DOT: Leading the IPv6 Initiative

The global Internet transition from IPv4 to IPv6 picked up significant momentum late last year with the OMB IPv6 Mandate (released in September of 2010). This Federal CIO and OMB mandate requires all public/external facing servers and services to operate on the IPv6 system (including web, DNS, and ISP services) by the end of FY 2012. Shortly thereafter, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced that the final blocks of IPv4 addresses were handed out to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) on February 3rd, 2011.
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IT Vital Signs

One of the hardest things to do as a CIO is to make sure that all of your projects and programs perform at a consistently high standard. Part of the challenge is that it’s difficult to even identify a benchmark standard!
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Portfolio Rationalization:Effective Optimization of IT Funds

IT portfolios in large organizations become bloated over time with an ever-increasing inventory of applications running on multiple platforms, duplicative or misaligned systems or technologies whose ability to deliver value has degraded over time. As a result, a majority of the IT budget gets allocated to “keeping the lights on” rather than investing in new strategic initiatives.
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Business Service Catalog

The concept of the business catalog is to list DOT business services in a systematic and consistent fashion so they can be searched, viewed, or accessed by customers internally or externally with ease and speed. Based on the ITIL framework, DOT will start with IT business services and is expected to evolve to include other modes of services.

Ideation

Government leaders don’t have all the answers. The true power of democracy comes from harnessing ideas from citizens and employees. As part of President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, DOT wants their input and encourages citizens and employees to share new ideas, discuss old ones, or vote on any or all of them. It’s available at https://opendot.ideascale.com. This interaction strengthens the faith stakeholders have in their government, and their input can boost the quality and efficiency of the public services they receive.

Cyber Security Strategic Plan

DOT has developed a proactive and holistic cyber security plan focused on human capital planning and training, consolidation and integration, cyber security situational awareness and remediation, infrastructure planning and upgrades, business management and governance, and critical transportation infrastructure protection. The plan has specific projects and milestones to be achieved within the next three years.

Mr. Nitin Pradhan was sworn in on July 6, 2009, as the Chief Information Officer for the U. S. Department of Transportation (DOT) as part of the Obama Administration. He is the Chief Advisor to Secretary Ray LaHood in all matters relating to information technology (IT). Mr. Pradhan provides IT vision, strategy, planning, policy, and oversight for DOT’s $3 billion-plus IT portfolio.

Mr. Pradhan is a business strategist, technology expert, coalition builder, and change agent with more than 20 years’ experience, including 11 years at the CXO level in government, startups, nonprofits, and private industry. His expertise is targeting new opportunities utilizing technology as a solution; advising operational managers in launching and promoting knowledge-centric products and services; and defining fundamental organizational transformation integrating entrepreneurship, innovation and technology, as well as institutional and partner knowledge. His focus is on Enterprise 2.0-based communications; collaboration and community-building; and information assurance, security, and privacy. Mr. Pradhan is also a strong proponent of building public-private partnerships. He was recently named to Information Week’s “Government CIO 50: Driving Change in the Public Sector” for bringing a business person’s point of view to management of DOT’s IT strategy, policy, and implementation.

Prior to joining DOT, Mr. Pradhan was an IT executive at Fairfax County Public Schools, the 12th largest school district in the country. The district’s IT department has been ranked in CIO Magazine’s top 100 IT organizations and Computer World’s 100 best places to work in the nation.

Before his time in Fairfax, Mr. Pradhan was the managing director of Virginia’s Center for Innovation Technology, where his focus was on mentoring and growing technology startups and building research and innovation capabilities and capacity. He was also the co-founder and interim CEO of a wireless startup.

Mr. Pradhan’s educational qualifications include a Bachelor of Science in engineering and a Master of Business Administration in marketing from India, as well as a Master of Science in accounting from the Kogod College of Business at American University in Washington, DC.

New Media Technologies and Services

DOT is integrating contemporary social media tools (e.g., Web 2.0) to improve the Department’s transparency and information-sharing, both internally and externally. As a specific example, the Department will leverage social tools for fostering transparent idea creation, collective refinement, and community selection—sometimes called “ideation.” This will allow DOT to combine informal and formal mechanisms for innovation.

Cloud Computing

Driven by the need to reduce costs and quickly react to business change, cloud computing’s on-demand, pay-as-you-go service model is helping to transform DOT’s IT infrastructure from a large, internally owned-and-operated static enclave into an agile, responsive, externally hosted IT service machine that will be leveraged not just as a business tool but as the medium by which business is conducted

VisualDOT

The Department is piloting a web-based environment to portray topical and prioritized transportation-related data in a geographically visualized and contextualized format. This program will allow the public to concurrently view multiple “cross-modal” data sets in order to experience a rich view of trends and correlations. The availability of a platform to display high-quality data that is specifically formatted for visual presentation is expected to incentivize DOT programs to collect and share data in ways that consider those requirements from the outset.