Not many government agencies get greater respect than NASA. In particular, that’s because they know a heck of a lot about technology - satellites, men on the moon, the space shuttle, the international space station etc. and have had some very impressive successes along the way. So, it was no accident that Vivek Kundra chose NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley to announce a major Federal technology initiative. (Ames is located at Moffett Field, California, and has a technology pedigree stretching back beyond Hangar One which was built 1932 for the USS Macon, a massive blimp.)
You may recall that Kundra was appointed as the first Federal CIO back in March. (Chuck blogged about it.) It seems he has been busy thinking in new ways and acting quickly. - Not necessarily what we expect where Federal thinkers are concerned.
This announcement centered on a White House Cloud Computing Initiative and it was done like a new product rollout that any high tech company would be proud of.
First, he laid out the problems being addressed. They include cost, waste, duplication, resource consumption, and excessive energy use.
The government now spends about $76 billion dollars a year on IT. Of that, 25% / $19 billion is spent on infrastructure and they continue to go on "building datacenter after datacenter".
So the new guy doesn’t take long to conclude that it makes no sense and costs too much and isn’t very effective in getting the job done either.
Sometimes common sense is “out of the box” thinking.
He gave the example of Homeland Security having 23 datacenters and says that "We cannot continue on this trajectory" .
Safeguarding my tax money. I like that.
Wonder if he has finished counting DOD yet.
Like any good product announcement, he showcased a shiny example in GSA’s new Apps.gov site which acts as a fast, simple portal & clearing house for business, social media, and productivity applications, as well as cloud IT services like storage, virtual machines, web portals and more. The site is just getting started but one of the working elements already allows government departments to easily add free services – just like consumers use Facebook or Google – to their own resources.
I’m impressed.
This is pretty progressive stuff when you think about the Federal government doing it before many IT savvy commercial enterprises have figured it out and many sophisticated IT services companies continue to struggle with it too.
The intent here is clearly that government agencies will use the site as a simple, cost-effective, one-stop shop for the kinds of services that to date have required long involved process and expensive IT outlays.
The initiative also counts upon improvements in energy consumption and overall sustainability impacts by the government. Check out the cartoon video to the right of the top on the Apps.gov site.
Kundra was pretty clear in his presentation that more long term impacts of this will be advanced in fiscal year 2010 as the administration pushes for cloud-computing pilot projects. The expectation is that the old expensive ways can be replaced by new and lightweight, lower cost ways of delivering IT.
One example he gave was of the upgrade of GSA’s usa.gov web site that was done in a day for $800,000 instead of six months at $2.5 million.
But my personal favorite is the way they have simplified the application process for student loans by linking the IRS tax info to the Fafsa (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form.
In a joint effort between the IRS and the Department of Education, with one click of a mouse button, IRS data populates the Fafsa form and eliminates more than 70 questions and 20 screens.
My son is applying to college this Fall.
Kundra’s expectation is that IT needs can be met with new secure, lightweight processes that are safe in the cloud. For fiscal 2011, they will issue cloud guidance to agencies throughout government.
Now EMC and every other IT company with Federal business will be competing for quite a different set of opportunities to serve our country.
That means some important re-thinking for all of us.
