“If an individual can create a free email account in a matter of minutes, and a small business can create its entire financial system online in a couple minutes, then why must the government spend billions of dollars building (similar) systems that may not be sensitive in nature?”
Vivek Kundra, the US Government’s Federal Chief Information Officer
What if you had more than 700 ministries, provincial governments, local governments, and government agencies all running separate servers located everywhere from small data centers, to closets, to old computers crammed under a desk?
The problems are clear:
- Poor security, as the servers are often undocumented and not managed
- Lack of management center visibility
- Usage of unlicensed or undocumented software
- Sensitive data being created without a backup or disaster recovery plan
- No data standardization
And we could go on and on. Nothing we have not seen before in government – as well as private sector companies. I am guilty as well. I used to run a covert web host within my company, serving up files and acting as a common disk system for my division within the company, at least until the IT director caught me. For me it was a way to get around the need for additional group applications, and a document management capability for the work group that was not being met by the IT department (budget, no staffing, etc., etc., etc).
Now that landscape is changing. With cloud computing and software as a service, spooling up additional servers and checking our applications from a corporate software library is becoming a more common model for building a corporate IT architecture.
For governments it is not quite as easy. Being a bureaucrat is by nature a political position. Politics by nature are based on power and influence. Giving up power or influence to another bureaucrat is not by nature a way to continue building a political power base.
But the Nation’s IT Infrastructure is at Stake
Just as the US appointed Vivek Kundra CIO of the US federal government, many other nations are following suit by appointing a national CIO. The governments know, whether they want to admit it or not, that the global economy and society is advancing so rapidly that a society or government cannot ignore successful models of business process, implementation of models such as ITIL and SOAs, or integration of eGovernment, eLearning, eBusiness, and eEverything into the nation’s national interests.
Appointing a national CIO relieves many bureaucrats from the burden of fighting for their internal IT infrastructure. As the national CIO sets information and communications technology standards, ministers and IT managers do not lose either “face” or prestige by supporting the national CIO, and if done right will get a better product for the effort.
So a country such as Indonesia has a great opportunity to go from being within the bottom 20 nations of the world in e-Readiness, to a leader. It might be easier for Indonesia to accomplish this task, as there is very little existing infrastructure to migrate or replace.
Consider a model where a country builds a few large data centers, all interconnected with high capacity communications, ample Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and a good library of either open source or licensed software online.
Consider the possibility that applications “checked out” to build a data base, office automation suite, eLearning, or other eGovernment application are available on demand. In addition, if the base applications are all designed to use a common data structure(field formatting, data base formatting, or document versioning), then the potential having national data interoperability becomes more likely than if 700 individual organizations are creating their own data.
The same applies for disaster recovery and backup. Much easier to have a backup plan for a single virtualized infrastructure than for 700 individual application servers.
Cloud computing, IaaS, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service become a national utility. Each agency should simply expect compute and storage capacity to be available.
Of course I use Indonesia as an example, because I happen to be here today and have had the discussion several times today. Indonesians are very interested in how to use cloud computing to help transform their nation’s government infrastructure into a model that leads Indonesia into the economic power it should be, rather than on the list of “developing nations.”
I have had the same discussions in Vietnam, Uganda, Palestine, Hawaii, and California. The move to cloud and resource virtualization is happening today, and will only accelerate as we head into the future.
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