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Testimony
before the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee
on Oversight & Investigations United
States House of Representatives Submitted
by Scott
C. Sherman Director
of Advanced Technology Architectures EMC
Corporation April
4, 2001 Chairman
Buyer, Congressman Snyder, and distinguished members of the
subcommittee, I am Scott Sherman, Director of Advanced Technology
Architectures at EMC Federal Systems.
It is an honor and a distinct pleasure to be here this morning.
EMC
is the world leader in enterprise information storage systems,
software, networks and services, and the leading provider of secure
information storage infrastructure in the world.
It is these information infrastructures that determine an
organization’s ability to deliver new services, and their ability to
adapt to the explosive growth in information and revolutionary
technologies. With
revenues of $9B in 2000, EMC stores two-thirds of the world’s
critical information, and has developed storage infrastructure
solutions for the majority of the world’s largest banks and
financial institutions, airlines, telecommunication companies,
transportation companies, Internet Service Providers, educational
institutions, and regional and national government agencies. EMC
has revolutionized enterprise Information Technology (IT) strategies,
and developed unprecedented interoperability with all information
systems, sub-systems and emerging technologies, to deliver complete
enterprise information frameworks that dynamically adapt to multiple,
mission critical requirements. Based
in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, EMC was founded in 1979, currently has
over 16,000 employee’s nation-wide (23,500 worldwide), and offices
in 43 states. We
are in the midst of explosive information growth. A recent University of California-Berkley study indicated
that we will create as much information digitally over the next two
years as we have created in the entire existence of man-kind.
Combine this with the revolution in technology and services,
exponential capabilities in information storage, exploding bandwidth,
wireless computing, and we have revolutionary new ways to leverage
information in order to deliver services never before thought
possible. In
the commercial sector, high performance organizations have shifted
their IT architectures in response to these trends, and employed
standardized, enterprise-wide IT infrastructure.
These organizations have created consolidated corporate
information databases which dramatically ease the sharing of data
between different business functions, standardize and simplify data
management processes, guarantee the protection of data against loss or
corruption, and improve management decision-making.
This same technology can be utilized by the VA to obtain an
efficient and unified view of each veteran, to include all of the
pertinent information regarding the healthcare and benefits that are
provided to him or her by the VA: ONE VA.
One
of the driving forces behind enterprise infrastructure is the
recognition by the world’s global 2000 companies that to stay
competitive they must insure that all corporate activities are focused
on ultimately providing high customer satisfaction. This
“customer-centric” business architecture must be matched by an IT
architecture that puts information of the customer, and the business,
at its center. This “information centric” approach makes possible
efficient information sharing, data management and high-speed
communication among diverse business systems.
The promise of IT to deliver massive operational efficiencies
is finally being realized in high performance organizations through an
enterprise, information centric approach that enables a single,
unified view of the customer, or business issue.
The
ability to capture and integrate all customer data from anywhere in
the organization, to analyze and consolidate it into standardized
form, and then to distribute the results to various systems and
customer contact points across the enterprise is the challenge that
the VA faces. This
challenge is made more difficult due to the advances made early on
with the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DCHP), and later the
Veterans’ Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA).
Although wonderful examples of integration and standardization,
the ability to rapidly adapt these systems to changing health care
technology and requirements is difficult. Commercial
organizations have demonstrated that this challenge is best met by
implementing an enterprise architecture that integrates all of a
company’s systems and places information at the center.
Such architecture is based upon enterprise storage, which
provides consolidated scalable support to multiple operating systems
(mainframe computers, Unix systems, and Windows NT), on a single
storage platform. Enterprise
storage infrastructure can be centralized in the data center, or it
can be distributed across the enterprise via an enterprise network;
however, enterprise information storage is the technical foundation
for an information-centric infrastructure. This
architecture eases information sharing across different business
functions and fast communication across all enterprise systems.
It provides better information protection by isolating the
complexities of data management.
It provides high availability as a result of online backup and
disaster recovery. It
provides cost-effective data management from centralized,
cross-platform management tools. Finally, it provides a more flexible business environment
that helps companies provide better customer service because they now
have a complete, manageable view of all their information. This
architecture consolidates information from many systems within a
centrally managed storage platform, reducing the need to extract and
replicate data among many systems.
The enterprise storage approach also creates tremendous
efficiencies through the ability to “mirror” (a mirror is a
real-time copy) all of the enterprise information.
This “mirrored” copy can be created in the background to
serve as an independently addressable physical copy, created for
analysis, decision support, application development, or to run
simultaneous tasks in parallel. Enterprise
storage’s powerful information protection capabilities also help
avoid the costly impact of outages.
By replicating information at the physical storage level, you
isolate the complexities of data maintenance, online backup and
disaster recovery. The
“mirrored” data serves
for instant back up and recovery in the event of a planned, or
unplanned, outage. The
VA’s operational database for benefit information, for example,
could be maintained in Kokomo, Indiana, and “mirrored” to a remote
disaster recovery site in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In the event of an interruption at the primary site, full
operation can resume at the secondary site virtually instantaneously,
as opposed to the days or weeks that are typically required from
“tape-based” recovery solutions.
Because enterprise storage consolidates heterogeneous systems
at the storage system level, decoupled from platform-specific anchors,
disaster management is centralized, and disaster restart can be
accomplished for all platforms at once.
This is far simpler than with server-centric storage, where
backup and restore is at the application, database or server level. This
is the Information Technology that has enabled our nation to enjoy the
extraordinary e-commerce revolution, by guaranteeing “24 x
forever” availability of service. Enterprise
storage allows centralized information management across the
organization through a common set of procedures. This is more
cost-effective than IT staffs having to learn separate procedures for
every database, operating system, or server.
When new applications or platforms are added to an enterprise
storage environment, existing staff are already trained and competent
to manage the information. Administrators, then, are far more
productive in managing enterprise storage.
Such
flexibility helps companies keep pace with rapid business changes,
preparing them for virtually any challenge. Finally,
enterprise storage allows data movement from all systems into a
central repository—the data warehouse, creating a single, uniform
view of the customer that can be shared throughout the extended
organization. The
Department of Veterans Affairs is currently utilizing some of the
technology discussed today. The Austin Automation Center (AAC) has been using EMC
hardware for several years. In
the last few months, they have begun acquiring and utilizing the
software tools that will allow the creation of an enterprise storage
environment at the AAC. But
the AAC is just one part of the VA’s information technology
infrastructure. In order
to create a true enterprise storage infrastructure across the entire
Department, the VA will have to create and implement matching
enterprise storage standards throughout the rest of the Department
(i.e. VHA, VBA, NCA). By
doing so, the VA will be able to harness the information necessary to
create a total continuum of care for the veteran.
This means from
the time each veteran begins realizing their VA benefits, information
would be available whenever and wherever the information is required
in order to efficiently provide service to the veteran.
Finally, the obstacles to achieving this enterprise, information centric, vision, are often times just as challenging culturally as they are technologically. The decision, authority and ability to develop an enterprise approach resides at the “CEO” level, and is typically met with significant opposition by departmental leadership who perceive the release of “their” information and supporting systems as encroachment into their domain. Commercially, it is EMC’s experience that few, if any, high performance organizations achieve an enterprise approach without a dictator-like commitment, which departmental leaders must accept regardless of the organizational and cultural changes that result. This cultural hurdle is often times more limiting than available technology, and just as frequently holds organizations back from realizing the massive operational efficiencies that have for so long been the promise of IT. Secretary Principi’s statements during his confirmation hearings earlier this year paint a very optimistic picture in this regard, and I am sure veterans across our nation are excited about the vision, experience and leadership that he brings to the VA. Back to Witness List |