IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Leaders are preparing technology initiatives and strategies that should help the state cope with further budget cuts in future years, officials told a conference of technology industry representatives hosted by TechAmerica, a lobbying organization representing the U.S. technology industry. The featured series of speakers shed light on recent legislative and policy efforts involving technology in the Golden State.

Led by Wyoming, states are ready to pioneer MMIS as a service.

The Wyoming state government already has considerable experience with cloud-based services. It uses Google Apps for Government, NEOGOV for human resources and is looking at Salesforce.com for customer relationship management. But as its Department of Health prepares to issue an RFP to replace its Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), all eyes in the Medicaid IT sector are on Wyoming because it will be the first time a state has tried to move away from an expensive custom-developed system to an MMIS-as-a-service approach.

The portal was launched in 2009 with the objective of being a one-stop shop for US government departments and agencies looking for cloud services to reduce their costs and increase efficiency. Its offerings included business and productivity applications, infrastructure services and social software solutions.

For government, as in industry, privacy and data security are paramount.

The transition to the cloud is already well underway in federal IT circles and with it, folks like John Kropf, the deputy chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security, are spending long hours developing policies and safeguards to keep sensitive data secure as the traditional silos of federal IT infrastructure are torn down.

In 2008, Pueblo County, Colo., began delivering cloud-computing-style hosted county assessor and treasurer software services to six other counties. The strategy either stabilized or reduced costs for all involved. The arrangement actually became a revenue generator for Pueblo County, which hired three extra employees for the sole purpose of delivering this service to the other counties. Municipalities receiving the software services pay a fee to Pueblo County and insist customer satisfaction is higher than with the private vendors they used in the past. Conejos, Costilla, Alamosa, Rio Grande, Saguache and San Juan are the other six counties participating.

In 2008, Pueblo County, Colo., began delivering cloud-computing-style hosted county assessor and treasurer software services to six other counties. The strategy either stabilized or reduced costs for all involved. The arrangement actually became a revenue generator for Pueblo County, which hired three extra employees for the sole purpose of delivering this service to the other counties. Municipalities receiving the software services pay a fee to Pueblo County and insist customer satisfaction is higher than with the private vendors they used in the past. Conejos, Costilla, Alamosa, Rio Grande, Saguache and San Juan are the other six counties participating.

Last week the GSA announced contracts with 11 companies to provide cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to all levels of government. Under the five-year blanket purchase agreement, IaaS offerings available through Apps.gov will feature storage, virtualization and Web hosting solutions as part of an initiative to help agencies realize cost savings, efficiencies and modernization without burning up capital resources to expand existing infrastructure.

The Senate Appropriations Committee recently voted to reduce fiscal 2011 spending on key Obama administration information technology initiatives, including e-government and cloud computing.

However, senate appropriators boosted fiscal 2011 spending for federal agencies to share innovative Web services, according to a report in NextGov.

Proponents of cloud computing today gave members of Congress an update on federal initiatives designed to achieve cost-savings and make the computing model more secure for wider agency adoption. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement held a hearing that allowed a panel of government officials and another panel from the private sector to speak and take questions.

The committee's interest in cloud computing reflected a new awareness within the legislative body of it's growing importance, although some members expressed skepticsm about how quickly cloud' computing might be adopted in the face of bureaucratic obstacles.

GCE's seven-year contract with Labor, worth $50 million, ties together the department's legacy travel, grants and procurement systems, and its financial application into one Web-accessible platform. The system, however, technically does not meet the government's definition of on-demand cloud computing, observers said. Cloud computing implies flexibility and elasticity of services, which is reflected in a payment-per-use setup. Nonetheless, Labor's new framework offers other benefits, such as a fast, easy, cost-efficient and secure rollout, they added.

That’s the idea behind Utah City Data, a benchmarking project that helps participating cities and towns derive intelligence from a private cloud of city-by-city government data. In November, the project launched a new online database — accessible only to participants — with the hope that it will take the project to the next level.

Data such as demographics, property taxes, tax revenue and tax revenue per capita is collected and archived in the database. Registered users can browse by cluster, which is a group of similar cities; by county; or can look up a particular city.

The survey, conducted during the first two weeks of April by the nonprofit Public Technology Institute (PTI), aggregated the opinions of 93 local government IT executives. The findings revealed that an additional 19 percent of local governments plan to implement some form of cloud computing within the next 12 months, while 35 percent don't intend to do so at all.

Cloud computing was on most government agencies’ radar before September, of course. The move to the cloud is driven by many powerful forces. Complexity of systems is rising. Budgets are tightening. Data center capacity is near the breaking point. And while modern systems are clearly designed around a post-PC architecture, current licensing terms on many PC-class systems force the government to buy licenses for functions that are poorly used, if used at all.

Saddled with an annual $75 billion price tag for IT infrastructure and related resources, the U.S. federal government is eager to find new ways to slash its IT expenditures. With promises of cutting IT infrastructure costs, diminishing vendor dependence and reducing licensing fees, both cloud computing and open source software fit the bill.

Government information technology procurement has been largely conducted on an independent basis, with each federal agency determining its own needs and acquiring the infrastructure -- both hardware and software -- to meet those needs. However, the procurement landscape may change significantly with the latest breakthrough in IT -- cloud computing.

Dr Quach Tuan Ngoc, Director General, ICT Department, Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) told FutureGov that his department had benefited from using cloud computing. In a document released recently, the ICT department has instructed local education and training departments to shift to cloud computing. “We use Google and Viettel services,” said Ngoc.

At FutureGov Forum Vietnam 2012, held last week in Hanoi, senior government IT decision makers shared their different perspectives about the government cloud, and how ready Vietnam was for such centralised infrastrucutre.

Vu Duy Loi, Director of the Information Technology Centre under the Party Central Committee said that it is too soon to apply government cloud in Vietnam, emphasising that it is necessary to re-organise the technical infrastructure first.

Chinh said that with the use of cloud, the ministry will be able to address its “fragmented IT infrastructure” that has data centres scattered across departments and local government offices.

Also keen to share inter-agency information through the cloud is the Information and Communication Technology Centre, Ministry of Science and Technology. Bui Dac Phuc, Deputy Director of the agency said that they already have a 1-year project with a budget of US$2 million approved.

The Ministry of Information and Communications has determined that the cloud computing platform is a key part of telecommunications infrastructure to focus on in the coming years. The ministry has also defined cloud computing as the digital infrastructure for the development of a digital government, digital economy and digital society.