The CIO of the United States Government released a detailed 25 point plan on December 9, 2010 that aims to restructure the federal government IT by creating a "cloud first" policy as well as reducing the number of federal government data centers by 800. While nearly everything in the document has been talked about by the government at one point or another over the last few years, this document really ties it all together and seems to create a path toward an actionable plan.
Two key points that stood out to me were the adoption of a cloud-first policy and the consolidation of data centers.
The section on the "cloud-first" policy talks about a web-based video company (I'm not sure the exact company, but think YouTube or the like) and how it was able to scale from an initial demand of 25,000 customers to 250,000 within three days and ultimately to 20,000 new customers per hour. In contrast the government run cash for clunkers program (officially called Car Allowance and Rebate System) had poorly scalable IT infrastructure and when demand exceeded estimates, the system crashed repeatedly. It took more than a month for architects and developers to stabilize the environments. The document states that cloud technologies are economical, flexible and fast. The plan calls for each federal agency to identify three "must-move" services within the next 3 months, and then actually move all three to the cloud within the next 18 months.
The second initiative that caught my attention (actually the first one in the plan - I'm summarizing out of order), was the goal to eliminate 800 data centers by 2015. The document lays out 3 key steps to do so:
1)Identify program managers at the agencies to lead the consolidation effort
2)Launch a data center consolidation task force
3)Create a publicly available data center dashboard to track the consolidation progress
As I've written about before, data center consolidations can be tricky and I think point number one is going to be the most critical. Strong program managers are essential to the success of the plan. If all goes well, the government can save a lot of money by eliminating so many data centers (I'll leave a discussion about the social effects of the resultant job cuts to someone else).
The entire 25 point plan is worth reading (it's only about 40 pages) and can be found here:25-Point-Implementation-Plan-To-Reform-Federal-IT
I'm glad to see some quality discussion about how the government can adapt IT best practices. Hopefully quality action will follow.
Good Talk,
Tom
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