By adding a manufacturer to their IT infrastructures, federal IT departments may be able to save billions more dollars than they can by consolidating datacenters.
The Government Accountability Office estimated closing 1,186 datacenters resulted in an overhead reduction of $2.4 billion, a figure disputed by some as not taking into account the costs of consolidation, additional power usage at remaining datacenters, and remaining inventories, reports FCW. By adding a vendor to their infrastructure mix, federal IT professionals estimate they can save 20 percent of their IT budget, or $15.8 billion, according to MeriTalk's new "Information Infrastructure: Set My IT Free" report.
But most aren't doing it.
Although 95 percent of those surveyed in MeriTalk's study state there are benefits to using more than one manufacturer in their IT infrastructure, three out of four agencies still restrict themselves to one specified vendor in these procurements, at least some of the time, and 41 percent have not even considered adding more vendors into their network infrastructures.
Taxpayers should be outraged. Now, $16 billion may be a drop in the bucket when you're talking trillions of dollars of debt, but it can certainly pay for a lot of education, veterans' support, healthcare, defense, and other services constantly under threat of cuts. Or pour it back into IT for additional training, innovation, and productivity solutions.
Of course, IT being IT, there are reasons for this non-adoption of multi-vendor infrastructures. Sixty-five percent of the 202 federal IT professionals surveyed in the Brocade-sponsored study said they specify a vendor in order to ensure compatibility with their existing infrastructure. Complexity concerns, siloed infrastructures, and testing issues also limit their exploration of additional vendors, the report found. But 17 percent confessed it's "what management wants"; 11 percent said "it saves time"; and 7 percent claimed that age-old "it's just what we always do." Shudder.
Ignoring the apathetic and inexcusable last response, IT has the responsibility to educate management about the benefits -- technological and financial -- of expanding the organization's use of only one or two legacy or favored vendors. In addition to potentially reducing costs, it could open up more capabilities and options, enhancing support and opportunities. Regarding time-savings, many vendors and their solution providers partner with other manufacturers to ensure compatibility, eliminating integration concerns. The growing use of open-source further should reduce compatibility and integration worries. I'd think you could buy a lot of testing time for even a portion of 20 percent of your total IT budget.
In this big-data age, IT departments should be very alarmed by silos, these giant speed bumps to advances in analytics, competitiveness, and productivity. Using silos as an excuse to avoid anything makes no sense; IT should proactively be working to eliminate these isolated repositories.
All this is occurring simultaneously with the federal government's two-year-old Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative. Trackable here, FDCCI aims to close 40 percent -- or 1,200 -- datacenters by the end of 2015. The goal, of course, is to save money. Imagine how much more of our dollars the feds could save if they also considered alternate or additional vendors.
Agreed Alison and Geoff. To your new example and great point, Geoff, what you are unveiling is the total lack of accountability. What we see in these examples are people filling these roles without accountability, and certainly not leadership. No wonder we have a national debt. It seems that when government is involved, we no longer expect efficiency and effectiveness.
@DHagar: Another issue is the "Why don't we wait to implement this until after the next election, when conditions are more favorable?" mindset. Wouldn't want to create a huge hairy mess that could be political fodder in the midterms-- or sink the boss's re-election campaign.
The notion that there will always be an election in two years never quite sinks in. Or, if it does, there's the temptation to leave the bag of snakes for your successor.
Of course, the private sector isn't immune to this. A lot of hospitals and HMOs dragged their feet on implementing electronic health records. The theory was "Why spend a ton of money and make our lives impossible trying to implement Obamacare when it'll get repealed if the Republicans win in 2012?"
Now you have a bunch of folks scrambling to meet 2013 and 2014 deadlines, hollering about needing more time.
Yes, that is true -- it must be tough to plan ahead and decide on a long-term strategy when the top gun will leave in four/eight years and could bring with him/her (please, one day!) a 180-degree change in strategy.
Fascinating perspective, Goeff. You are absolutely correct, and that constant turnover, with perpetual caretakers, may be part of the problem that Alison points out.
Those facts, along with the overall lack of transparency in accountability, provides a perfect storm for wasted efforts and restricting purchases to comfortable alliances that keep things the same.
@Alison: The problem can be fixed and it should be. The biggest obstacle, I think, is the frequent turnover at the top.
A lot of private sector companies don't know how many servers they have and what they all do... and they don't document well. But at least they don't have regime change every four or eight years.
@Kim: At some point, people simply run out of energy to fight a particular battle. Facebook has figured this out. Keep changing the settings, so people have to hunt to protect themselves-- keep rolling stuff back incrementally. At some point, you have a job or kids or dandurff to worry about.
Plus, in politicis, there's always the "We didn't promise you it would be easy to fix this..." defense. How do you decide if the problem is really hard to fix, or if the people fixing it need mroe help... or if they're simnply incompetent... or just not trying?
Good points, Geoff, and I suspect there's a general assumption that a significant amount of money will be wasted which makes the electorate passive about things like this.
It's easy to be cynical about government's preference for sticking with the old boy network and a laissez faire attitude toward doing business, but I would argue that it's trying to shake things up within its datacenters by adopting cloud and consolidating many datacenters. Based on the MeriTalk report (and other data out there), one way federal IT execs can almost immediately improve efficiency and cut costs is by simply expanding the number of vendors they work with (although, granted, this study was funded by a vendor that would potentially benefit in this scenario). You can argue the same holds true in some private companies, as well, although industry has the advantage of being able to reward successful CIOs and IT pros with bonuses, profit-sharing, and other incentives not necessarily available to federal employees.
Now the feds are placing so much emphasis on cost-cutting and efficiency within their datacenters and are publicizing the succeses of various departments' initiatives, I think we'll see more of these practices across various agencies and states.
@Kim Davis: No, I'm not suggesting that this is right or that people shouldn't want it changed. I was merely addressing a point that is often overlooked: The system might be working precisely as designed.
Governmsnts tend to be very slow-moving, and frequently the programs focus on the wrong objectives or try to solve problems in a roundabout way. But mechanisms to spend money are almost always carefully thought out..
If you're auditing such a system, it's foolish to assume that people don't realize what's going on. You're likely to reach the truth much sooner if you assume there is a rational explanation for its behavior.
Then, as Hal Holbrook says to Robert Redford, "Follow the money."
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Big-data has become a big point of emphasis for many businesses. While the technology is available to deploy these applications, the needed personnel often is not. As a result, analytic engineers' salaries have blown past the six-figure mark, and hiring these experts has become a challenge for IT managers.
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The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
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New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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