I live in California where we are facing severe challenges in our economy and funding public services ranging from teachers in the classroom to courts and correctional institutions. In San Francisco, cuts to 25 courtrooms and 40% of staff are underway to address the $13.75 million budget gap. Longer lines for citizen services and delays up to 5 years for cases coming to trial are expected.
Of course, the economy is not only challenging governments at the state and local level but nationally and internationally as well.
Isn’t it time we use technology to help cut costs and deliver services that are more efficient?
A great example is the City of San Antonio Texas sharing video across public safety and justice systems.
Today, as I watched the Cisco Data Center webcast “Evolutionary Fabric, Revolutionary Scale: A Nondisruptive Way to Handle Dynamic Data Center and Cloud Environments” I thought about how data centers can provide an advantage for government agencies seeking ways to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs.
In many ways, data centers today have similar characteristics when compared to government organizations with:
isolated silos of information
labor-intensive manual processes
rising costs of service
limited flexibility
mandates to provide open access to information
changing workplace with mobile applications, video, …
requirements to ensure security
In the data center, silos include servers, storage, applications, and network devices. In many government organizations, different agencies often operate independently in separate silos.
The strategic advantage for both government IT organizations and government agencies is to develop holistic strategies that unify the separate parts into a system to deliver better efficiency with higher resource utilization that is easier to manage and costs less.
