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July 19, 2011 By Sarah Rich
King County, Wash., IT services are getting a makeover. By the end of the year, the county, which includes Seattle, plans to undergo an enterprisewide reorganization by centralizing IT staff and servers, and moving to private and public clouds.
The plan to reorganize IT services was proposed by County Executive Dow Constantine and approved on July 11 by the Metropolitan King County Council, according to the county.
While the changes were approved July 11, original plans to reorganize started in 2004, said King County CIO Bill Kehoe.
Under the reorganization, the county will consolidate all IT services and staff in the executive branch into one department, Kehoe said. With the reorganization, the formerly titled Office of Information Resource Management will be renamed the King County Department of Information Technology (KCIT).
“The reason the executive proposed a consolidation of IT in the executive branch is really to be more efficient in how we apply IT services,” Kehoe said. “It gives us an opportunity, instead of departments having to do everything IT, to really define those areas that we can do things in a common direction such as cloud computing and server consolidation and move in those directions.”
The new organization created a central team of experts — IT staff in the executive branch department — to collaborate and use skills more effectively, Kehoe said.
“We’ll be able to provide expertise to all the agencies in different technology areas instead of having to hire a whole host of different experts to utilize new technology,” said King County Webmaster Sabra Schneider.
The county plans to consolidate all of its departments’ servers — approximately 900 total — into its state-of-the-art data center and plans to complete the consolidation process by 2012, Kehoe said. However, certain servers like those used for 911 service, are associated with lab equipment that connects them to a specific business function, which doesn’t allow them to be consolidated into the county’s data center. So far 154 devices have been moved into the data center.
Once the consolidation process is complete next year, the county will move forward with migrating into a private cloud computing environment, he said. Next year, the KCIT will submit a funding request to the Metropolitan King County Council to start building the cloud.
Previously each department had its own server and storage environment, but Kehoe said the KCIT plans to transition into the private cloud environment while attempting to keep a 2012 to 2015 time frame for completion.
This fall, the KCIT will focus on rolling out its public cloud environment by using Microsoft Office 365 — the company’s recently launched cloud service. According to Microsoft, the service provides the company’s popular productivity suite SharePoint and Exchange.
King County already has an enterprise agreement with Microsoft and plans to continue on as one of the company’s existing Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) customers, but in the cloud. Kehoe said the county uses BPOS for SharePoint, video conferencing, instant messaging and other features, however, according to Microsoft, BPOS is no longer available for purchase.
Kehoe said after the full migration into the public and private clouds, the reorganization is anticipated to save $10 million over a five-year period.
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What an interesting and bold move by King County. While we’re seeing this type of initiative in the private sector, the public sector has held off on this move for some time. But it’s a move that many organizations, whether they are private or public, will need to make in order to stay productive. And that really goes for all IT services. The more services that can be moved into one centralized location, the better the organization will work as a whole. This is particularly true with the growth of mobile. Since employees can now access company servers from everywhere, it makes more sense to assure the data stays safe from one central location. Providing tools so IT administrators can easily manage all the devices on the network will assure that the company – private or public – has secure data. Stephen Midgley, Absolute Software http://blog.absolute.com/
Interesting that the previous post thinks this is safer and makes reference to tools to manage better at central location. No such reference to better monitoring and security was made in the article. All such projects are as successful or unsuccessful as the quality of project management and analysis put into them. Cloud services and data center consolidation does not in itself guarantee any better services, connectivity, or security. How it is accomplished and maintained will determine those factors. The bigger question in these areas are this: (1) what kind of savings will King County realize when their contract comes up for renewal and Microsoft raises their prices (which history says they will do); (2) how locked-in will they be in that case, since standard bodies are still forming and still defining the standards for cloud computing, i.e. you are locked-in and can't easily migrate elsewhere; and (3) how about state laws such as the RCW concerning archival of all email and similar business-related correspondence, as well as handling the related public records requests? From what I've seen so far (somewhat first hand, I might ad), government agencies are moving to these services to supposedly save money, but they have thought none of the critical issues through. I hope King County carefully considers what they put in the cloud vs. what they keep in their data center. Running your own so-called cloud is one thing, handing over everything to a 3rd party in locking in taxpayers for the future is another.