Happy New Year to all.
As we begin the new calendar year, our budgets are still a mess, all new initiatives are on hold, and we continue to find ourselves in "maintenance" mode. There are a number of technologies that would benefit our organization and the provision of service delivery to our community, however the capital needed to invest in these technologies does not exist. With some down time over the holidays I started to ponder the potential impact of the recession if it does last long into 2009 and into 2010, and what the implications are for local government IT.
Most of use have already explored having our applications hosted or the SaaS model, but what about taking the service model a step further and applying it in some fashion to data centers and networks for example. Generally speaking IT spending in local government is not on par with the private sector. In my case the City IT budget is approximately 2.5% of the total general fund budget. Tax dollars are used by the City, County, K-12, Community College, and surrounding towns to build, maintain, and support separate data centers, networks, IT departments, and licensing of applications. Wouldn't IT dollars be better spent on building one network infrastructure for all of these entities? Couldn't one ERP application be licensed and used for all of these agencies?
I think that you get where I am going with this. By pooling resources and eliminating redundancy of effort economies of scale can be realized and each governmental agency would be better positioned to use technology as a means of reducing costs and providing a higher level of service to internal and external customers. Yes there are tremendous political hurdles to clear, but given the fact that budget and revenue shortfalls will be the norm for the foreseeable future, the political will might be building for moving towards such a solution. In my simple mind, as an IT professional, tax payer, and civil servant this makes sense on so many levels.
I know that indeed there is some consolidation of this type happening around the country. I would be interested to hear from anyone with a success story or lessons learned from such an effort. I believe that this service model is the future of public sector IT and that the current economic conditions could be the catalyst to make this happen sooner.
Desperate times call for drastic measures - well maybe. I prefer to believe that every crisis provides an opportunity. In this case it is an opportunity to do the right thing.
As we begin the new calendar year, our budgets are still a mess, all new initiatives are on hold, and we continue to find ourselves in "maintenance" mode. There are a number of technologies that would benefit our organization and the provision of service delivery to our community, however the capital needed to invest in these technologies does not exist. With some down time over the holidays I started to ponder the potential impact of the recession if it does last long into 2009 and into 2010, and what the implications are for local government IT.
Most of use have already explored having our applications hosted or the SaaS model, but what about taking the service model a step further and applying it in some fashion to data centers and networks for example. Generally speaking IT spending in local government is not on par with the private sector. In my case the City IT budget is approximately 2.5% of the total general fund budget. Tax dollars are used by the City, County, K-12, Community College, and surrounding towns to build, maintain, and support separate data centers, networks, IT departments, and licensing of applications. Wouldn't IT dollars be better spent on building one network infrastructure for all of these entities? Couldn't one ERP application be licensed and used for all of these agencies?
I think that you get where I am going with this. By pooling resources and eliminating redundancy of effort economies of scale can be realized and each governmental agency would be better positioned to use technology as a means of reducing costs and providing a higher level of service to internal and external customers. Yes there are tremendous political hurdles to clear, but given the fact that budget and revenue shortfalls will be the norm for the foreseeable future, the political will might be building for moving towards such a solution. In my simple mind, as an IT professional, tax payer, and civil servant this makes sense on so many levels.
I know that indeed there is some consolidation of this type happening around the country. I would be interested to hear from anyone with a success story or lessons learned from such an effort. I believe that this service model is the future of public sector IT and that the current economic conditions could be the catalyst to make this happen sooner.
Desperate times call for drastic measures - well maybe. I prefer to believe that every crisis provides an opportunity. In this case it is an opportunity to do the right thing.
Not related to this post, but I wonder if you would comment on the trend to mobile computing by municipal employees. I'm interested in issues such as rugged computers.