AV Technology - February/March 2009 - (Page 37) keep pace with demand. This approach is much more likely to get support from network transport stakeholders than largescale changes and closed pilots that cannot accurately predict network impact. The challenges of bringing new AV capabilities into an agency are numerous and diverse, but alpha capabilities can eliminate or reduce the impact of several common political and infrastructure challenges. On the political side, it is much easier to get buy in on a limited capability for a small user group than to get agreement on massive changes to the network. It is also easier to justify a project that has not been thoroughly planned and validated since the alpha capability is lower cost than an enterprise solution and can reveal valuable project information, including realistic costs and impacts that often cannot be accurately predicted by the best project plans. Alpha capabilities also eliminate the infrastructure risks associated with standing up new capabilities in an operational environment. Lower cost means some more risk can be taken, but, more important, you and your engineers can take the time to refine the system and get it working properly before taking it to the masses. With the understanding that they will not have full capabilities and there will be issues, the alpha user community can contribute to capability refinement by sharing their finding with the AV team through user community wikis and blogs. This makes the users part of the solution and development process, and turns their focus from complaints to constructive feedback. This approach can also work between agencies, and could be transferred from government to industry. By associating alpha capability infrastructures, many of the risks that create internal resistance to external connections can be reduced. Smaller scale alpha testing can be the answer to walking the fine line between interconnectivity desired by many agencies and the need to protect internal systems from corruption or outages. Your AV and IT consultants, contractors, integrators, and equipment manufacturers can provide some of the best supporting materials and ideas to help you identify opportunities for alpha capabilities. In fact, the idea to use alpha capability pilots confebruary | march 2009 | 37 nected to real operational capabilities was recently mentioned to me by a manufacturing partner’s engineer during a technology exchange meeting. While the concept of alpha capabilities is nothing new, the application of alpha capabilities to overcome the challenges of integrating AV capabilities on IP networks may be new to some of us. Nonetheless, a lot of smart people are already using alpha environments to test and refine capabilities. I’m not suggesting that it is the only or even the best way to bring new AV capabilities onto your agency’s network. I do however, suggest, that alpha capabilities should be considered as another option to help you find the solutions that will meet your agency’s unique mission requirements. Gary L. Hall, CTS-D, CTS-I, is a program management execution officer at the NationalGeospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Bethesda, MD. He is also an adjunct instructor at the InfoComm Academy and can be reached at garylhall@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are in no way officially endorsed by NGA, and do not necessarily represent the views of the United States. http://www.hallresearch.com http://www.hallresearch.com
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