Bespoke Systems Blog

Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) is a federal program for IT investment management. Managed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), all US Federal Agencies are mandated to provide evidence to OMB about their compliance with the CPIC program. There are two documents, the Exhibit 53 and Exhibit 300, that are required. There's quite a bit of guidance from OMB on how to manage an agency's CPIC program and many agencies have a fairly mature understanding of how to integrate budgeting processes into their regular affairs - it's money, after all.

 

At a low level of maturity an EA group may not even exist and the CPIC process is managed by a budgeting group - forms that get filled out on a yearly basis are hurried together near the end of a budget year to justify the expenses that have occured at an agency, typically by the finance department or another non-IT-aware group.

 

Enterprise Architecture is also mandated by congress but there's a lot less prescriptive guidance from the federal government about EA - there's the Federal Segment Architecture Methodology (FSAM), though that's a method for segmenting architectures, not developing or maintainign them, and there's also the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), but that's a taxonomic classification methodology (with KPI metrics).

 

This is where industry standards such as TOGAF can be brought to bear. The Open Group Architecture Framework has a process for developing, growing and managing an enterprise architecture and fits nicely into the FEA and other federal processes. Since EA tends to be less mature than financial or budgeting processes, there exists some tension between EA and finance/budgeting at some agencies.

 

The information below is how TOGAF's Architecture Development Methodology (ADM) and CPIC's phases can work together.

 

 

CPIC Phases Mapped to TOGAF Phases

 

CPIC Phase	TOGAF Phases
Pre-Select	Preliminary, A, B, C, D
Select	E, F
Control	F, G
Evaluate	G, H
Steady State	H

 

 

Figure 1 CPIC, FEA mapped to TOGAF, Chinoy 2009

 

 

There're a lot of good genetics, genomics, and DTC testing bloggers out there and some have released their SNPs in the public domain. As I update the usability of of Visual SNP Chip, I figured a few 50k pngs of some of them would be interesting to look at (plus mine). 

The images are all of the same 50k chunks (the default setting), nothing larger (though one can take a larger chunk to view), and there's a combo of the v3 and v2 23andMe chip data (that's1m snps for the v3, vs the v2 600k snp max) so it's not exactly overlapping ranges.

In order, Aerts, Barrett, Chinoy, Fisher, Jostins, Khan, MacMillan, Morley, Pickrell, Plagnol, and Vorhaus.

Visual SNP Chip works by reading a local 23andMe dataset and rasterizing the SNP pairs into colored pixels. It uses HTML5 techniques to never send the 23andMe dataset over the internet and does all rendering on your own computer. (read more about Visual SNP Chip ...) The prominent bloggers have all graciously put their 23andMe datasets online under the Creative Commons 0 License, and I used those public datasets to make the images above.

23andMe is celebrating DNA Day (04/15) early with a sale!

Tomorrow, they're waiving the $199 fee when you sign up for their $9/mo service. Take advantage of it!

 

Celebrating DNA Day Early This Year! Although DNA Day is officially April 15th, we at 23andMe just couldn’t wait that long. So we’re celebrating a bit early with a big sale!  For a limited time, you can order a 23andMe kit for $0 up front, plus a 12-month commitment to our Personal Genome Service® at $9/month. This is down from the regular price of $199 plus $9/month.  Note that the 12-month subscription commitment is required to receive the sale price. If you buy the service as a gift, you can pay the full year's subscription at the time of purchase. You may also choose to order the service with no subscription requirement for $399.  Existing customers on our v2 genotyping platform can also take advantage of this sale to upgrade to the latest v3 platform for the same price by going to https://www.23andme.com/user/upgrade.  Once your sample has been processed, you’ll receive data on nearly 1 million places in your genome, information about your distant ancestry, and access to more than 180 health reports (optional). With the Personal Genome Service®, we’ll also help you connect with potential relatives to fill out your family tree and keep you up to date on the latest research linking genetics to your health and traits.

Visual SNP Chip displaying 1,987 bases (few enough that they could be displayed) and the resulting image.

A project of ours - timeline dashboarding of project progress - received some attention from the good folks at Intland who produce the Application Lifecycle Management software codeBeamer.  I wrote a blog piece for them about how we use the Simile Timeline widget, codeBeamer and Google Calendar to create an interactive timeline. Check out the post! We hope to put up a public version of the codeBeamer Timeline Builder soon!

During my TOGAF 9 training class, I was asked to do a SWOT (Strengths - Weaknesses - Opportunities - Threats) analysis of adopting EA at the USDA. John Polgreen, the TOGAF trainer, has placed the SWOT on his blog.

Timeline of Enterprise Architectures - Zachman FEA, TOGAF, Gartner EA, from 1987 to today.

After UR7 if you see the IE yellow I-bar "Internet Explorer has blocked this site from using an ActiveX control in an unsafe manner. As a result, this page might not display correctly." KB 976539 is for you.

The KB states that you can safely ignore the IBar and everything'll be fine. We noticed something else. Briefly, when the page loads, a little Outlook icon appears to the left of the Help menu on the CRM standard tool bar - "CRM for Outlook". This little visual blip keyed us off to one of the statements in the KB:

If Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook is installed but not configured, or if you are connecting to an organization other than the organization for which Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook is configured, you receive the following warning message in Internet Explorer:

After reconfiguring the CRM Outlook connection, the IBar warning disappeared.

Microsoft's Engineering for Enterprise (MS CRM E2) Team released a document that goes over options and considerations for field-level security (something that's not out of the box in CRM 4.0 and very often requested by clients) on Nov 11.

This white paper, Field-level Security in Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Options and Constraints, provides selected aspects of the conceptual application of the security model in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. While Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not provide for true field-level security, there are a number of options available for using supported custom logic to control of access to data at a more granular level than provided out of the box. This document discusses some of the key options and constraints available for implementing this type of solution.

Let's skim the beginning and the end:

From their Introduction....

Many businesses have sensitive data that should only be viewable or editable only by certain groups of users. While Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers the ability to limit access at the entity level, business requirements frequently include controlling access to and updating data at a more granular level. This business need is typically voiced through a customer request for field-level security, which would provide the ability to:

• Hide certain fields from particular groups of users
• Allow particular groups of users to view but not edit certain fields of an entity

While these capabilities are not provided directly by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, there are a number of options available for using supported custom logic to control of access to data at a more granular level. This document discusses some of the options available.

And from their Conclusion...

Although Dynamics CRM does not currently offer field-level security as a product feature, this paper has shown that it is possible to use the flexibility of the CRM platform to offer relatively rich capabilities.

For scenarios that require more granular control of access to data, it is worth considering these approaches although there is no one solution that meets all needs. Rather, there are a number of possible approaches that can be combined to offer the optimum balance of capability for the requirements of a particular implementation.

Remember, though, that all possible access channels need to be considered when providing field-level security. Offering restricted access in Entity Forms and Views but allowing Reports to access the restricted data is not a valid solution unless you can secure that channel by, for example, restricting access to that channel to authorized users. In other words, it is essential to consider the whole solution when addressing these types of requirements.

CRM 4.0 SDK 4.0.10 was released on 11/10/2009.

According to the notes, this release updated only the assemblies in the Bin folder. "Use these updated assemblies instead of the ones in the previous release of SDK 4.0.10."