I popped along to the American Association for Budget and Program Analysis (AABPA) Symposium panel discussion on how people are using BFELoB-funded tools to improve their budget management activities and took some notes that I thought I'd share with the community more broadly. (I apologize in advance for any typos; I was doing this on a new machine!) Hosted by Mark Dronfield, the BFELoB Program Manager, panelists included:
The FDP has made available all of the presentations from its meeting earlier in May. You can grab the whole lot here: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/fdp/PGA_057092. They include updates from NIH, NSF, Research.gov, ARO, AFOSR, among many others.
Some pretty amazing numbers are included here. LIke this:
"Across the United States, as of May 7, 2010, the Department of the Treasury has paid out $114.8 billion in Recovery Act funds for use in states and localities. Of that amount, $61.9 billion has been paid out since the start of fiscal year 2010 on October 1, 2009. The latest GAO report looking at how states and localities are spending Recovery Act funds was released May 26, 2010."
TCG has been named by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) and Bloomberg BusinessWeek as one of the 100 fastest growing inner city companies in the United States. The Inner City 100 program recognizes successful inner city companies and their CEOs as role models for entrepreneurship, innovative business practices and job creation in America’s urban communities. TCG ranked 37th on the 2010 list, which was announced at the 12th Annual Inner City 100 Awards Dinner on Wednesday, May 5, 2010 in Boston, MA. For more information, read the press release on the TCG website
Computers around the world are ready to sell, sell, sell! I don't mean on-line stores, but stop loss orders. At first a stop loss order sounds great, if not a necessity: if you hold stock at $100 and you want to protect yourself, you set up a standing stop loss order that if the stock drops below $98, you automatically sell. That way you are "guaranteed" to keep your equity. Many financial sites claim that you've got to use these orders to be a smart investor. However, with a tiny bit more analysis, you'll realize that they're utter insanity, because the policy does not scale. I claim that it caused the 995 point drop in the DOW yesterday. Here is coverage from CNBC - notice how fast the drop came and went:
What do I mean that "the policy does not scale?" Imagine that a significant portion (say 20%) of a particular stock is under stop loss orders, but then a mistake (CNBC claims that this flash crash way have been caused by a sell mistake) causes the stock to drop a bit. Then 20% of the stock gets suddenly sold in an automated stampede that causes the stock to drop like a rock. From a game theoretic perspective, this is a great example of a strategy that seems ideal for an individual (automatically sell when the price drops a bit), but when expanded to a large group leads to a horrible result. This effect is so bad and so strong that for many years the NYSE had trading curbs that automatically stopped many types of computer orders if the market dropped (but for some reason curbs were stopped in 2007).
If you are a long term trader with a stop limit order, you may have been automatically caught up in what essentially amounts to a crazy day-trading glitch. Fortunately for you NYSE canceled many "clearly erroneous" trades. Alas, that will probably let this amazing drop go by with a minimal amount of analysis.
So what does this have to do with cloud computing? If you implement any sort of automated policy by autonomous agentsyou must make sure that your policy scales if a large portion of the population adopts it. A traditional example is deadlock acquisition: if you acquire locks in a simple greedy way, it is easy to end up in "starvation" situations. We computer scientists have known this for decades, but because of Internet and cloud computing, we need the ability to apply this wisdom to a much wider set of problems.
With wonderful irony, as the market is wildly fluctuating in the CNBC clip, Cramer talks about making $500,000 if he had placed a buy limit order on P&G. Automated buy limit orders probably led to the amazing rapid rebound. In addition, this points to a policy that does scale: buy low and sell high. A more nuanced version of this policy is: determine a goal distribution of your holdings and periodically correct your actual holdings to match. If applied universally, such counter-cyclic policies can lead to system stability.
Quoting speakers at the recent Knowledge Management Conference, an article at FCW.com says that...
"The combination of knowledge management and a cloud computing environment is the likely catalyst for open government"
and...
"the questions are: Who owns information in the cloud and what is the business model for leveraging intellectual property in the cloud, Neilson said.
Regarding standards, the issue is: Who sets the standards? Is it the vendors, government or international standard bodies? If it is just the larger firms -- domestically or internationally – will that hamper innovations from smaller firms?
On governance, the question is: Who makes the rules?"
While the discussion tends toward the question of international interoperability of cloud-based knowledge management (KM) platforms, the questions it poses are familiar to anyone who has stood up a KM system in government. Who owns the knowledge? What standards are we using? Should we inherit best practices from vendors or forge our own? Who governs the system?
Fortunately, there are well-established answers to these questions, implemented in existing cloud-based KM systems in government. The largest such system is the MAX Federal Community, which is now used by over 30,000 government workers across the Federal government. [Disclosure: TCG supports the MAX Federal Community.]
The answers to the questions posed at the KM Conference are:
Knowledge is owned by their creators and participants. OMB, which manages the MAX Federal Community on behalf of the Budget Formulation and Execution Line of Business (BFELoB) PMO, owns only the knowledge that OMB staff has created for OMB. The propriety of agency knowledge is upheld.
The standards are open. While there are some proprietary pieces to the technology stack, the standards by which knowledge is stored and managed are open and cross-platform.
The system is governed by a cross-agency PMO, via the BFELoB.
This approach ensures that there are low barriers to entry and access. Knowledge can flow freely and securely around the system, within and between agencies and inter-agency groups.
So it's clear that at least one strong, established model for the governance of cloud-based KM systems exists.
