Dan Chenok

Today, the IBM Center for The Business of Government is pleased to release the report, Mitigating Risks in the Application of Cloud Computing in Law Enforcement, by Paul Wormeli, Executive Director Emeritus, IJIS Institute.

This report comes at an opportune time as the law enforcement community is undergoing a major transformation. Traditionally, communication within law enforcement was often linear and hierarchical. Today, communication happens in real time across jurisdictional boundaries. Because of improved communication and real-time information, the law enforcement community can plan where to place resources ahead of time, instead of only reacting to events after they have occurred.

This is because government now has thousands of mission systems using legacy architecture, each built for a single purpose to support the needs of a single program or agency. Common standards, common definitions of like data, or enterprise approaches are rarely used in the federal government. Government does not often leverage IT to make things simpler, generate economies of scale, or increase collaboration. Over the last 20 years, mission systems have become more customized and focused on single programs or needs, making government information systems at once more siloed and complex.

This week, our focus was on key considerations before moving to a virtualized development and test (dev-test) environment.

Yesterday, I talked about the location of a dev-test environment.  I argued that  there is a good reason for an agency to consider hosting their own virtualized dev-test environment in their data center.  I said:  

I recently discussed the significant benefits and low risk for agencies adopting a shared virtualized development and test (dev-test) environment.  Until now, each project team has been saddled with building and maintaining their own dev-test environment.  Lacking any centralized planning, development teams made sometimes arbitrary selections for the operating environment which resulted in each system operating as an island; with dedicated facilities and staff.

On Cloud: This week, Johnny Barnes, our Public Sector Chief Technology Officer, provided an overview comparing cloud models and offering thoughts about their connection to the mission needs that may drive an organization to move to the cloud.  For many, this framework is clear; using definitions provided by NIST is intended to help federal leaders compare apples to apples.   A few other articles relevant to efforts to improve performance while reducing budgetary needs: ·    Joe Davidson’s article Monday on the SAVE awards

On Consolidation and the Cloud: Last week, Ravi Bansal wrapped up his description of the Five E’s of IT Consolidation with a discussion of exposure and execution.  The exposure post connects COOP efforts to the consolidation approach; CIOs can manage risk to the mission of their o