Awesome — only word to describe Vivisimo’s Federal Day 2010. So many great insights expressed, I would be remiss to not share. Yes, I’ll admit the Nationals Park Conference Center venue and Nationals vs. Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game, featuring Stephen Strasburg’s major league debut, did not hurt!
Dr. Bob Mikelskas, recently retired CIO of MITRE Corp., started the day with an excellent presentation on “Information Advantage for the Enterprise CIO.” Dr. Mikelskas’ key point was that most of the layers of the IT “stack” such as storage, routers, operating systems, databases, ERP, etc., are mature enough to offer easy choices and low risk for the CIO. Two components that remain challenging, however, are cyber security and information access. Focusing on information access, Dr. Mikelskas laid down a challenge to the industry to meet the needs of knowledge workers while maintaining security and incorporating legacy systems and content.
With this challenge on the table, Vivisimo’s president, Kevin Calderwood, introduced his topic “Proving ROI.” He highlighted Vivisimo’s approach in working jointly with it customers identifying activities and business processes where information is not being used in an optimal fashion. Kevin then outlined how Vivisimo’s Information Optimization Assessment results in a set of measurable objectives and projected value that can be presented to a decision-maker. ROI isn’t a term you hear every day in government circles, but in fact the session became very interactive as Kevin showed that the same measurable results can help government executives achieve their missions and deliver better services to taxpayers at lower cost.
Following Kevin’s talk Gary Mann, Sr. Sales Engineer in Vivisimo’s Federal group, demonstrated some advanced features of Vivisimo’s Velocity Platform and Vivisimo Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Dr. Raul Valdes-Perez capped it with a cutting-edge trend-discovery prototype developed by Vivisimo’s advanced research group under a grant from the National Science Foundation.
It’s always fascinating to see how our customers utilize our various information optimization applications in the federal government. They did not disappoint.
Doug Brook of Triune Group started the afternoon with a discussion of the Air Force Knowledge Now application, which combines Web 2.0 collaboration and expertise location with information discovery to effectively provide knowledge and expertise to more than 400,000 registered users in the U.S. military! This improves knowledge re-use and counters the “brain drain” of experienced personnel through retirement.
Mike Frame and Hugh O’Connor of USGS wowed us with the National Biological Information Infrastructure application, a model “digital library” which consolidates an enormous amount of biological information from diverse internal and external sources into a single point of access with a highly refined search capability and advanced navigation tools.
Tom Gregg of Trusted Computer Solutions discussed the Multi Domain Dissemination System managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency which addresses one of the persistent challenges in the intelligence community: secure information sharing across agencies. I was quite intrigued with their use of Vivisimo’s Velocity Platform and trusted guard technology from TCS, to securely search and cluster information across multiple secure domains and 30+ sources simultaneously.
In the final case study of the day, Jennifer Heiland-Leudtke of the National Library of Medicine took us through their successes in optimizing usability of the search interface for multiple NLM websites that use Vivisimo’s Velocity. Jennifer showed how, with carefully designed tests, experimentation and incorporation of user feedback, the NLM team was able to optimize information discovery on both the main NLM website and MedlinePlus, the public-facing medical information website that receives more than 10 million hits per month. NLM’s hard work has produced some of the highest scores among government websites as measured by the industry-standard American Customer Satisfaction Index!
Rock Arkie (Vivisimo’s Sr. VP of Services and Support) and I wrapped up the day with presentations on how Vivisimo can help ensure customer success and the Velocity Platform roadmap.
By the end of the day, with the help of our customers and partners, we had explored the need, the theory and the practice behind Information Optimization. As Director of Product Management I have the benefit of hearing our customer stories daily, but many in attendance don’t have this luxury so it was a great pleasure to see their eye light up with possibilities when hearing each other’s stories. One of my favorite quotes of the day was when an analyst explained the value of their application as “finally it was like the lights were turned on.” The diversity of solutions shown by our customers drove home the enormous potential of this discipline, and the feedback we received will help drive the evolution of Vivisimo’s product and service offerings in the future. What a home run!
CIO, Defense Intelligence Agency, Dr. Bob Mikelskas, federal, Information Optimization Assessment, IT, Kevin Calderwood, legacy systems, National Library of Medicine, ROI, security, Velocity Platform
