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September 17, 2002

In this Issue:

National Treasure

The White House puts information sharing and analytics at the top of the homeland security priority list

Strategic Security

Protection tactics and trends

Out of Bounds. In "CIOs: Govern Web Services Now," (July 2002), Forrester analysts recommend that CIOs establish IT "SWAT teams" now to "prioritize the flow of new Web services" before independent internal efforts proliferate out of control. CIOs should be aware that:

About 17 percent of corporate IT groups have already started Web services projects.
Any developer can create Web services with funding and approval from outside IT, and resulting apps may not follow traditional IT guidelines.
Architecture teams will need authority to govern disparate projects.

IT Staff Survey. In its "2002 IT Market Compensation Study" (July 2002) People3 Inc. found:

The average IT salary increased 5.1 percent in 2002 to $67,900, and total compensation grew 6.1 percent to $72,900.
Database administrator and security manager positions take the longest average time to fill (3.2 months).
Recruiters have the hardest time finding IT skills in Unix, Microsoft SQL Server, and Java, in that order.
More than 69 percent of surveyed companies had a 5 percent or lower IT staff turnover rate. More than 59 percent of turnover came from staff working less than three years.

Data mining and information sharing techniques are principal components of the White House's recently released National Strategy for Homeland Security, and several pilots that use technology supporting such techniques are already underway.

According to the proposal, the "National Vision" of the strategy is to "build a national environment that enables the sharing of essential homeland security information." The paper goes on to say that this environment would consist of a "system of systems" that can "provide the right information to the right people at all times." Published reports put the IT budget for this effort in the neighborhood of $1 billion to $2 billion.

The proposal claims that work has already begun to integrate "terrorist-related information" from databases across government agencies. The next steps in this effort will be to adopt common metadata standards that will allow this information to be easily found and understood, as well as to use advanced data mining techniques to "reveal patterns of criminal behavior."

According to the proposal, despite more than $50 billion in IT spending per year, these goals have been previously out of reach due to uncoordinated investments as well as legal and cultural barriers that have prevented the exchange and integration of information among agencies.

In a July briefing, Steve Cooper, Homeland Security Office CIO, echoed the White House strategy by explaining that one of his department's most important functions will be to develop guidelines for information sharing and the use of analytic technology in agencies that manage data assets.

Cooper cited the development of a homeland security portal for state and local agencies and the creation of a national, master list of suspected terrorists as examples of pilot projects that are using technology his agency will evaluate for wider use.

— Justin Kestelyn

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