NASA's CIO - Santa Baby, I’d sit on your lap for a shower cap | Hacker News Reader

NASA's CIO - Santa Baby, I’d sit on your lap for a shower cap

blogs.nasa.gov

25 pointsmarkbnine16 comments

I'd absolutely love to pick her brain about what she thinks is wrong with enterprise calendaring.

I was thinking exact same thing since I would love to sell NASA an awesome web2.0 smart-phone-enabled awesome calendar.

Me too. As someone who looked at Bedework[1] a while back, I'd like to know if she considered it.

In my experience, there is always SOMETHING that doesn't quite work right with calendaring, whether it's "enterprise" (whatever that's supposed to mean) or not. Mainly synching.

People want cross-platform Exchanged-hosted Outlook calendars. They want the ability to see other people's calendars, invite them to meetings and accept/reject invites via email. This is especially important to places like NASA that have engineers on Linux desktops. I've been at a place that was going to go so far as to installing VMware with a Windows VM just so everyone could have access to Outlook for calendars.

I've also found that people really, really hate web based calendars. It's amazing how picky people are when it comes to the views of their schedule and most web-based solutions do not address these needs very well.

It's not calendar software, it's NASA. It's a ridiculously fragmented organization. The various space centers all operate as their own little (or big, really) entities, and compete for influence.

Then, in parallel with the space centers there are massive projects (think Hubble Space Telescope or International Space Station) that operate separately from each other, but across multiple centers.

Now, throw in that NASA does almost none of its own work. They hire the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world to do that for them. They, in turn hire the likes of Orbital and Swales (and other medium to tiny firms you've never heard of) to do their work. They, in turn, well, you get the point...

On top of that, every pork loving congressman (or sometimes a dimwitted vice president - look up Triana for that story[1]) comes poking around, causing budgets to shift, vendors to be changed, and generally making asses of themselves in the name of their constituents.

It's really amazing that it works at all. And not so amazing that it costs what it does to launch a space shuttle.

Can you imagine the software that would be required to put all of NASA on the same page? Yikes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory I worked on this project back in the day. The wikipedia article is very kind to the project's worth and to Al Gore. He literally dreamt up the idea that we should have a continual view of the sunlit side of the earth because it was inspiring or some such nonsense (I was told you could easily piece together that image from available data and nobody would know the difference). He woke up the next day, called the NASA head, and the project was born. We spent millions (I think it had a budget of about $75 million, but don't quote me on that), until finally someone called it out for being utterly worthless and devoid of scientific value. Nobody really had an argument against that.

Looked at her linkedin profile, she went from getting her BS in 1980 to being Deputy Director of the US Department of Justice in 1983. How did that happen? She was a college grad with 3 years of experience with a degree in math. She's not a lawyer or a DA or State Attorney General, I'm really curious how she got that job?

Edit: Seems she was the Deputy Director of the Office of Information Assurance in the US Department of Justice. That's still a big jump, but not as large.

She's not exactly dumb:

"Ms. Cureton earned a Bachelor of Science Degree from Howard University in 1980 graduating magna cum laude with a major in Mathematics and a minor in Latin. She also received a Master of Science Degree in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1994, and a Post-Master's Advanced Certificate in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. She performed extensive research in numerical analysis and has been published in the "Journal of Sound and Vibration.""

It's probably not really a jump. In 1983 the Office of Information Assurance in the US Department of Justice probably was a tiny blip on the Justice Department's org chart with 5 people in it. It's pretty easy to get the title Deputy Director when you only have 5 people in an office.

Government titles are interesting. I've run into many Deputy Assistant Directors or other out there title just to fill in a line on an org chart. Plus it's easier to get money for a position when it has a title.

"I [...] hired a very nice little boy for CTO for IT and the sweetest little girl in the world for Deputy CIO. I have a hardworking tyke for Associate CIO and two others are working hard too and they want to make the good little boys and girls and NASA very, very happy."

I understand she might personally pine for sitting on Santa's lap again, but these condescending employee jokes are not at all funny.

That's odd, I didn't take it as condescending at all. She made similar jokes on herself:

"I’ve been a good girl this year." "The Good Little CIO of NASA"

At risk of sounding like a total jerk, I'm incredibly disappointed in this blog post and in her being appointed to this position. This post reads way to personal for my tastes. A quick read of her past accomplishments shows a history of government bureaucratic jobs, but I'd like to actually see what she accomplished there.

Unfortunately, this all stinks of a "quick, let's find a social media expert (i.e. Twitter user) and appoint them to the job!" Said "social media expert" then goes and blogs/tweets like a dork and alienates all the people they are supposed to be getting involved - similar to what Scott Monty did for Ford last year. If I was working IT at NASA, I'd hang my head and cry.

/rant

NASA is all about scientific research. I'd rather the people there be occasionally creative than be stiflingly corporate.

I know a guy at NASA working on enterprise collaboration strategy and he is pretty sharp. They seem to be headed in the right direction.

I'd think being in government shouldn't disqualify you from having a personality. I like people in my government thank you very much.

I work at NASA, and I like to think that I have a personality...in fact, the center I work at is incredibly relaxed and basically has a collegiate atmosphere.

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