Andrea DiMaio

Today the UK Cabinet Office released the much awaited document describing the UK IT strategy for the next 10 years: Government ICT Strategy: smarter, cheaper, greener.
This is a very comprehensive and well structured strategy document, which lays out the priorities for the UK government and the broader public sector in rather clear terms. Unlike the [...]

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Not surprisingly Vivek Kundra, US Federal CIO, has been named CIO of the Year by Information Week.
I met him for the first time a bit more than a year ago, when he was CTO in DC and launched the first application contest (appsfordemocracy) as part of his early move toward open government. He has been [...]

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Almost inevitably the last few days of the year feature an impressive number of lists – on newspapers, magazines, web sites, radio and TV programs – about the best and the worst that happened during the year that is about to end.
As 2009 is my first full year as a blogger, I could not resist [...]

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I keep having conversations with government clients who are considering to either use or rationalize cloud-based services. By “rationalizing” I mean to provide definitions, frameworks, procurement vehicles, sourcing guidance, and so forth to facilitate the use of of cloud-based services by government agencies across an entire jurisdiction.
In both cases I still sense a significant degree [...]

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Over the last several years we have witnessed a move towards greater consolidation and centralization of IT assets and IT-intensive processes across several jurisdictions. Some of these have taken the form of true shared services, where different government organizations use and jointly manage those assets, while others have moved more decisively toward sheer centralization, where [...]

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A few days ago I came across a request for proposals issued by the US Air Force Materiel Command to purchase 2,200 Sony Playstation 3 (PS3).
For how surprising this may look like, the  justification is indeed very clear. The Air Force is interested in expanding an earlier pilot where it has been using 300 PS3 [...]

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I spent a good part of yesterday at Gartner Symposium in Orlando talking to government clients, moderating a vendor panel and finally running an analyst-user roundtable, all on the topic of cloud computing.
Two main take-aways for me:

Government clients are confused as to (1) whether vendor offerings really meet their security requirements, (2) which workloads could [...]

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Yesterday, I addressed our audience at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando on cloud computing in government about the possible competition between vendor cloud providers (like Google, Amazon, Terremark, and so forth) and government infrastructure owners (such as NASA Ames, DISA, NBC). I have blogged about this before and I also asked a related question to [...]

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On October 20 at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando I will be moderating Cloud Computing in Government: A Vendor Perspective, a panel with five vendors discussing the relevance and roadmap to cloud computing for government organizations.
Vendors in the panel (in strict alphabetical order) are:

CSC
Google
Microsoft
Salesforce.com
Terremark

Their choice is neither reflective of their position in the market nor [...]

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The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is one of the government organizations in the US that can be or aims to become a private cloud service provider. Their Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) was launched a few months ago to allow on-demand access to infrastructure to develop and test new custom applications.
Now RACE is available [...]

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