IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The combination of new cloud-accessible, easily implemented customer relationship management technology coupled with mobility enables meaningful results.

It used to be that powerful computing resources were the exclusive domain of large cities with big budgets. However, the growing availability of affordable, cloud-accessible IT solutions is bringing the advantages of mobility to small and medium-sized municipalities. The result of this technical ubiquity: More and more U.S. citizens are reaping the benefits of innovative technology that allows local government fieldworkers to do their jobs more quickly and efficiently.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office announced on Thursday, Jan. 3, that the city is migrating desktop applications and email for 30,000 city employees across all city departments onto the Microsoft 365 cloud service -- a move that will reduce taxpayer dollars by $400,000 annually. The phased migration to the cloud is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Cloud adoption has been considered a cost-saving step for IT departments, but according to Chicago CIO Brett Goldstein, migrating email to the cloud also frees up time to focus on innovation elsewhere in the city.

Cloud and SOA will not only be used for internal development but for end-to-end solution development, said Ajay Budhraja, chief technology officer with a component of the Justice Department, who will give a keynote address on cloud and SOA trends April 3 at the 13th SOA for E-Government Conference.

Platform-as-a-service could be next. Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel has identified PaaS as “the next major value set for federal cloud computing, and it also aligns closely with his Shared Services initiative to knock down stovepipe software and save money,” said Kevin Jackson, general manager of NJVC cloud services and a co-author of the white paper "Platform as a Service (PaaS). What Is It? Why Is It So Important?"

The paper attempts to clarify some of the confusion around PaaS for federal IT buyers.

Kentucky faced a choice when it wanted to move to the next generation of its Tyler Technologies financial system: Switch all of its school districts to a different database engine, operating system and server, or move to the cloud.

"If we had gone forth with putting a new file server in 174 school districts with a new database engine, it would have been a lot more difficult for the average person in a school district to maintain," said David Couch, associate commissioner of the Office of Knowledge, Information and Data Services at the Kentucky Department of Education. "It would not have been a good experience, nor would it have been reliable."

The plan to reorganize IT services was proposed by County Executive Dow Constantine and approved on July 11 by the Metropolitan King County Council, according to the county.

While the changes were approved July 11, original plans to reorganize started in 2004, said King County CIO Bill Kehoe.

What may seem like the neighborly thing to do is actually a practice that can help cities save money on IT services: sharing.

When Melrose, Mass., moved forward with an IT infrastructure upgrade and data center consolidation in 2010 after receiving grant funding from the state, the city developed a scalable model to allow other cities to share its multitenant cloud platform.

Microsoft und Google versuchen, sich ein möglichst großes Stück von diesem Kuchen abzuschneiden. Dafür wird eine Armada an Verkaufsleuten beschäftigt, die Regierungsverantwortliche kontaktiert. Jeder Erfolg wird in Pressemitteilungen verbreitet. Einige der Ausschreibungen enden dagegen vor Gericht: So hat Google das US-Innenministerium verklagt, um einen rund 60 Millionen Dollar schweren Deal mit Microsoft zu verhindern.

As the National Association of Counties (NACo) reported, the partners have issued a request for qualification from national IT companies to implement their plans.

One such platform is OpenStack, created by NASA and Rackspace Hosting, a data storage solution provider. Launched in July 2010, OpenStack has grown to become a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing ubiquitous code for public and private clouds.

“We’re wondering if there isn’t an opportunity to aggregate the volume, drive some costs down and work more cooperatively,” Petty said. Oregon’s Geospatial Enterprise Office is responsible for about 30 terabytes of GIS storage. If the other states store a similar amount, the four-state consortium would spend a combined $15 million annually on GIS storage, the RFI says.

Business process management and other applications delivered through the cloud speak directly to VanRoekel's requirement to maximize information technology investments. Moreover, the cloud increases collaboration and the use of shared services.

The multiyear contract, valued at $1.2 million annually, will migrate the city and county’s 23,000 municipal employees onto Exchange Online, a move San Francisco CIO Jon Walton said will consolidate IT resources and cut costs.

“We’re very excited about this opportunity, not just about e-mail but what it means for the future of the city,” Walton said.

After seeing responses to a request for information from the Office of Information Resources and the company CedarCrestone, the colleges chose to partner with the state because it was willing to work with the colleges' unique consolidated effort, said Tom Danford, CIO of the Tennessee Board of Regents. But it would work with a forward-thinking commercial provider if the provider was willing to do the same.

St. Paul, Minn., is transitioning its 3,300 city email inboxes to the state’s Microsoft Office 365 cloud platform. The project, which should be complete by early June, will give the city 24-hour technical support supplied by the state and a more reliable communications system.

State CIOs have their heads in the cloud these days.

Cloud computing, data center consolidation and virtualization are among the top policy and technology issues that state CIOs face in 2011, according to a survey conducted last fall by the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO).

The survey found CIOs were interested in the cloud as a service delivery strategy in addition to a means for sharing resources, services and infrastructure.

At the NASCIO Annual Conference, Arkansas Chief Information Officer Yessica Jones explained how her state’s data center consolidation has set the stage for making smart choices about what’s going to the cloud.

A theme among tech leaders at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Annual Conference was that states are now moving from cloud first to “cloud smart.” Like many states, Arkansas, having completed its data center consolidation, is now evaluating what is ideal to move to the cloud and what is better left on-premises.

The contract, which will give state workers access to Office 365, will provide compliance with the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) and federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) security standards.

This ability to meet stringent security standards was one of the main reasons Texas chose Microsoft as a vendor over its competitors, said Todd Kimbriel, director of e-government for the Texas Department of Information Resources.

Unique public-private partnership develops contracting language to help make the cloud work for the public sector.

With perennially challenging budget environments and fierce competition for funding, government is well known for stretching legacy technology systems past their useful life, and then paying to maintain what should have been put down years before. But it isn’t necessarily the fault of those in government IT. When faced with the dilemma of struggling to procure the latest functional tech or scratching together the funding to simply keep things running status quo, it can be hard to tip the scales in the right direction.

To some geeks in government, Google’s 2009 defeat of Microsoft to run e-mail for Los Angeles was akin to Luke Skywalker’s blow to the Empire in Star Wars. By October 2010, Microsoft struck back, signing an e-mail contract with New York City, moving 100,000 public servants to its cloud. In 2011, San Francisco also took e-mail to Microsoft’s cloud and Wyoming became the first state to use the Google Apps for Government suite. These are just a few of the higher-profile examples.