Virginia Targets Wasteful Government Cell Phones

Virginia officials think they’ll find cost savings in a comprehensive review of the state’s 21,000 cellular devices, an initiative announced Tuesday, May 3.

State CIO Sam Nixon said Virginia will pay nothing upfront to Tangoe Inc., a telecommunications management firm contracted to examine the state’’s cellular usage patterns and identify potential savings opportunities. Instead, the contingency contract will pay the vendor “from savings identified and implemented.” The review will audit cell phones, smartphones and air cards.

A July 2010 report from the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts found the state is spending $6 million annually for 11,000 cell phones. On average, 4,500 of the cell phones — costing $160,000 monthly — went unused. “A phone with [zero] minutes is not necessarily wasteful because the agency may use the phone for emergencies,” the report said.

Details Here

first published week of:   05/09/2011

Washington State Begins Move Into New Data Center and Office Complex

Washington has begun moving state agency employees into its new 1,000-person office complex, which was built in conjunction with the state’s new data center. The data center, while not yet operational, is expected to be running within the next eight months.

The buildings, located adjacent to each other in Olympia, were made available for migration on July 15, and had been under construction since August 2009. The $255 million project, a price tag that includes the 50,000-square-foot data center and additional space, was criticized by some lawmakers and budget watchdogs earlier this year after a report by Excipio Consulting suggested that the state would only need 4,000 feet of the data center’s total floor space.

Mike Ricchio, Washington state’s information services director, said the state is currently building out the data center’s core network, including routers, switches, cabling and communications.

While the state has purchased some equipment for the data center, it hasn’t yet acquired servers nor has a virtual environment been created. Ricchio said the state hopes the data center will be operational by March or April of next year and estimated to have the migration completed by September 2012. “It’s not like [it goes] A, B, C, D,” Ricchio said. “You’ll have pieces moving over that are already consolidated within the existing data center environment, and when they move over they’re operational because they need to be.”

Details Here

first published week of:   08/08/2011

Washington State Shrinks IT Department’s Head Count

The Washington State Department of Information Services reduced its head count by more than 10 percent beginning this month as a reshaping of the state’s technology enterprise continues.

The department is cutting 61.5 full-time-equivalent positions from its 460-person work force, an opening salvo in further changes that will fundamentally alter the department’s future. The cuts are coming through a combination of attrition, unfilled positions and more than 30 layoffs. Officials expect the number of positions lost to eventually reach a total of 70. This reduction comes on top of a pre-existing hiring freeze.

Meanwhile, the Department of Information Services is set to be split apart in a larger reorganization of the state’s executive branch that Gov. Chris Gregoire and lawmakers are counting on to help close the state’s budget gap. The state budget Gregoire signed last month will cut spending by $4.5 billion during the next two years, and includes cuts to education, tuition increases, and a 3 percent pay reduction for state employees.

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first published week of:   07/11/2011

Web–GIS based risk management of water and wastewater pipeline failures

This article focuses on the research and development of a robust model for the quantitative risk assessment of water and wastewater pipelines by taking into account the likelihood and consequence of pipeline failure.

Extensive global parameters are taken into consideration to determine the likelihood and consequence of pipeline failure, and these parameters are evaluated by water and wastewater utilities in the US, and derived by geographic information system (GIS) using advanced geospatial tools.

A web GIS–based Pipeline Infrastructure Database (PID) will be developed as a tool for utilities to access and tweak the risk assessment model for each type of pipe. An exclusive working environment will be provided for each utility with access to their respective data to access the global risk assessment model and export the results in customised formats as reports, shape files and databases, and thus this serves as a comprehensive tool for sustainable utility risk management. Also, this is a global risk model for strategic infrastructure asset management and thus for asset allocation, financial planning, and determining condition assessment methods.

Details Here

first published week of:   09/12/2011

Welcome to a new era of government contracting
By Nick Wakeman

Is insourcing dead? Is the era of big systems integrators ruling the roost coming to a close? Will the defense cuts save the economy?

These were some of the dominant themes I heard executives and others talking about at investment bank Raymond James’ 10th Annual Government Services & Technology Summit on Thursday.

A variety of public and private companies gave presentations on their strategies. Because three presentations were usually going on simultaneously in different rooms, I couldn’t hear all of them, but the ones I did hear often shared similar themes.

The easy one to explain is the death of insourcing. Several executives and other speakers commented that a year ago insourcing was a big concern, but not so much now as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has publicly admitted that the cost savings he envisioned from moving contractor jobs to government jobs did materialize.

The demographics of the government workforce make widespread insourcing untenable, several speakers said.

Details Here

first published week of:   01/10/2011

WikiLeaks Danger Concerns City IT Leaders

In November, The New York Times published private U.S. diplomatic information gleaned from leaked documents — only 220 of more than 250,000 — from more than 270 U.S. embassies and consulates. Called “diplomatic cables” by several news outlets, these documents and messages were confidential government property obtained from WikiLeaks, a “not-for-profit media organization” that publishes media submissions from anonymous sources.

WikiLeaks became a household name, and the organization’s periodic release of confidential government information has shed light on a pesky issue: how to keep private information private, and what to do if it gets out. Thus far, the bulk of the leaks have come from federal and private sources.

But local government officials are also aware of the danger. The embarrassing WikiLeaks disclosures could serve as a reminder that all levels of governments can be vulnerable to data breaches.

“I’m looking at it from a perspective of the city, saying, ’What is the response of the elected official?‘ That’s really, to me, what sets the tone for the next cyber-offense,” said Hap Cluff, IT director of Norfolk, Va. “If you want to stop it, obviously, you’ve got to go after the person that leaked the information. For me, that’s the highest priority.”

Details Here

first published week of:   01/10/2011

Volume 31

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