The move of IT executives across industry sectors and from IT providers to IT users is a sign of healthy job market dynamics. In all these cases, though, one remains with the fundamental question about what this gifted individuals would have accomplished, had they stayed in their position a bit longer than the high-level strategy definition phase. A cynical reading is that their move came after they crated an interest and a high-level framework for cloud adoption but before being involved in any actual vendor selection process, which could have made any such move more difficult or certainly target of criticism.

I hope they will convey to their new employers a clearer view of what public sector customers need and expect. Saleforce.com is quite an interesting case, as they have not launched any “government cloud”, unlike many other large players like Google, Microsoft, IBM and – more recently – Amazon. This has not made them any less successful in terms of government references so far, so it will be interesting to watch whether Vivek will be salesforce’s evangelist for the use of public cloud in government, or will be the government’s evangelist inside salesforce to make them change attitude toward a government cloud.

Personally, I’d like the former over the latter, as I believe that the full value of cloud computing can be realized only on a public cloud scale.

The note stated that

While government agencies and departments are looking at shared services as a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency, some of the potentially shareable services will be supported by cloud-based solutions

and that

While not suggesting that government organizations that are currently engaged in devising a shared-service agreement among themselves are doomed, it is important to understand where the cloud will impact government shared services and where it will not and when.

providing advice about which types of shared services were likely to be challenged (or “obscured”) by cloud-based services, which ones would have a chance to provide sustainable value, and which ones would be an intermediate step toward more centralized services (where the difference between shared and centralized is that in the former clients do have a say by participating in the governance process, while in the latter they are just clients).

This being said, it does not look like governments have been taking much notice. There are quite a few shared service initiatives (or strategies) that focus on IT infrastructure services, which that are presumably seen as a commodity by most prospective clients. Examples include the Canadian initiative to consolidate a whole-of-government infrastructure and run it as a centralized service, or the more recent US federal “Shared First” strategy (a Gartner research note is being prepared), which is looking at commodity IT services as easy wins for shared services, despite some of them being already targeted through an earlier “Cloud First” initiative.

On the other hand, according to NextGov, the US Congress is directing the Department of Defense to use commercial cloud computing services rather than those provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

As stated in the congressional record dated December 12, 2011:

Not later than April 1, 2012, the Chief Information Officer of the Department shall submit to the congressional defense committees a performance plan for a reduction in the resources required for data centers and information systems technologies Department-wide [including] Migration of Defense data and government-provided services from Department owned and operated data centers to cloud computing services generally available within the private sector that provide a better capability at a lower cost with the same or greater degree of security

I assume this will be subject to negotiation and interpretation, but exemplifies quite well the potential – or, better, the actual – conflict between cloud computing and shared services.

Anybody who is familiar with the complexity of government IT (and very much so in the defense environment) knows quite well that migrating to any cloud solution, and even more so when commercially provided, requires much more than turning a key and pulling a plug. But the real question here is whether shared services at an infrastructure, commodiity level have a sufficiently long shelf life to allow the expected returns on the investment to materialize: in fact, also getting the shared service levels and governance mechanisms right is far from trivial.

The race between shared services and cloud will be interesting to watch, as shared service providers move up the value chain (from infrastructure to applications) and commercial cloud-based offerings mature along that same value chain. What is important is not to be obsessed with either, but to create fair conditions for departments and agencies to procure the service they need at the best value for money from the most appropriate service provider.

On December 6 the New Zealand government published a Registration of Interest notice for suppliers who want to assist with defining a business case for cloud computing in government. Indeed a sensible approach. Also, there is no obsession with cloud. In fact they say

While the programme is considering the feasibility of moving to a ‘cloud,’ it is imperative that we maintain future upgrade options for our current technology platforms, and provide certainty to agencies ahead of key dates for license renewals.

The purpose is clear

This is a fact-finding mission; we want to engage with both vendors and agencies to discover what’s possible. There are some very real challenges in this kind of ambitious programme, and we want to make sure we’ve got robust answers to them.

and there is no intention to impact investment cycles and the normal course of business for any of the 32 agencies.

Interesting to compare this approach to what we have seen elsewhere in the past. The UK government has engaged large vendors through the Intellect group, rather than going through an RoI and issued two versions of its G-Cloud strategy (before and after the last elections). The US government has aggressively pursued cloud through the early establishment of an application store, a couple of tenders for IaaS and for email, and the establishment of a common resource for certfication and accreditation of service providers (FedRAMP). Australia has developed a strategy mostly with internal resources, but with an open consultation process.

New Zealand starts from the business case, asking very simple questions: does it makes sense? Where? For whom? Migrating how?

Let’s the vendors walk the talk. Isn’t it brilliant?

As I did last time, I found some of her views about that quite refreshing, if compared to what many gov 2.0 and cloud enthusiast keep stating. In particular, as we chatted about the arguably diminished impetus around gov 2.0 after the change of government, she agreed that, while the lack of a specific cabinet member dealing with IT is a factor, the very nature of gov 2.0 requires it to be geared toward the solution of particular problems rather than pursued as a desirable platform. Openness has great value in itself, but needs to be proven on a case by case basis, and that’s not been the case yet, at least in a demonstrably sustainable fashion.

Kate also showed a down-to-Earth appreciation of cloud computing hype and opportunities, proving once again that she is an incredibly switched on politician.

It is quite clear that, while the political drive on open government and gov 2.0 remains important, the ball is now in the departments’ and agencies’ hands to use these as essential means to achieve outcomes and solve problems, rather than a desirable attribute that gets discarded as soon as tougher and more urgent priorities emerge.

The relatively predictable budgetary situation for the Australian government, which is tightening its belt to achieve a surplus but is not imposing any draconian cut to agencies and programs, could be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it may still have room for funding innovation, and a curse because it may not offer those opportunities for radical thinking driven by the lack of any other traditional solution to problems.

There seems to be a trend with government IT executives who spend a fair amount of their time pushing for change, and then leave somebody else in charge of that change. In the case of Vivek, the change has happened well into the second half of the term, when there is relatively little time left to deliver on some of the objectives in ways that generate political capital for the re-election campaign. But Bill’s departure has happened at a still early stage of the Cameron government, and very shortly after publishing the strategic implementation plan including the much-anticipated cloud strategy.

It is quite possible that the skills required to trigger change and to lead change are different, although I would argue that – at a whole of government level – a blend of clout and negotiation abilities is required at both stages. Most likely, these are personal decisions motivated by the desire to leverage early accomplishments. But they can also be read as a lack of confidence in the achievability of what they have planned.

Are we going to see more relays between visionary government CIOs and IT executives, and execution-oriented ones? And if so how are either going to be held accountable, as they can always say it was the other person’s fault?

Today many governments around the world are either mandating or pursuing or planning the establishment of shared services as a way to reduce operational costs. Be it infrastructure, applications or entire business processes, it is quite easy to build a business case for why services should be common inside a particular jurisdiction, rather than duplicated in each and every agency or department.

On the other hand, it appears that shared services are having a hard time. Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria have all had their fair share of issues with shared services, and this is happening quite consistently in other parts of the world. More recently, many have been looking at the bold consolidation decision by the Canadian federal government, which has set a rather aggressive timeframe to consolidate over 300 data centers into 20 and over 100 email systems into one.

There is no doubt that duplication of services and spending across different government agencies makes little sense. But experience shows that there is insufficient attention to the governance aspects (agencies want to have a say in how the shared services are structured) and – more recently – to technology evolution that is making some of the technology that is being targeted through shared services more and more commoditized.

The challenge is no longer to put one organization in charge of delivering shared services, but to look at how to support agencies in efficiently buying the same service from external service providers. In this respect, I am impressed with how New Zealand is moving to support agencies in buying infrastructure-as-a-service, by selecting preferred vendors that agencies can buy from. This is not dissimilar from how GSA in the US and the UK Cabinet Office are doing, but with an important difference: while in the UK and in US there is a data center consolidation initiative funning in parallel to the cloud one (and agencies may choose either cloud or the consolidated data center), New Zealand seems to be going for cloud only, still leaving agencies free to choose within the boundaries of a framework contract

This balance between control and choice is at the basis of the success (or lack thereof) of future consolidation and shared service initiatives.

I find it quite an accurate term to describe what’s going on in other jurisdictions. CIOs and IT leaders either feel or are compelled to adopt cloud, and it takes a while to reset the expectations and make people reflect on the fact that cloud is just another sourcing and delivery model and if it is not appropriate to one’s requirements, so be it. In this respect CIOs from Australia and New Zealand, at all levels of government, seem to get what the cloud is and to appreciate that, given the scale of the country, there will be significant limitations to mission-critical deployments

Let’s hope that this down-to-Earth, laid-back approach will get more traction well beyond Oceania.

In both Orlando and Barcelona I had the opportunity to discuss cloud computing and the use of social media in government, as well as how to use and manage technology to make governments more affordable and sustainable. These look like top concerns also here in Australia.

It seems to me that now more than ever is the time to re-imagine the role of IT both in the public and the private sector.  For those who weren’t able to attend this year’s Symposium/ITxpo 2011 and missed the keynote, check out the video highlights and related research here.

In some cases, these clouds are seen as the end result of a consolidation process resulting from a decision to centralize IT infrastructure across multiple entities, while in other cases they are seen as an alternative to the current, often mainframe-based system to increase agility and reduce cost.

Let’s start with the latter first. In one case, an organizations that deals with periodic workload peaks assumed that going cloud would make their infrastructure cheaper. If it is a private cloud, and you are the only user, you still have to size your infrastructure on the peak requirements. The only way to use a smaller infrastructure is either to distribute those peaks better across the organization (which would be a business and ultimately regulatory decision in their case), or rely on external infrastructure (e.g. virtual private cloud) provided by an external supplier (either some government central entity or a commercial organization). Unfortunately in their case neither was an option, so the question remains: would they save money?

The former case – i.e. the relation between infrastructure consolidation and cloud – is also interesting. People are struggling with whether to create a private cloud by first colocating and then virtualizing existing servers, or by starting from a greenfield data center and gradually migrating workloads and decommissioning servers. However the real question behind is the following: should the resulting data center(s) be just a private cloud? Or should IT services be made available in a variety of ways, cloud being one (and gradually the most important), but not the only one? What if a department still needs a hosting service, or a co-location service?

So I can’t help observing that sometimes people self-inflict (or self’-prescribe?) cloud even when there is no clear need to.

We also probed him on two topics that are quite pertinent to government clients, at least judging by the interest they showed through session attendance and analyst meetings. The first one was about the mission control center that they have realized, and is supposed to work as a situation room to monitor all sorts of logistical and safety emergency throughout the event. It recalled me f what the city of Rio did recently in preparation for the Soccer World Cup. I asked Gerry whether he sees something like that as the kernel for a wider “city operations control center”, which would be a key component for a so-called smart city. After explaining the role this plays for the Olympics, he also highlighted that these are quite expensive endeavors, and are justified only in the context of major sporting or political events. This is hardly sustainable in the day-to-day operation of city. Personally I found this refreshing, as we try to tell our clients about how both affordability and sustainability are becoming very important attributes for technology-intensive solutions in the public sector.

The other question was about cloud. I had just spent the entire morning discussing cloud computing with a number of clients, many of which were somewhat pushed by the management in their organizations (or even senior political leaders) to look into cloud-based solutions. Very rationally, Gerry shared how – given the high-profile, one-off nature of the event – they need to be extremely cautious and risk averse, and tend to minimize changes on core. mission-critical applications from previous games, besides what is of course necessary for technology refresh or changed requirements (see also Computer World article). They have actually frozen the hardware configuration quite some time ago, purchased user devices and servers and stored in a warehouse, testing them thoroughly since. While recognizing that cloud would provide an ideal model to support a temporary enterprise like the Olympics, he felt that the move toward cloud computing (and any new technology) can only happen from the outside in, starting from areas that are not mission critical, and slowly moving toward the core of the enterprise. Interestingly, this is the approach that most government organization take, despite the pressures some of their IT leaders are under to accelerate the move.

I will have a separate post on my recent conversations about private clouds, which shed further light on the still significant distance between the hype surrounding cloud and the reality of its deployment.