rachna Choudhry, Emma Richards, Josh Wall, Douglas Neagele, Glen Hellman, and Andy Mack. Thank you for everything.

And for all of you who participated on Friday, tweeted to your friends, contributed to the Piggy Bank, encouraged your friends to do so on Facebook, emailed us more ideas, and followed up with us to take action… thank you!

More to come so stay tuned…

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National Piggy Bank Speakers, Part 4: Glen Hellman, Andy Mack, and Mario Rebello

2011 Nov 10
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With the National Piggy Bank Summit tomorrow morning, it’s time to introduce our final three speakers: Glen Hellman, with Driven Forward and Startup America, Andrew Mack, the Principal at AMGlobal, and Mario Rebello, the Managing Director of CREATe.

Glen is Chief Entrepreneureator for Driven Forward. Glen’s a serial entrepreneur, an angel Investor, and a reformed hired-gun turn-around CEO for VCs, who now helps entrepreneurs figure out what to do and gets them to do it. He’s also leading a working group on Mentorship for Startup America, where he’s creating a volunteer core of experienced professional mentors for early-stage companies to experience the benefits of peer advisory groups and 1-on-1 mentoring. He also created TweetDingman, the world’s first pitch your company to investor event held over Twitter.

Andy Mack is the Principal of AMGlobal Consulting and an expert in innovation and technology in emerging markets. Andy is a former World Bank project manager and banker with experience in more than 80 countries. He founded AMGlobal in 2005 to bring together the private sector, governments, donors, NGOs, and foundations to substantially address today’s toughest development challenges in an innovative way. Andy has worked with clients from Fortune 100 corporations such as Chevron, Oracle, and Motorola, to donor agencies like the World Bank and USAID, to startups and entrepreneurs focusing on emerging markets and green technologies. Andy holds a bachelors from Amherst and a masters from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Mario is the Managing Director of CREATe.org, a movement to create jobs, growth, and innovation by promoting fair competition, responsible global supply chains, and respect for intellectual property rights. Until last month, Mario was the Senior Director of US Corporate Citizenship at Microsoft. Mario has a bachelor’s degree from Brown and a law degree from the University of Connecticut.

Finally, if you’d like to watch the National Piggy Bank Summit, we’re going to live stream it here. You can also follow the Summit on Twitter from @hamstrong and with #piggybank.

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National Piggy Bank Summit Speakers, Part 3: Emma Richards, Josh Wall, and Douglas Neagele

2011 Nov 9
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With three more days to go until the National Piggy Bank Summit, it’s time to introduce three more speakers that we’ll have on Friday: Emma Richards, a Community Manager with SeeClickFix, Josh Wall, the Director of Advanced Technology with InfoStrat, and Douglas Naegele, the President at Infield Health.

Emma is the Community Manager for SeeClickFix, a platform for crowdsourcing and citizen engagement with local governments. SeeClickFix is a startup helping create a world where every citizen feels empowered and part of their neighborhood, where everyone feels trusted and taken care of by their local government, and where the power of the internet can bring people closer together and closer to their government. Emma brings her expertise in social collaboration and citizen engagement to SeeClickFix.

Josh leads a team at InfoStrat focused on developing groundbreaking solutions with emerging technologies for the public sector. He’s an expert in multi-touch interfaces, Kinect, cloud, and mobile. He has applied advanced technologies to a range of public sector problems ranging from national security to state and local government.

Douglas is the President and Founder of Infield Health, where is brings health information directly to people through their mobile phone. Infield believes that when short, consistent health messages are delivered to people, their health improves. Douglas’ past healthcare experience includes drug design and development at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he participated in the creation of many compounds aimed at immunosuppression and Hepatitis C. Doublas holds an MBA from the George Washington University and an undergraduate degree from Harvard.

Tomorrow, I look forward to introducing our final speakers. Again, if you’d like to watch the National Piggy Bank Summit, we’re going to live stream it here. You can also follow the Summit on Twitter from @hamstrong and with #piggybank.

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National Piggy Bank Summit Speakers, Part 2: Blake Hall, Rachna Choudhry, and Joe Sestak

2011 Nov 8
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Following up on my past from last week, I wanted to introduce three more speakers that we’ll have at the National Piggy Bank Summit on Friday. Again, the Summit will see over 100 entrepreneurs, social activists, designers, policy experts, and government officials joining a conversation on how the innovation community can help tackle the really big problems facing our country.

Today, I’d like to feature three more diverse speakers: Blake Hall, the CEO of Troopswap, Rachna Choudhry, the cofounder of POPVOX, and former Congressman Joe Sestak, our keynote speaker.

Blake Hall is the Cofounder and CEO of TroopSwap.com, a platform for that military community that offers retail discounts to service members in a similar way as LivingSocial, while employing only veterans and their spouses. Blake is a former US Army captain and an Airborne Ranger. He led a scout platoon in Iraq from July 2006 to September 2007. His military awards include two bronze stars with one “V” device for valor in combat. He recently graduated from Harvard Business School after doing his undergrad at Vanderbilt.

Rachna Choudhry is cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer for POPVOX. POPVOX is an innovative new platform for citizen communication with Congress built around integrity, transparency, and accountability. Rachna is responsible for their social media strategy, marketing to individual users, and outreach to advocacy organizations. Rachna earned a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University and a Political Science degree from UCLA.

Finally, Joe Sestak will serve as our keynote speaker on the role of innovation and risk taking in solving our national problems. Congressman Sestak represented Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district from 2007 util 2011. He defeated 30 year incumbent Arlen Specter in the 2010 Pennsylvania Democratic Senate Primary before losing in the general election to Pat Toomey. Congressman Sestak was the highest ranking military official ever elected to the US Congress, having served in the US Navy for over 30 years. Congressman Sestak is a former three star admiral and was the Director for Defense on the National Security Council under President Clinton. Following 9/11, he served as the first director of codename “Deep Blue,” the Navy’s top secret counterterrorism unit.

Between now and Friday, I look forward to introducing the rest of our speakers. Again, if you’d like to watch the National Piggy Bank Summit, we’re going to live stream it here. You can also follow the Summit on Twitter from @hamstrong and with #piggybank.

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National Piggy Bank Summit Speakers, Part 1: Jonathon Perrelli, Robert Puentes, and Richard Boly

2011 Nov 4
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A week from today, Mark Drapeau from Microsoft and I will be hosting the National Piggy Bank Summit as part of Digital Capital Week. We’ll have over 100 entrepreneurs, social activists, designers, policy experts, and government officials joining a conversation on how the community of innovators can help tackle the really big problems facing our country. While anyone of the people attending would make an awesome speaker, we’ve selected a pretty cool group to lead the conversation and share their experiences and ideas. Over the next week, I’m going to discuss some of the speakers to give everyone a taste of what we’re doing with the National Piggy Bank.

Today, the first three speakers I’m going to introduce should give an indication of the community we’re building: Jonathon Perrelli from Fortify.vc, Robert Puentes, a Senior Fellow at Brookings, and Richard Boly, the Director of eDiplomacy at the State Department.

I heard Jonathon speak for the first time a few months ago on an NVTC panel of VCs advising aspiring entrepreneurs about the process of raising venture capital. I think Jonathon was the only VC on the panel wearing a t-shirt and his advice was similarly refreshing. Jonathan has built successful companies cyber security companies that have helped the Defense and Intelligence communities tackle hard problems, he’s  been an angel investor in companies like Plaxo and Brivo, and in May of this year he co-founded a Fortify.vc, a fresh new approach to venture capital on the DC area. Jonathon understands innovation at its purest, but also understands the challenges that an innovator faces when trying to tackle big public sector problems.

Robert Puentes, as a Senior Fellow at Brookings and an Affiliated Professor at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, brings a different perspective to the challenges our metropolitan areas face with growth and development. From transportation to urban and suburban planning, Robert has analyzed and advocated about innovative solutions to creating sustainable cities.

Finally, Richard Boly will bring an international perspective on innovation in public services to the National Piggy Bank Summit. Richard is a career US diplomat and the Director of the Office of eDiplomacy, an applied technology think tank for the State Department. His diverse experiences include serving as a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he launched the Global Entrepreneurship Program. His embassy assignments have spanned Italy, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Paraguy. He is also an active speaker on Web 2.0 and its implications for diplomacy, development, and social movements.

Again, over the next few days, I look forward to introducing more of our speakers. If you’d like to watch the National Piggy Bank Summit, we’re going to live stream it here. You can also follow the Summit on Twitter from @hamstrong and with #piggybank.

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