ABC News posted a story today positing the imminent decline of the small airport.  While the article only specifically cites the reduction of flights at the San Luis Obispo airport, it does draw more general conclusions about the impact of reduced airline traffic on regional and municipal airports.  A similar report in June prematurely predicted the demise of many airports. prompting at least one airport director to respond directly to the allegations.  While reports of the death of the regional and municipal airport may be greatly exaggerated, there is no doubt that airports cannot simply sit back and rely on airlines to do their marketing for them.  The presence of planes does not ensure the presence of passengers, and, as my Army buddies are wont to say, it’s time for airport marketers and directors to lean forward in the foxhole and take charge of their own destinies.

What can airports do?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Talk to your constituents.  This isn’t just the flying public, but everyone who’s affected.  Airports mean jobs and commerce, so there are more people than just airport/airline employees and fliers who are affected.  Tell them what is going on more often, and don’t expect them to read the minutes of your board meetings.
2. Tell the good stories.  There are reasons that people like to fly out of municipal airports, and that message needs reinforcement.  As one passenger said, “When you want to make connections…it’s really important to have a local community airport.” 
3. Tell the WHOLE story.  It’s easy to go to an airfare aggregator such as Kayak and look at fares from regional and large airports.  Does your airport have shorter security lines?  Does it have more convenient parking?  Cool art exhibits?  Tell the world!

If regional and municipal airports don’t do their part to market to the flying public, then they will most certainly lose flights as the cost of oil and consolidation within the airline industry put the squeeze on the smaller players.

Is your airport’s website telling your story?  Does your website, the most commonly seen branding statement of your airport, tell the story you want it to?  If not, check out our AeroWeb solution and see if we can help.  Contact us to see how we can help you fight back.

A new buzz word, “Green”, is on everyone’s tongue recently, which is the result of a growing trend all over the world. For years groups like Clean Air Watch and the Sierra Club have advocated a change in modern society’s habits in favor of a cleaner and “greener” Earth. The industrial world is embracing this trend with the hybrid car. For example, even Capitol Hill is moving toward a change with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to “green” the Capitol complex.

While “Green” carries a specific connotation of minimizing energy consumption and/or carbon emissions, it also makes superb business sense in the IT community. IT systems, particularly for data centers are a significant consumer of electricity. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stated that data centers consumed 59 billion kilowatt hours (KWh) in 2006 ($4.1 billion) of which the federal government is responsible for 10% and it is estimated to increase up to 103 billion KWh by 2011. Many data center managers see the energy bill for operating the equipment and power consumption becomes a major concern for them. Servers and storage have developed into a very power-hungry element of data centers. Thus Data Center managers are beginning to embrace “Green IT” and “Green” data centers have become a significant factor in future data center design.

Procuring power efficient hardware is not just a smart business move for companies that are trying to save money, but it will soon become a mandatory shift when laws are passed to force such a change. Europe has already seen signs of this shift with the European Commission publishing the Directive 2005/32/EC on the eco-design of Energy-using Products (EuP) and with the recycling regulations that are already in place.

People around the world have grown socially aware, questioning the morality of political, social and business decisions taken. Thanks to the Internet, information has become easily accessible to everyone, which has allowed people to be more aware of their surrounding. Businesses and agencies are thus under a magnifying glass and every move they make is judged by society. Therefore, they do not want to conduct business in such a manner that would reflect a bad image. Since the hot topic of today is being environmentally friendly, it is crucial that companies adopt the “Green” attitude.

In the United States of America, this movement has been fueled by a society that has been advocating this movement. But soon enough government regulations in the US will be another driving force for IT companies to go “Green”. The European Union has already started on that track with the Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical Equipment (WEEE) regulations. Although such regulations do not exist in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to include with the ENERGY STAR power consumption ratings hardware such as servers in its certification program.

As system components become faster and more effective, they also dissipate more heat. Chip manufacturers have focused their design on functionality and performance but not so much on heat efficiency. This allows more heat dissipation, while at the same time lowering the maximum acceptable temperature of operation for these chips. Such characteristics of the systems in use lead to a higher need for cooling per chip to avoid overheating and damage to the processors. The heat problem translates itself into a power and efficiency problem. These chips consume more power than their predecessors, so data center managers these days can only stack ten servers in the same rack that used to hold up to thirty servers. At the same time, these devices generate more heat, which equates to higher cooling power. Cooling a data center requires sophisticated and elaborate equipment that consumes power, exacerbating the power dilemma.

With the average cost of Kilowatt-Hours (KWH) in the U.S at around $0.092 in 2007 and $0.0892 in 2006, running a data center can be costly. Cooling accounts for a major portion of the energy bill, second only to the cost of running the equipment itself. The lack of focus toward designing an efficient data center has resulted in the need of between 0.5 and one watt to cool one watt of equipment when ideally managers would like to achieve a 0.3:1 cooling watt to equipment watt ratio. Making cooling efficiency the major concern in the design of a data center, and purchasing energy-efficient or “green” hardware becomes compelling.

Data centers’ energy bills are rising fast, it’s becoming a budget issue for the entire company. Managers need to find a way to reduce the energy cost while maintaining their high efficiency productions that business customers require these days.

Processor chips are designed to include the maximum computing power possible in the least space possible. This results in a need for more power and dissipating more heat per unit of equipment. It turns out that this strategy is less efficient because neither data centers nor the electric utility companies are able to provide enough power to the racks housing the hardware or to generate the necessary cooling that is required to compensate for the heat produced by the servers, switches and routers present in the data center.

Data center managers found out through experience that the key to efficiency was not physical space but power consumption. Unfortunately the chip manufacturing industry focuses the design mainly toward speed and not power efficiency. Throughout the years, semiconductor design has favored higher speed allowing higher leakage currents. Leakage current is wasted energy flowing through the junctions when the transistor is in the “zero state”. Estimations indicate that leakage current in high-end processors is between 18% and 20% of total power consumption.

Measuring the efficiency of a data center lies in measuring the ratio of systems per rack. But an average data center is equipped to handle racks powered up to 5-6 KW worth of equipment and its equivalent cooling power. With the hardware specifications discussed earlier, stacking racks to their full capacity will require them to be powered with approximately 25 to 30 KW per racks, which becomes a design issue and a critical point for vendors and data center managers.

The IT market is very competitive in terms of providing the best services, but what characterizes such a service is the speed and functionality of the equipment rather than the component efficiency. Power supplies are the main component that gets neglected in favor of such competitiveness. The consequences are a data center that consumes more power in power conversion and cooling than the computer systems actually need. This means that most of that power is wasted energy which we can work on saving by using energy efficient equipment. There is a classic cost tradeoff between a more efficient (expensive) power supply and the cost-savings over the life cycle.

In this discussion, we will present the common techniques and technologies used in today’s data centers, we will then show why they are inefficient in terms of energy consumption. Once we have determined the problem we will give solutions for deploying and operating an energy efficient data center… Read more.

I’ve recently discovered Blair Enns’s Win Without Pitching website (thanks to David Robinson of Birch Studio Graphics for pointing me to the fantastic FunctionFox seminar). The main theme of Enns’s site, as I have gathered, is that proposal writing is, for the most part, an ineffective way for buyers to purchase specialized services, and for sellers of specialized services to prove their value. It is ineffective for buyers because the request for proposal (RFP) process often doesn’t allow the buyer to truly find out if there’s a fit between the seller and the buyer, and it attempts to normalize factors between competitors to create an apples to apples analysis. As Enns points out, what if you’re a pomegranate? You don’t want to be compared to an apple because you’re NOT an apple. This is why proposal writing is ineffective for providers of specialized services, because proposals which normalize factors often then reduce the reason that you’re specialized in the first place. A filet mignon prepared by Bobby Flay (or any other Food Network denizen) is not the same as beef tips purchased from Ponderosa Steakhouse. Yet, without the opportunity to engage in a conversation, the filet mignon is often reduced to the level of the beef tips in comparison.

So, how does this impact the largest buyer in the free world, the U.S. government? Less than it should. Check out the FedBizOpps website and see how many open proposals are available for a seller to peruse. As of the evening of July 30, there were 6,736 requests for proposals with expected response dates of July, 2008. If the process is flawed, then those flaws replicate themselves many times over on a regular basis.

Here are three flaws that I see in the process:

1. RFPs seek to mitigate the wrong risk. As a buyer, I want to know if I pay for something, then I’m going to get my money’s worth out of it. The risk i want to mitigate is that the provider doesn’t know what they’re doing or provides me a bad product and I can’t take it back for a refund. However, many RFPs seek to mitigate cost risk first and foremost, looking for price reductions, best offers, and fixed price bids in situations where expected outcomes are unclear or not well-defined. The mantra “nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM” seems to come to mind (though, to be clear, there are many cases where IBM should get the work), and that low cost bidders will often win. The risk that buyers of specialized services should seek to mitigate is fit, and by normalizing on other factors (are you CMMI qualified, give me your three best references, etc.), the government is trying to indirectly answer the question of fit. However, process gets in the way of answering that question…

2. The strict adherence to the process makes meaningful conversations difficult. Once a RFP is published, then communication with the actual customer is not allowed. Questions must be asked via the contracting officer, who then relates them to the customer, who then answers the question for everyone to see. This process creates a game of “gotcha” because a potential provider of services doesn’t want to ask the “a-ha” question that will reveal the true nature of the need and alert competitors to the same need. As a buyer, I’d rather get the deep, insightful question from one seller that reflected higher skill and continue conversations with that seller to explore fit. It seems inimical to then take away the benefit of that thoughtfulness by sharing that information with all other potential sellers. Yet, that’s what the government regularly does. I understand that this is a question of access, and with potential sellers often numbering in the hundreds, it’s a tough problem to solve. Still, encouraging more real conversations in the process would help to address the issue that the strict RFP process tries to mitigate through its normalization efforts.

3. The vendor qualification process is not rigorous enough. To become a registered government vendor, you need to follow a few steps: a) Register as a legal entity (corporation, LLC, partnership, DBA, etc.); b) Get an EIN; c) Get a DUNS number; d) Register in the Central Contractor Registry (CCR). As a result, there are, as of July 30, 2008, 465,684 active registrants in CCR. Increased viable competition for the government is great–it gets more value for the taxpayer dollar. However, increasing the noise-to-signal ratio does exactly the opposite. It’s why contracting officers hate full and open competitions–they have to read volumes of non-competitive responses from people who think that throwing a proposal over the wall is the surefire way to success. If contracting officers knew that they would get responses only from companies who had a reasonable probability of being able to do the work, their job would be easier. Put another way, if contracting officers knew of the fit between client and provider, their job would be easier. Tightening up the registration requirements would be one way to help this.

I believe that the government RFP process is flawed. It often puts out interpretations of needs and opens it up to the masses, putting the decision-makers in a tough situation of trying to discern differentiation from dozens, if not hundreds, of potential suitors. As a result, the RFP process tries to normalize as much as possible to reduce decisions down to a few factors, and, where possible, down to one–price. It does not address the issue of fit and localizes variables rather than finding global optimization. The process leads to over budget, out of scope, and missed timeline performance. By trying to be fair to EVERYONE who wants to participate in government contracting, the government is not fair to the most important stakeholder of all–the taxpayer.

We are here at the National Veteran Small Business Conference for Day 1 of the three day conference. The agenda today focused mainly on legislative activities aimed at helping service disabled veteran owned businesses get more access and opportunity with the federal government. The main conference speakers focused on the accountability aspects of existing directives and new legislation that was working its way through Congress. The piece of legislation which got the most commentary (and vituperation for its current unpassed status) was H.R. 3867, the Small Business Contracting Program Improvements Act. This act would create parity in sole source authority with 8(a) firms. Currently, contracting authorities can sole source work up to certain thresholds ($3.5MM for services) to any 8(a) firm, whereas they can only sole source to service disabled veteran owned small businesses (SDVOSB) if and only if there is one responsive SDVOSB; otherwise, the work must be set-aside and competed.

While I appreciate the work that Congress is performing to take care of veterans, particularly given a rapidly growing population of new, freshly minted veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, I am as perplexed today as I was last year about the entitlement mentality that these companies have. Yes, they are veterans who served their country with dignity and honor and made sacrifices that others generally don’t make. Yes, the country owes its veterans a debt of honor for what they have done. However, creating an entitlement culture and a handout mentality serves neither the veterans nor the government. There is not a government teat of endless money for anyone to suckle on, and the government has a duty to taxpayers to get maximum value for the money. Helping veterans is one thing. However, neither the government nor the veterans should confuse help for handouts.

This leads me back to what sticks in my throat about the displeasure at the pace of movement of H.R. 3867. It’s almost as if veterans are afraid to compete for business. Granted, for contracting officers, it is easier to find an 8(a) and sole source the work, but if we veterans truly want parity and want to do what is in the best interests of the government, we should be working to repeal the sole source authority for 8(a) companies, not fight for it ourselves. I understand that the government has a long-term interest in fostering smaller business to help them grow and to have them be employers; however, it also has a long-term interest in increasing viable competition so that it has a higher probability of getting what it needs from its contractors.

In commercial business, set-asides do not exist. Businesses fight for work on merit, which is an ever-changing definition depending on the buyer. I am stunned at how many businesses who attend the Vetbiz conference fail to adhere to the basic tenets of successful business.

I was also disappointingly surprised to hear government contracting officers say that they valued commercial experience as lower than government experience. I would have expected a predilection (or at least a neutrality towards) for bringing in industry best practices into government work. I also understand the risk mitigation (aversion?) that exists in the government, but I was disappointed to hear that explicitly stated by contracting officers.

Still, by and large, I am impressed by my comrades who I have met. There are many companies doing many great things and there are many, many government agencies who want to do the right thing and who are very dedicated to helping the veteran community. I was honored to see the genuine emotion about this industry shared by many, many people, and I was even more honored to be graced by the presence of many, many true American heroes and heroines whose service and sacrifice is absolutely astounding.

Recently, the Newport News, Virginia Open eGov system was released. Using the Plone content management system, the system is designed for governments to install, out of the box, a website which also includes specialized departmental infrastructure. Newport News has also made the system available under the GPL; it can be found here.

I found this quotation from their Lessons Learned document interesting: “The adoption of new technology is an iterative process of innovation and learning…” While they did not use the actual term, it seems that the team which developed Open eGov utilized an agile approach to software development. Agile development does not mean a harem scarem approach to development; the team said that they spent a significant amount of time conducting research on best practices and content management systems before undergoing the customization necessary to launch Open eGov.

We are interested to see if this product gains traction. It is part of the PloneGov project, which, while claiming members in 20 countries, does not have an apparent member list, or much reach. I think that if the Newport News staff wants to extend their reach for the product, they’ll need to answer some questions:

• How can they increase citizen participation in these sites? I see surveys, but there is no way to comment
• How to spread the word about the availability of this product? The product is, from appearances, targeted at local governments.
• Is the Plone/Python/Zope package the best one to facilitate widespread adoption? The community of developers is much smaller than of other developers. Naturally, Scott Stults, our resident Plone and Python expert, believes it’s the right answer and could be seen dancing with joy when shown the Newport News announcement.
• Why not put the project into a system that allows user contribution to it? How a developer contributes to the Open eGov project is not particularly clear. Perhaps this is an intentional result of the lack of desire to be the gatekeepers of others’ contributed code.

Seeing Open eGov is certainly, to us, a positive development. Now, we’ll see what happens next. Building a great open source platform is just one part of the puzzle; developing a vibrant open source community is another kettle of fish.

Thanks to our friend James Walker at EzGov Europe for pointing this article out to me!

This week I was at the AAAE Conference in New Orleans, showcasing the AeroWeb product that we have just released at OpenSource Connections. Everyone who saw our demo seemed to be very impressed. I think that many of the airport executives I met realized they needed the better website that AeroWeb offers, with features like Flight Tracking, Online Booking and Airfare Deals (with referral bonuses for the airport), blogs, inline content editing right from your browser, custom directions, flash maps, and more. All wrapped in great designs customized to each airport.

But one reaction I got several times was “this looks great, but our county/city controls our airport and our website, and they want us to use the county IT staff and web page.” Basically they liked what we offered, but felt like they are locked into a single page static web page occasionally edited by County staff.

As an example, compare the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport website GoCho.com with this static web page of a regional airport in Hawaii, which is part of a larger state web site. The differences should be obvious. GoCho is a dynamic site providing real time information of immediate interest to passengers, and gives them incentives to fly through Charlottesville. The Hawaii site provides a single paragraph of generic information about the airport. As a passenger, it doesn’t really tell me anything of value about whether or not this is an airport I would want to consider using during a trip to Hawaii.

If you’re an airport executive, you inherently understand this. But how do you convince your County or governing authority to give you the freedom to create and manage your own site? Here’s a few ideas for discussion points you can bring up with them. When you’ve convinced your board to build a new site, please make sure to contact us at AeroWeb so we can submit a bid!

1. Show passengers you have great deals too! If you are a regional airport competing for passengers with nearby larger airports, then you know it can be a struggle to convince passengers that they can get good prices through you. Perhaps not all your airfares are cheaper, but with our Flight Deals tab, great deals targeted to your airport will be displayed from Kayak.com. Especially with rising gas prices, if you can show passengers that they are going to get a comparable airfare through your airport, they will skip the longer drive to larger airports.
2. Give passengers the information they need. When passengers enter your airport, the first thing they probably do is check the arrivals and departures board. With our online flight tracking, you can give them the same experience on your website. We can integrate our tracking widget with your internal FIDS or with one of our online data partners.
3. Easy content management. With our inline editing tool, you will be able to manage all the content on your website, without involving AeroWeb staff or your County IT staff, and without any technical knowledge! One reason your County’s IT department may be reluctant to let you have your own website is out of a fear that they will have to maintain all the content for you. With AeroWeb, you can manage the website yourself, so there is no burden on other IT staff!
4. Managed hosting. We will host your AeroWeb site for you, which removes another area of concern your IT staff may have. They don’t need to worry about the database or server uptime, or providing you with traffic reports and other analytics about your website. We do all of that for you - so there is no extra burden on your County IT staff!
5. Provide updates to media and passengers. Since editing content on your site and blog is so easy, it can become a communications channel for you directly to your passengers and even local media. By providing the latest news about your airport online in a timely fashion, you may reduce your customer service calls and keep passengers happy!
6. Your airport website is not the same as the county landfill site. No disrespect meant to your local garbage collectors, but the fact of the matter is that your airport has more specific website needs than the local landfill. So why are they both using the same boring static pages on the County web site? The landfill is not competing for customers like you are, and they don’t need to provide timely and updated information to passengers who expect you to have a great website.
7. Providing the latest functionality on your website. AeroWeb is tuned in with the features that airports need. In addition to the features described above, we offer other widgets for weather, customized driving directions, advertising tools, and more! We can do custom development to meet your airport’s unique needs, and we are working on adding additional features too!

A couple of days ago I did some competitor research. My goal was to see a five-year timeline of SDVOSB’s that were operating in our NAICS (541519, 541512, 541511, 519130, and 518210). The metrics I was looking for were total income, employees, and federal contract award amounts. From this I hoped to draw some comparison to us.

After navigating a metric shit-ton of reports, statistics databases, and spreadsheets, I was only able to come up with the table below (which is about a third of my goal.) It’s based on a 2002 survey of small, minority, and women-owned businesses. In particular, the section I’m including represents veteran-owned businesses. There is a section of the original table that does not account for veteran status, so a comparison could be made to show its affect on customer distribution. (By the way, they do this survey every 5 years and are doing one now. The new data won’t be published for about 3 years.)

Table 1: Customer Types for SDVOSB’s

If conclusions can be drawn from this, I’d say that:

1. These businesses were 3 to 4 times more successful at contracting at the state and local level
2. “Other businesses” were their mainstay…
3. Followed closely by individuals.

Of course, there are some other considerations that are not factored into these numbers. I’d really like to know if either mentor-protégé programs or teaming arrangements affect the distribution. Also, there is an increasing trend of federal procurement through large, multiple-award “contract vehicles” which could raise the barrier for small businesses.

During FOSE, I was surprised to find that FedBizOpps had completely changed its format, look, feel, and usability.  I found out about this because I had bookmarked several pages to look at responding to potential RFPs, and none of them worked.  So, instantly, I had a predisposition against the new FedBizOpps, even though I consistently complained to colleagues about its lack of functionality.

However, once I got over the initial dissatisfaction of losing ten or so bookmarks to a poor conversion, I started looking into the new website.  Now that I’ve been using it for a couple of days, here are some observations:

• The search agents solve a key missing element.  Instead of having to type in the same searches over and over every day, I can save a search with the criteria that I want and have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, sending me an e-mail with the newest postings.
• Searching by expiration date is a good capability.  I want to see what’s yet to expire, expiring soon, and the like.  However, one element missing in a saved search agent is a dynamic date.  In other words, I can’t say that I want postings which expire tomorrow through eternity and have that date move forward daily.
• This site was not fully tested.  My two biggest pet peeves should have easily been caught in testing: 1) if I open a link (for example, to a posting) in a new tab, it messes up the original tab, and 2) the back button doesn’t seem to work.  I like to return to previous activity by using the back button.  Even “Return to Results” does not work, and there is no obvious internally linked navigation.
• Site visitation does not have permanence.  If I keep a tab open on a posting, it’s probably because I want to come back to it.  If I put my computer to sleep and come back, I can’t navigate from that page anymore.  It’s quite irritating.
• There’s no obvious way for me to provide feedback.  If the government wants to improve and wants to serve its customers, then it should make interaction easier.
• I didn’t see it coming.  If I would have known that this was coming and the effects it would have on my searching efforts, I could have prepared adequately.
• There’s no obvious FAQ or user’s guide.  It’s truly a libertarian site–you figure things out on your own merits, apparently.  No paternalism here!

All in all, as the title implies, I think it’s a step in the right direction.  The transition was poorly not handled, and it’s clear that testing did not incorporate the full cycle of usability testing.  I would be surprised if there was a detailed test plan, and if there was, it wasn’t detailed enough.  However, the concepts of usability are improved; I just hope it’s not another several years before the government decides to take the next step.