US Dept of State saves US$50m in IT

Implementing the US Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) has helped the Department of State shave over US$50 million ($64.9 million) from its IT expenditure so far, according to the department’s CIO Frontis Wiggins III.

In a blog post, Wiggins explained that standardising and consolidating IT requirements as part of adopting the new principles achieved initial savings of US$23.7 million from the department’s Microsoft Enterprise Agreement alone.

The department has also achieved initial savings of US$15 million on its technology and middleware agreements for Oracle database products, US$100,000 on a licence agreement with Adobe, $5.7 million on an agreement with VMWare and $2.5 million on a contract with Citrix.

As well as IT portfolio review savings, FITARA covers government IT reforms including data centre consolidation, risk assessment transparency and adopting incremental development principles.

“As for the department’s commitment to data centre consolidation, I want to reiterate that we are currently consolidating our IT infrastructure into optimised, geographically dispersed data centres,” Wiggins wrote.

“In alignment with FITARA legislation, the department installed the first modular data centre, known as MDC, which allows us to scale data centre resources based upon the department’s needs — which reduces both operational cost and unnecessary, ambiguous materials from the ‘Stone Age’ of tech.”

He said the department has also achieved a 60% virtualisation rate at its data centres and is pushing to increase this further.

Incremental development meanwhile refers to a question faced by many large organisations in both the public and private sectors, Wiggins said — how to work towards IT innovation, development and implementation, while also encouraging an environment of transformative change.

“The department’s answer to this question rests on our ongoing commitment to a decision-making environment rooted in collaboration,” he said.

“For example... we have our Information Technology Change Control Board (IT-CCB), which coordinates the review-cycle for all IT requests throughout the department, including testing IT for its accessibility to all potential users.”

Image courtesy of DonkeyHotey under CC

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