by Andrea Di Maio | March 9, 2012 | 1 Comment
Yesterday I spent the whole day with government clients in a European country where there is an aggressive plan to consolidate infrastructure across several departments. This is one of the many data center consolidation programs that are going on around the world in all tiers of government. Some of them are quite aggressive and are [...]
Category: cloud IT management Tags: consolidation, shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | June 1, 2011 | 3 Comments
This week I visited a shared service organization that manages, among other things, the jurisdiction-wide e-government portal, including a number of widely utilized components supporting content management, electronic forms and payment. Some of the statistics they shared with me, although I have not yet verified them, looked quite promising, and so was their reputation among [...]
Category: e-government Tags: IT management, shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | October 4, 2010 | 5 Comments
Over the last two weeks I have been visiting Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden, meeting a fair amount of clients in each country. With the notable exception of Sweden, almost all conversations revolved around the need for cost savings, something I have touched upon in a previous post. The other common theme [...]
Category: Europe and IT Tags: consolidation, shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | October 1, 2010 | 6 Comments
As reported by Information Week, the Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a law to improve the state’s IT infrastructure and make it less expensive. the law aims at stronger project oversight, increased transparency in spending, greater cost savings, energy usage reduction and further services consolidation. It strengthens the former Department of Technology Services, [...]
Category: e-government Tags: CIO, consolidation, shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | June 9, 2010 | 4 Comments
Yesterday I visited a large central government service provider, which offers infrastructure and basic software to almost all departments in its jurisdiction. This is entrenched in that jurisdiction’s strategy, although I am not clear whether that’s a mandate or not. I was asked to present a condensed version of my standard pitch on cloud computing [...]
Category: cloud Tags: shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | December 11, 2009 | 1 Comment
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 [...]
Category: cloud Tags: NIST, private cloud, shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | November 8, 2009 | 6 Comments
As the agenda manager for the government research team in Gartner, I am in the process of gathering input from clients and non clients about the areas we should be researching about in the course of 2010. You are welcome to respond to our survey, which asks three very simple questions: What are your top [...]
Category: Gartner research agenda Tags: cloud computing, e-government, government 2.0, shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | August 20, 2009 | 1 Comment
Last week I had an interesting conversation with a US State client, who runs a central organization providing infrastructure services to some State agencies. The IT organization there is quite decentralized (or – al most –federated) and each agency can run its own IT infrastructure, although quite a few have their servers hosted by the [...]
Category: cloud Tags: shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | August 5, 2009 | 3 Comments
I am at the Gartner Symposium in Capetown, which is always a very interesting experience. Of course cloud computing featured a lot during the event, starting with the analyst keynote where my colleague Daryl Plummer said, among other things, that cloud computing is the next step after consolidation and centralization. While this is both sensible [...]
Category: cloud Tags: GSA, shared services, South Africa
by Andrea Di Maio | July 9, 2009 | 1 Comment
In a discussion with several people from an agency in a US jurisdiction, I was asked whether cloud computing can help IT consolidation. Digging a bit, I found out that this jurisdiction is consolidating data centers across different departments and – as far as I can tell – the process is still on-going. The jurisdiction [...]
Category: cloud Tags: consolidation, shared services
