A Frost & Sullivan

White Paper
Brian Cotton, PhD
www.frost.com
50 Years of Growth, Innovation and Leadership
Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
Century Governance
Transforming IT Infrastructures to Meet Critical Imperatives
Frost & Sullivan
CONTENTS
Abstract........................................................................................................... 3
An Opportunity For a Smarter Government .................................................. 3
A Smarter Computing Approach to Support
21
st
Century Governance ................................................................................ 6
Meeting Government IT Needs With Smarter Computing ............................. 10
A Smarter Way to Build Better Government ................................................. 14
References ...................................................................................................... 16
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Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
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ABSTRACT
Amid fiscal restraint, government agencies around the world are transforming their
organi zati ons to be more responsi ve to the chal l enges faci ng them. Thi s
transformation is guided by four governance imperatives: (1) improving citizen and
business outcomes, (2) managing public resources effectively, (3) strengthening
safety and security, and (4) ensuring a sustainable environment. These imperatives
play out across all the domains of governance, including education, healthcare,
transportation, utilities, national defense, and public safety. The information
technology (IT) applications and operations that support these imperatives place
substantial workload demands on IT infrastructures. Traditional government IT
systems are built to handle a single workload in a single agency, but are unable to
handle the workloads effectively or efficiently, thus impeding a government agencys
ability to deliver on its imperatives.
Government CIOs need guidance to help them transform their IT infrastructures
to deliver on these imperatives. Smarter Computing, a new approach to transform
IT infrastructures, is based on three fundamental capabilities: Designed for Data,
Tuned to the Task, and Managed in the Cloud. Smarter Computing enables IT
infrastructures to handle multiple types of data for advanced management and
analysis applications, by using IT components optimized to the workloads placed on
them, to support a variety of service creation and delivery models.
Meanwhile, leaders in every industry are adopting Smarter Computing to address
the challenges they face and opportunities presented by a Smarter Planet, and IBM
is helping some of them to implement the approach.
Governments that are embracing Smarter Computing are delivering on their
imperatives, and are realizing performance and economic benefits from their
transformed systems. Examples from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research, and Caisse Nationale d'Allocations Familiales to Miami-Dade County and
the City of Norfolk demonstrate the benefits of using this approach. These
organizations have been able to modernize their IT infrastructures to accommodate
new governance services, to extend powerful computing resources to other
agencies and jurisdictions, and to identify and eliminate fraud in benefits programs
while improving the outcomes of their citizen clients. At the same time, they are
realizing significant capital expense, maintenance, and cost savings by using a
Smarter Computing approach.
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR A SMARTER GOVERNMENT
This is a pivotal time for governments because the world is changing rapidly.
Globalization is making government agencies and jurisdictions ever more socially,
politically, culturally, and economically interdependent. Demographic compositions
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are shifting, with populations in some countries getting older, while others are
getting younger. The natural environment is changing and leaders are realizing what
the planet is able to provide, and what it can no longer tolerate. An assortment of
threats, from armed conflicts that cross national borders, to terrorism, disease, and
increasingly fierce natural disasters, are facing us.
Underlying all this is an economic climate that dictates how governments adapt to
the changing world. In the developed economies, diminished tax revenue and record
deficits are stressing government funding and putting some in substantial deficits.
Globally, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is
estimating the aggregate budget deficit is 7.5 percent
1
, while some countries are
running deficits well into double digits. In the United States, the Government
Accountability Office (U.S. GAO) has painted a stark picture of the situation, stating
the fiscal position of the (government) sector will steadily decline through 2060,
absent any policy changes.
2
Some U.S. state and local governments are in a crisis
as financial problems force them to suspend services, as recently happened in
Minnesota.
3
Governments are being forced to become leaner, more efficient, and
more effective amid fiscal austerity.
Governments in emerging market countries are obligated to modernize their
operational models to meet citizen demands for new services, and some are
implementing eGovernment systems as part of their strategy.
4
This is enabling them
to inject flexibility into their operations and quickly scale to expand the reach of
public services when needed.
5
China, for instance, is increasing its spending on
eGovernment programs at the local and regional government levels
6
, and similar
spending is planned by the government of India
7
and the Kingdom of Bahrain.
8
In both settings, governments are transforming themselves to be smarter and take
advantage of the forces of change. Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan
from 2003 to 2011, called on her peers to recognize and embrace this opportunity.
The 21
st
century economy is all about speed, access, intelligence, and efficiency. A
21
st
century government needs to be about the same things.
9
In this new world,
traditional silo-based models of governance are shifting to newer collaborative
models that enable government to rapidly and efficiently develop, implement, and
manage services. These collaborative models place government in a system that
facilitates the interaction between internal agencies and the external private sector,
including communities, academia, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and
foreign governments at the national level. At the core of this is a move toward
sharing intelligence and analysis, with speed based on real-time data access and
analysis, and capabilities that are optimized to specific domains or functions of
governmentall running at a high level of efficiency.
The 21
st
century
economy is all about
speed, access,
intelligence, and
efficiency. A 21
st
century government
needs to be about
the same things
Jennifer Granholm,
former governor
of Michigan
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Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
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The transformation to a 21
st
century government is guided by a set of four critical
imperatives linking into multiple government domains, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Improve citizen and business outcomes: Enhance social and business
services with a citizen-centric focus, while reducing operational costs and
maximizing taxpayer value
Manage public resources effectively: Strengthen analysis, intelligence, and
planning to improve program management and sharpen insight into and
control over operations
Strengthen security and safety: Enable defense, law enforcement, and
first responder agencies to improve situational awareness, speed decision-
making, and increase speed of command
Ensure a sustainable environment: Use energy conservation and efficiency,
improve transportation management, and develop renewable resources
Guided by these imperatives, a government becomes a smoothly functioning system
that 1) promotes economic growth by streamlining and simplifying processes and
reporting requirements, 2) delivers citizen-centered services in offices that address
multiple types of services, and 3) provides high-demand transactions over the
Internet. These imperatives play out at all levels of government, and will be most
acute at the urban level, where the interplay between stakeholders is particularly
close in cities with steadily increasing population growth and density.
10
Figure 1: Critical Imperatives Guiding Government Transformation
Source: Frost & Sullivan analysis and IBM
Improve Citizen & Business Outcomes
Social Benefits and Service Delivery
Education
Healthcare
Tax and Revenue Management
Transportation Management
Public Safety
Ensure a Sustainable Environment
Transportation Management
Power Management
Water and Sewer Management
Strengthen Security & Safety
Customs and Immigration
Border Management
Public Safety
Defense Network Centric Operations
21
st
Century
Government
Manage Public Resources Effectively
Social Benefits and Service Delivery
Education
Healthcare
Tax and Revenue Management
Transportation Management
Public Safety
Water and Sewer Management
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Governments that are transformi ng to col l aborati ve model s need an IT
infrastructure that supports them. Traditional government IT infrastructures were
designed on a one agency-one architecture silo model, mirroring the operational
structure of government itself. These IT systems typically do not interoperate well,
and as they are aggregated across agencies and jurisdictions, these silos of IT
infrastructure can result in underutilized assets and redundant software, which
increase capital and operational costs.
Public sector CIOs and IT planners need to be creative when redesigning their IT
infrastructures to reduce the administrative overhead while maintaining high levels
of performance. In mature market countries, this presents a conundrum, because
whi l e many government CIOs recogni ze a need to transform thei r IT
infrastructures, most are faced with IT budgets that are being cut back, remaining
flat, or are at best growing only slowly.
11
Here, the opportunity of a tight budget can
stimulate creative solutions for increasing IT efficiency and effectiveness.
12
As one
state government CIO put it, IT in my state was developed inside out, so that 19
state agencies have 19 data centers and every county has its own network... theres
a lot of money to be saved in just one network for all of them.
13
In emerging market
countries, the CIOs opportunity is to design systems according to state-of-the-art
approaches. In both cases, government CIOs need support to transform their IT
infrastructures, and Smarter Computing can guide them through the process.
A SMARTER COMPUTING APPROACH TO SUPPORT
21
st
CENTURY GOVERNANCE
Smarter Computing is a new approach to transform IT infrastructures to
perform better in todays complex and interconnected world. This approach is
based on three fundamental capabilities:
Designed for Data means designing an IT infrastructure to harness all
available information, including real-time streaming data, to unlock insights for
better decision-making. It is about extending beyond traditional sources of data
to generate insights by leveraging new forms of information, which can be
incorporated into a government organizations information supply chain to
create a single version of the truth, simplify data security, and get insights from
huge volumes of data, while reducing operating costs.
Tuned to the Task means matching workloads to systems that are optimized
to the workload characteristics, including transaction processing, database
management, business intelligence, analytics, managing cross-domain
communications, and enabling complex modeling. Optimizing systems to the
workloads enables greater performance and efficiency, helping government CIOs
working under constrained IT budgets to deliver services cost effectively.
IT in my state was
developed inside
out, so that 19 state
agencies have 19
data centers and
every county has its
own network. . . .
theres a lot of
money to be saved
in having just one
network for all of
them.
U.S. state
government CIO
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Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
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Managed in the Cloud means evolving government data centers to
support a variety of business models and service delivery methods that
bring greater efficiencies out of existing IT assets, deploy resources flexibly
and quickly, and reduces costs. Ultimately, it increases efficiency, rapidly
delivers services, and adds more degrees of freedom to government CIOs to
deliver on eGovernment initiatives.
Smarter Computing supports government IT infrastructure transformation by
creating a technology framework to support the IT applications and operations that
deliver on the four key imperatives. These applications and operations revolve
around how data is collected, processed, analyzed, stored, and shared. The IT
infrastructures running these applications are subjected to various types of
workloads and processing tasks (as summarized in Figure 2), which cannot be
effectively or efficiently handled by traditional government IT infrastructures.
Figure 2: 21
st
Century Government Imperatives and their
IT Infrastructure Workloads
Source: Frost & Sullivan analysis
Government CIOs can use Smarter Computing to design IT infrastructures to
handle massive amounts and varieties of data needed by applications and
operations. Different workloads have different characteristics, and by emphasizing
optimized systems Smarter Computing encourages efficient infrastructure designs
that are flexible enough to meet peak level workload demands, and enable
Back Office
Transaction
Processing,
Simulations &
Analytics,
Information
Management
Edge of System
Sensors &
Controls,
Cross-System
Data Feeds,
Communications
Workloads
on the IT
Infrastructure
Government User Integrated Access & Operations
Improve Citizen &
Business Outcomes
Social Benefits and Service
Delivery
Education
Healthcare
Tax and Revenue
Management
Transportation Management
Public Safety
Manage Public
Resources Effectively
Social Benefits and Service
Delivery
Education
Healthcare
Tax and Revenue Management
Transportation Management
Public Safety
Water and Sewer Management
Strengthen Security
& Safety
Customs and Immigration
Border Management
Public Safety
Defense Network Centric
Operations
Ensure a Sustainable
Environment
Transportation Management
Power Management
Water and Sewer
Management
Front Office
Business Process
Management,
Database
Management,
Business
Intelligence
Process Automation
Event Processing Simulation Models Data Analysis Transaction Processing
Data Storage And Management
Physical World Interfaces (Sensors, Systems, Devices) & Data Acquisition
Control
Data
CCTV
and video
infrastructure
Energy
supply and
management
Public
and private
buildings
Transportation
infrastructure
and services
Public service
staff and
resources
Water
supply and
management
Other stakeholders
(e.g., agencies,
NGOs,
private sector)
Smarter Computing
supports Smarter
Government by
creating a
technology
framework to
support a
collaborative,
shared-service
operational model
that delivers on
the four key
imperatives of
21
st
century
government.
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resources to be deployed elsewhere during off-peak periods. Smarter Computings
cloud capabilities facilitate the rapid deployment of new services, and can integrate
services and data across government agencies to provide a unified view of insights
and enhance collaboration. Importantly, the approach gives CIOs control over
capital and operational expenditures because existing IT infrastructures can be
transformed, and need not be completely replaced. By using Smarter Computing,
government CIOs can transform their IT infrastructures to effectively and
efficiently enable the imperatives of 21
st
century governance.
Improving Citizen and Business Outcomes
Improving citizen and business outcomes relies on a set of applications and operations
to provide the right level of services to citizens and businesses. These include:
Shifting records from paper to digital formats
Creating and maintaining an accurate, single view of the citizen or business entity
Support citizen or business self-service
Using analytics to ensure proper citizen-to-service match
Using analytics to detect fraud, and
Ensuring data security and access according to established protocols
In social benefits administration, for instance, a Smarter Computing approach would
prepare an IT infrastructure to handle all the data for its citizen clients, wherever
and in whatever format it resides. As well, it would enable master data management
(MDM) techniques to create the single-view record of the citizen, provide
authorized access to parts of that record across an agency, and apply analytics to
match the appropriate level of benefits with the citizen and to detect instances of
fraud, all while ensuring the identity of the citizen and his or her personal data is
kept secure. This can improve the level of services delivered to the citizen, and
improve the management of public resources allocated to an agency. The Alameda
County Social Services Agency, for example, found these benefits when it
implemented Smarter Computing to create a single view of its clients, and applied
analytics to its benefits payment operations to ensure its clients were given the
proper level of benefit assistance. As a result the agency saves almost $25 million
annually by reducing benefit overpayments.
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Manage Public Resources Effectively
Managing public resources effectively means not only improving data management
and analysis, but also improving the efficiency with which services are created and
delivered, which are realized in lower costs. This imperative uses the same set of IT
applications and operations as does improving citizen and business outcomes, and
The Alameda County
Social Services
Agency implemented
a Smarter
Computing approach
and realized almost
$25 million in
savings annually.
Nucleus Research
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Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
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adds asset management, tracking, and maintenance, and analytics applications
to ensure a proper resource to service match. The efficiency advantage of Smarter
Computing for this imperative lies in using systems optimized to the various
IT workloads, and because Smarter Computing infrastructures are cloud-enabled
they can operate wi th mul ti pl e del i very model s, i ncl udi ng shared-servi ce
arrangements. Moreover, Smarter Computi ng enabl es consol i dati on and
virtualization, allowing flexible and scalable resource deployment in the event
of unanticipated or unknown workload demands. Cloud capabilities also improve
the economics of service creation and delivery. North Carolina State University
(NCSU), for instance, adopted this approach to address an unanticipated growth in
demand for its computing resources. By using Smarter Computing, NCSU was able
to extend its resources to other educational institutions in North Carolina,
increasing the average number of students served per license by 150 percent
without incurring any additional capital expenses.
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Strengthen Safety and Public Security
Strengthening safety and public security involves the paper-to-digital-record shift,
single view, and data security applications and operations that are in the previous
imperatives, as well as others, including:
Analysis of streaming data for event detection and prediction
Communication coordination across jurisdictions and agencies
Analysis for real-time incident detection and incident and event prediction, and
Cross-domain data feeds and sharing
Increasing traffic safety and providing rapid responses to traffic incidents, for
instance, relies on accurate data collected from a variety of sources, and making it
available for analysis to enable security commanders to evaluate the situation,
assess the risks to the public and officers, and then deploy the appropriate
personnel. Traditional methods of data collection often involve manual processes,
and the data is seldom easily accessible or amenable to rapid analysis. A Smarter
Computing approach to increasing traffic safety would enable a single IT platform
to centralize traffic data collection, using automated sensors and video feeds, and
integrate analysis and reporting applications available to all commanders and
officers who need to act on the data. To illustrate this, the Inner Mongolia Public
Traffic Police Detachment, a governmental traffic administration agency serving the
citizens of Inner Mongolia in northern China, implemented Smarter Computing to
enhance its ability to respond to traffic data processing. By using the approach, the
agency reduced data collection times from an average of 10 days to only four
hoursa 95 percent improvement. Moreover, because traffic data collection is
accelerated, the agency is able to reduce its monthly processing costs and improve
traffic services and citizen satisfaction.
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Ensuring a Sustainable Environment
The governance imperative of ensuring a sustainable environment complements the
other imperatives. Often, concerns over making sure large-scale physical
infrastructures, the agencies that manage them, and the citizens they serve all operate
to minimize impacts on the environment and conserve natural resources. Applying
Smarter Computing to the digital infrastructures that run the physical infrastructures
can help governments protect the environment. The IT applications and operations
involved here include 1) citizen self-service; 2) asset management, tracking, and
maintenance; 3) the analysis of streaming data for event detection and prediction; 4)
cross-domain data feeds; and 5) communication coordination across agencies.
The requirements for extreme weather event prediction and warnings used by
publ i c safety agenci es, for i nstance, pl ace heavy workl oads for database
management, analytics, sensors and controls, communications, and complex
modeling on a weather agencys IT infrastructure. Because of the cost in lives,
property, and disruption that a severe weather event can cause, it is critical that
predictions are accurate and provided on a timely basis across multiple agencies.
The number of agencies and the volume and variability of the data needed make this
massively complex. Traditional infrastructures cannot adequately handle the
multiple, interdependent workloads tied to performing the service without large
investments in IT equipment, energy to power and cool it, data center floor space
to house it, and manpower to maintain it.
The Potsdam Insti tute for Cl i mate Change i n Germany (Potsdam Insti tut
fur Klimafolgenforschung, PIK) models and predicts climate for the German
government with a consideration for extreme weather events that arrive with
little warning and last for comparatively short durations. The extremely complex
calculations that PIK needs to perform this service require an IT infrastructure
that delivers extremely high performance and reliability, while cost-effectively
managing huge amounts of weather data. PIK was unable to provide this service
efficiently using its traditional IT architecture. Instead, PIK used a Smarter
Computing approach to design a workload-optimized, multisystem IT architecture
abl e to provi de the cruci al predi cti on and advanced warni ngs capabi l i ti es
at 30 times the capacity of its traditional architecture, while consuming 25 percent
less energy than would have been the case.
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MEETING GOVERNMENT IT NEEDS WITH SMARTER COMPUTING
A Smarter Computing IT infrastructure is designed to handle all types of data
to improve insight and management of government domain operations. Such
an infrastructure also is optimized to efficiently handle the complex workloads
placed on it, and has the flexibility to support multiple service delivery models
in a 21
st
century government. Government agencies that are embracing Smarter
Computing are delivering on the imperatives of 21
st
century government, and
are enjoying the benefits from using the approach.
The Potsdam Institute
for Climate Change
uses Smarter
Computing to provide
advance warning of
extreme weather
events at 30 times
the performance and
25 percent less
energy consumed
than traditional IT
architectures would
allow.
IBM Case Study
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Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
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Caisse Nationale d'Allocations Familiales: Improving Citizen Outcomes
and Increasing Environmental Sustainability
Caisse Nationale d'Allocations Familiales (CNAF) is a French government agency
providing social benefits and assistance to families living in France and its overseas
territories. The agency wanted to improve the speed at which it handles benefits
processing, sharpen its visibility into applicants requirements, and modernize its
operations by shifting much of its administration from paper-based to digital processes.
CNAF worked with IBM to apply Smarter Computing to redesign its IT infrastructure
to better cope with disparate forms of benefits data, to optimize data centers to speed
the processing of benefits information, and to put all services online to better meet the
needs of its clients. Smarter Computing not only helps CNAF improve the outcomes
of its clients, but also helps minimize its impact on the environment.
Growing Workloads Slow Services for Citizens
The CNAF is a large social services agency employing 30,000 people at 123
locations that provides benefits and assistance to 12 million families, students, and
low-income individuals, and manages more than 50 billion in public resources
annually. For most of its history, CNAF has relied on a painstaking set of processes
to examine a number of eligibility factors for each case and matching them to the
appropriate level of benefits, while checking other accounting and legal practices to
limit fraud. This manual, paper-based process involves multiple departments, and
requires applicants to make several in-person visits to crowded agencies, and then
wait up to four months to have their applications confirmed. Moreover, the agencys
reliance on paper forms places a burden on the environment. As the number of
applications increased in the wake of the economic recession, CNAF needed a way
to slash the processing time and efforts, while vastly extending the access to
services beyond the traditional agency locations, and still provide a high level of
service and responsibly to manage a significant amount of public funds.
Implementing a Holistic Smarter Computing Architecture
Recognizing a need to build an advanced IT infrastructure to improve the outcomes
of its citizens and better manage the public resources, CNAF teamed with IBM to
implement a Smarter Computing approach across its infrastructure. The core of the
initiative was to implement a comprehensive and standardized portal structure to
provide easier, faster and more accurate access to eligibility information and
processing for citizens and agency staff. IBM designed the architecture to handle the
disparate information submitted online by accepting electronic data and scanned
forms from Web browsers and more than 900 new interactive kiosks deployed across
France and its territories. The core of the portal is built around an IBM mainframe
optimized to handle all this disparate data, yet be flexible enough to handle 35 million
transactions every day, and support peak workloads of 2.2 million page view requests.
The CNAF
implemented a
smarter Computing
approach to its
social benefits
processing, cutting
wait times from
four months to
one week, reducing
costs, and improving
its environmental
sustainability.
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In addition to
providing the speed,
reliability and
scalability we needed
to support our
enterprise business
intelligence
environment, the
system fit within
our budget, which
was a key deciding
factor.
Jaci Newmark,
project lead,
enterprise business
intelligence
architecture,
Miami-Dade
County
Vastly Improving Citizen Outcomes while Cutting Costs
CNAF soon saw the benefits of its new Smarter Computing system. By increasing the
access to information and enabling citizens to submit application information online,
the agency was able to immediately begin matching citizen needs to social services,
thereby speeding eligibility processing and enabling staffers to make more informed
decisions and reducing the potential for fraud. This reduced the need for citizens to
visit agency offices, making the process more convenient, as well as substantially
cutting confirmation wait times from four months to as little as one week.
Additionally, CNAF was able to reduce real estate costs through the use of the new
kiosks, and by moving from a paper-based system to a digital system, it reduced costs
and the environmental footprint associated with manual processing of paper forms.
Miami-Dade County: Managing Public Resources More Effectively
A large county-level government in the United States needed to support a growing
need for information sharing across its many departments. Building on an
established platform, Floridas Miami-Dade County worked with IBM to make its IT
architecture smarter, and gained a powerful new business intelligence platform. In
addition to increasing the countys business intelligence functionality and scalability,
the solution preserved investments in existing systems. This enabled Miami-Dade to
make better use of scarce public resources.
Advanced Business Intelligence Capabilities are Essential across
Multiple Organizations
With a population of nearly 2.5 million citizens, and an area of more than 2,000
square miles, Miami-Dade County is the largest county-level unit in Florida. Even
with the recent economic recession, the countys population grew by more than 10
percent from 2000 to 2010. As would be expected of a county with this profile, all
organizations within the county government, from first responders to county parks,
amass an extensive amount of data. Beginning in 1999, the countys IT organization
was using IBM business intelligence analytic applications to provide business
intelligence to its internal stakeholder agencies. The analytics soon became strategic
assets to the county, but the growth of demand driven by the expanding population
began to outpace the IT systems ability to support the corresponding increase in
information sharing between agencies. At the same time, funding in a state hard hit
by the recession meant that existing IT investments had to be preserved as best as
possible. This led the county to search for a solution to provide the advanced
business intelligence capabilities needed, building on the systems in place.
Enhancing a Current System to Handle Advanced Analytic Capabilities
Because bal anci ng the need for new analyti c capabi l i ti es wi th preservi ng
investments in current IT system was a primary concern, Miami-Dade County
turned again to IBM to enhance its infrastructure to handle the increased data
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Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
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feeding into its business intelligence, data management, and transaction processing
workloads. The countys IT planners and IBM enhanced the existing IT architecture
with two new higher-capacity mainframe platforms, and upgraded the business
intelligence software to ensure very high reliability for critical agency functions,
particularly fire and police services. The project team built the enhancements
around the need for a real-time situational awareness, and the new system enables
users to view reports on a dashboard interface. The implementation plan also
extended the data management and analysis capabilities to other departments
beyond the original group of users, such as jails and power and IT operations.
Cost Effectively Extending the Capabilities of Business Intelligence
The smarter IT infrastructure that IBM developed supported Miami-Dade Countys
requirements to extend the capabilities of its business intelligence system, managing
the resources of the county much more efficiently. This is helping the county to
make the transition to a more modern, collaborative, and smarter structure. It has
already provided numerous governmental agencies the insight and prediction
capabilities of an advanced business intelligence system. Because IBM was able to
build from existing systems, the county was also able to become smarter within its
tight budget by saving on hardware and software costs. All of this provides the
foundation for the county to continue to expand its business intelligence
capabilities across the entire governmental organization.
The City of Norfolk: Strengthening Public Safety and Security
The City of Norfolk, VA, is a typical example of a city government with an IT
infrastructure that was insufficient for its needs. The citys disparate IT systems
were inefficient, expensive to maintain, and could not accommodate the citys desire
to introduce new services for its citizens. Norfolks IT planners and IBM
collaborated to optimize its IT systems by transforming the citys IT architecture to
support new data-intensive workloads for the police and other departments, which
helps the city to strengthen public safety and security.
An Antiquated IT Infrastructure Impedes Growth
With more than 242,000 residents, Norfolk is the second-largest city in Virginia. The
citys IT department, charged with storing and maintaining vast amounts of complex
data in a dynamic 24x7 environment, began to see exponential growth in data volumes,
and the existing storage facilities were rapidly running out of space. This was
jeopardizing the impending launch of the citys new major public safety initiatives,
anticipated to be highly data-intensive, such as storing police car video data. The
multiple storage and system devices were also power-hungry, which added to the
systems operational costs. The citys IT department decided it needed to transform its
IT infrastructure to accommodate the transaction processing, database management,
analytics, and communications workloads to deliver the new public safety services.
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Tuning the IT Infrastructure to Handle a Data-Intensive Environment
Norfolk turned to IBM to create a solution that would not only accommodate existing
data volumes from the various city departments at their current rate of growth, but
also scale quickly and easily to meet unanticipated needs. Of particular importance
was the need for the IT architecture to handle the new public services that would
generate massive amounts of data. The centerpiece of this was integrating its storage
infrastructure on a single IBM storage system, enabling automated processes,
improving performance and security, and reducing energy consumption across the
entire system. By optimizing the infrastructure to handle the new workloads
envisioned, IBM and Norfolk consolidated storage needs from a wide variety of
mission-critical, data-intensive applications and systems onto a single platform.
Supporting New Initiatives, While Boosting Performance and
Lowering Costs
Norfolks new storage system was optimized to handle the existing data sources,
and to quickly and easily provision additional storage to support its new service
initiatives. These include transportation services designed to improve ground traffic
through automated parking alerts and payment options, as well as public safety
services, such as in-car video surveillance for the citys police cruisers. Beyond
helping the city fulfill its mandates to improve citizen outcomes and strengthen
public safety, the Smarter Computing infrastructure helped it to more effectively
manage its scarce financial resources and improve environmental sustainability.
Storage performance was increased by 40 percent, while power consumption
dropped by 50 percent. All of this helped the city reduce its operating costs, deliver
a higher level of services, and increase its ability to protect public safety.
A SMARTER WAY TO BUILD BETTER GOVERNMENT
Public sector CIOs and IT managers are painfully aware that policy makers,
government workers, and citizens and businesses are demanding more from the IT
systems under their administration. As the world changes, models of government are
transforming from traditional silo models, to being more collaborative. Government
CIOs who are faced with tight IT budgets, as well as those who are making a leap into
the digital age, need a smarter way to collect, analyze, and present the enormously
rich and complex data that underlie the imperatives guiding this transformation.
The application and operational requirements to realize these imperatives come
with substantive IT workloads, and traditional IT infrastructures that were designed
around a one-function-one-hardware system principle cannot cope with these
workloads. In todays austere economic climate, government CIOs have the
additional requirement for their IT infrastructures to reduce operating costs, be
flexible and scalable to deploy computing resources where they are needed, and to
ease collaboration across agencies, partners, the private sector, and citizens.
The City of Norfolk
used Smarter
Computing to
optimize its storage
system to support
its new public safety
initiatives. Storage
performance was
increased by 40
percent while power
consumption dropped
by 50 percent.
frost.com
15
Smarter Computing to Support 21
st
Century Governance
The Smarter Computing approach can guide government IT departments along the
path of establishing the IT infrastructure to support the imperatives of a smarter,
21st century government. A number of muni ci pal , regi onal , and nati onal
governments around the worl d are begi nni ng to real i ze the benefi ts of
implementing a Smarter Computing approach. Government CIOs may wish to
investigate using a Smarter Computing approach if they are considering:
Modernizing large scale public programssuch as tax and revenue management,
education, social benefits and services, and healthcareto improve the level of
services provided, and enabling agents to reduce unnecessary waste of public funds;
Optimizing IT infrastructures to support new policing services, streamline
customs and border management processes, and enhance situational awareness
and personnel safety in security and defense operations;
Revi tal i zi ng exi sti ng water, transportati on, and power networks wi th
advanced IT capabilities to improve their operation and capacity and extend
the life of public assets
From the above-mentioned cases of Norfolk, Inner Mongolia, NCSU, Miami-
Dade, Alameda County and CNAF, Smarter Computing is proving to be a
successful and valuable approach to help governments meet the needs of their
citizens responsibly and efficiently.
frost.com
16
Frost & Sullivan
1
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). OECD Economic Outlook.
www.oecd.org (25 May 2011).
2
United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), State and Local Governments Fiscal
Outlook: April 2011 Update, Publication GAO-11-495SP (6 April 2011).
3
Davey, Monica, Minnesota Government Shuts in Budget Fight, New York Times Online Edition,
http://wwwnytimes.com/2011/07/01/us/01minnesota.html (30 June 2011).
4
United Nations Public Administration Programme, United Nations E-Government Survey 2010,
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan038851.pdf.
5
Ibid.
6
Government of China, Report on the Implementation of the 2010 Plan for National Economic
and Social Development and on the 2011 Draft Plan for National Economic and Social
Development. Adopted on March 14, 2011, at the Fourth Session of the Eleventh National
Peoples Congress, http://english.gov.cn/official/2011-03/17/content_1826561.htm.
7
Mukherjee, Pranab, Minister of Finance, Government of India, Budget Speech for 2011-2012,
Speech, http://indiabudget.nic.in (28 February 2011).
8
Kingdom of Bahrain eGovernment Authority, http://www.ega.gov.bh/en/strategy.php, (7 July 2011).
9
Von Drehle, David, In the U.S., Crisis in the Statehouses, Time Magazine,
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1997457,00.html, (17 June 2010).
10
Demographia, World Urban Areas: Population Projections (2010),
http://www.demographia.com/db-wuaproject.pdf, (10 June 2011).
11
Open Government Sites fall Prey to Budget Cuts. InformationWeek Online,
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/policy/229625627, (25 May 2011).
12
National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), The 2010 State CIO Survey:
Perspectives and Trends from State Government IT Leaders, (August 2010).
13
Ibid.
14
Nucleus Research, ROI Case Study: IBM SSIRS Alameda County Social Services Agency,
Document K12, (August, 2010).
15
North Carolina State Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University and
IBM Extend Access to Educational Resources to the World through Cloud Computing Press
release, CSC News, (24 October 2008).
16
IBM, Inc. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research takes on Smarter Climate
Research, Press release, http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/DLAS-
7WVKDS?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us, (18 October 2009).
This report was developed by Frost & Sullivan with IBM assistance and funding. This
report may utilize information, including publicly available data, provided by various
companies and sources, including IBM. The opinions are those of the reports
author, and do not necessarily represent IBMs position.
XBL03008-USEN-00
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