Yesterday Federal CIO Vivek Kundra identified 98 additional data centers that will be shut down by the end of this year and gave an update on the federal 25 point plan. It seems agencies are coming along fairly well and they're talking seriously about collaboration. In related news, it's becoming evident that the crowd is beginning to impact decision-making on how to weather the storm. A panel of CXOs advice to vendors this week was "talk to the program managers, they're the ones who know what they need to carry out the business." As for Open Government's fate, base on Facebook and Wikileak's success, I'm not convinced that money is the issue. Transparency is going to come as a result of all of this storm activity, not as a traditional IT project. We don't need to rebuild that house.
Government IT Tornado - Power of Positive Destruction
29.04.2011
It seems like this is the perfect week to talk about what happens when two powerful opposite forces meet, in light of the weather we're experiencing in the U.S. this week - rampant tornadoes. In nature they're destructive, usually in a negative way. I'm thinking that for government IT, the convergence of cold budget news with a hot government IT environment is likely creating some destruction that, overall, is positive. Some of the casualties of the destruction: duplicitous data centers, duplicitous services, underutilized software and applications, to name a few. And government CXOs are huddling together, weathering the storm, making decisions on how to rebuild. Seriously, this could be just the kind of traumatic event we've been waiting for.