Carl Drescher: January 2009 Archives

"Its not easy being green.  Spending each day the color of the leaves"  - Kermit the Frog

I am sure that the economy has stalled Green IT efforts in most organizations as is the case with us.  Historically, in lean times such as these, our budget situation will not improve for anywhere from 12-24 months after the economy starts to recover.  For us this means that our major Green efforts will not begin again any time in the forseeable future. By major I am refering to those projects that require a capital investment such as new equipment purchases for server consolodation, virtual desktops etc.  Our plan has changed to move forward with efforts that do not require a large upfront investment but that will still reduce our overall energy use and limit electronic waste in our landfills.

Some of the simple things or low hanging fruit we are picking are:

• maximizing our investments in server virtualization - we are looking to replace as many single servers as we can and move the applications and databases onto existing virtual environments thus eliminating racks of servers
  

• using existing desktop management tools to force logoff and powering down of desktop machines after business hours

• working with local non profits and K-12 to reuse desktops.  Linux runs well on older processors and the number of open source applications has increased tremendously in the last few years to make this a very viable combination for education and business

• looking for ways to increase telecommuting.  My city has had a policy in place for a number for years and we are starting to see more interest in telecommuting to save on office space use, etc.
  

• Replacing any CRT monitors with LCD displays

I know there are other things being done to continue to realize power savings etc. I am interested in hearing what others are doing during these challenging times to continue to move their Green efforts forward.

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.