Smarter Computing to Support 21st Century Governance

A Frost & SullivanWhite Paper

Brian Cotton, PhD

www.frost.com

50 Years of Growth, Innovation and Leadership

Smarter Computing to Support 21st Century GovernanceTransforming IT Infrastructures to Meet Critical Imperatives

Frost & Sullivan

CONTENTS

Abstract........................................................................................................... 3

An Opportunity For a Smarter Government .................................................. 3

A Smarter Computing Approach to Support 21st 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 21st Century Governance

ABSTRACT

Amid fiscal restraint, government agencies around the world are transforming theirorganizations to be more responsive to the challenges facing them. Thistransformation is guided by four governance imperatives: (1) improving citizen andbusiness outcomes, (2) managing public resources effectively, (3) strengtheningsafety and security, and (4) ensuring a sustainable environment. These imperativesplay out across all the domains of governance, including education, healthcare,transportation, utilities, national defense, and public safety. The informationtechnology (IT) applications and operations that support these imperatives placesubstantial workload demands on IT infrastructures. Traditional government ITsystems are built to handle a single workload in a single agency, but are unable tohandle the workloads effectively or efficiently, thus impeding a government agency’sability to deliver on its imperatives.

Government CIOs need guidance to help them transform their IT infrastructuresto deliver on these imperatives. Smarter Computing, a new approach to transformIT infrastructures, is based on three fundamental capabilities: Designed for Data,Tuned to the Task, and Managed in the Cloud. Smarter Computing enables ITinfrastructures to handle multiple types of data for advanced management andanalysis applications, by using IT components optimized to the workloads placed onthem, to support a variety of service creation and delivery models.

Meanwhile, leaders in every industry are adopting Smarter Computing to addressthe challenges they face and opportunities presented by a Smarter Planet, and IBMis helping some of them to implement the approach.

Governments that are embracing Smarter Computing are delivering on theirimperatives, and are realizing performance and economic benefits from theirtransformed systems. Examples from the Potsdam Institute for Climate ImpactResearch, and Caisse Nationale d'Allocations Familiales to Miami-Dade County andthe City of Norfolk demonstrate the benefits of using this approach. Theseorganizations have been able to modernize their IT infrastructures to accommodatenew governance services, to extend powerful computing resources to otheragencies and jurisdictions, and to identify and eliminate fraud in benefits programswhile improving the outcomes of their citizen clients. At the same time, they arerealizing significant capital expense, maintenance, and cost savings by using aSmarter 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 aregetting younger. The natural environment is changing and leaders are realizing whatthe planet is able to provide, and what it can no longer tolerate. An assortment ofthreats, from armed conflicts that cross national borders, to terrorism, disease, andincreasingly fierce natural disasters, are facing us.

Underlying all this is an economic climate that dictates how governments adapt tothe changing world. In the developed economies, diminished tax revenue and recorddeficits are stressing government funding and putting some in substantial deficits.Globally, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) isestimating the aggregate budget deficit is 7.5 percent1, while some countries arerunning deficits well into double digits. In the United States, the GovernmentAccountability 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 crisisas financial problems force them to suspend services, as recently happened inMinnesota.3Governments are being forced to become leaner, more efficient, andmore effective amid fiscal austerity.

Governments in emerging market countries are obligated to modernize theiroperational models to meet citizen demands for new services, and some areimplementing eGovernment systems as part of their strategy.4 This is enabling themto inject flexibility into their operations and quickly scale to expand the reach ofpublic services when needed.5 China, for instance, is increasing its spending oneGovernment programs at the local and regional government levels6, and similarspending is planned by the government of India7 and the Kingdom of Bahrain.8

In both settings, governments are transforming themselves to be smarter and takeadvantage of the forces of change. Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michiganfrom 2003 to 2011, called on her peers to recognize and embrace this opportunity.“The 21st century economy is all about speed, access, intelligence, and efficiency. A21st century government needs to be about the same things”.9 In this new world,traditional silo-based models of governance are shifting to newer collaborativemodels that enable government to rapidly and efficiently develop, implement, andmanage services. These collaborative models place government in a system thatfacilitates the interaction between internal agencies and the external private sector,including communities, academia, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), andforeign governments at the national level. At the core of this is a move towardsharing intelligence and analysis, with speed based on real-time data access andanalysis, and capabilities that are optimized to specific domains or functions ofgovernment—all running at a high level of efficiency.

“The 21st centuryeconomy is all about

speed, access,intelligence, and

efficiency. A 21st

century governmentneeds to be about the same things”

—Jennifer Granholm,former governor

of Michigan

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The transformation to a 21st century government is guided by a set of four criticalimperatives linking into multiple government domains, as illustrated in Figure 1.

• Improve citizen and business outcomes: Enhance social and businessservices with a citizen-centric focus, while reducing operational costs andmaximizing taxpayer value

• Manage public resources effectively: Strengthen analysis, intelligence, andplanning to improve program management and sharpen insight into andcontrol over operations

• Strengthen security and safety: Enable defense, law enforcement, andfirst 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 systemthat 1) promotes economic growth by streamlining and simplifying processes andreporting requirements, 2) delivers citizen-centered services in offices that addressmultiple types of services, and 3) provides high-demand transactions over theInternet. These imperatives play out at all levels of government, and will be mostacute at the urban level, where the interplay between stakeholders is particularlyclose 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

21st CenturyGovernment

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 transforming to collaborative models need an ITinfrastructure that supports them. Traditional government IT infrastructures weredesigned on a “one agency-one architecture” silo model, mirroring the operationalstructure of government itself. These IT systems typically do not interoperate well,and as they are aggregated across agencies and jurisdictions, these silos of ITinfrastructure can result in underutilized assets and redundant software, whichincrease capital and operational costs.

Public sector CIOs and IT planners need to be creative when redesigning their ITinfrastructures to reduce the administrative overhead while maintaining high levelsof performance. In mature market countries, this presents a conundrum, becausewhile many government CIOs recognize a need to transform their ITinfrastructures, most are faced with IT budgets that are being cut back, remainingflat, or are at best growing only slowly.11 Here, the opportunity of a tight budget canstimulate creative solutions for increasing IT efficiency and effectiveness.12 As onestate government CIO put it, “IT in my state was developed inside out, so that 19state agencies have 19 data centers and every county has its own network... there’sa lot of money to be saved in just one network for all of them.”13 In emerging marketcountries, the CIO’s opportunity is to design systems according to state-of-the-artapproaches. In both cases, government CIOs need support to transform their ITinfrastructures, and Smarter Computing can guide them through the process.

A SMARTER COMPUTING APPROACH TO SUPPORT 21st CENTURY GOVERNANCE

Smarter Computing is a new approach to transform IT infrastructures to perform better in today’s complex and interconnected world. This approach isbased on three fundamental capabilities:

• Designed for Data means designing an IT infrastructure to harness allavailable information, including real-time streaming data, to unlock insights forbetter decision-making. It is about extending beyond traditional sources of datato generate insights by leveraging new forms of information, which can beincorporated into a government organization’s information supply chain tocreate a single version of the truth, simplify data security, and get insights fromhuge volumes of data, while reducing operating costs.

• Tuned to the Task means matching workloads to systems that are optimizedto the workload characteristics, including transaction processing, databasemanagement, business intelligence, analytics, managing cross-domaincommunications, and enabling complex modeling. Optimizing systems to theworkloads enables greater performance and efficiency, helping government CIOsworking under constrained IT budgets to deliver services cost effectively.

“IT in my state wasdeveloped inside

out, so that 19 stateagencies have 19 data centers and

every county has itsown network. . . .

there’s a lot of money to be saved in having just onenetwork for all of

them.”

—U.S. stategovernment CIO

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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 todeliver on eGovernment initiatives.

Smarter Computing supports government IT infrastructure transformation bycreating a technology framework to support the IT applications and operations thatdeliver on the four key imperatives. These applications and operations revolvearound how data is collected, processed, analyzed, stored, and shared. The ITinfrastructures running these applications are subjected to various types ofworkloads and processing tasks (as summarized in Figure 2), which cannot beeffectively 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 tohandle massive amounts and varieties of data needed by applications andoperations. Different workloads have different characteristics, and by emphasizingoptimized systems Smarter Computing encourages efficient infrastructure designsthat 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 DeliveryEducationHealthcareTax and Revenue ManagementTransportation ManagementPublic Safety


Social Benefits and Service DeliveryEducationHealthcareTax and Revenue ManagementTransportation ManagementPublic SafetyWater and Sewer Management

Strengthen Security& Safety

Customs and ImmigrationBorder ManagementPublic SafetyDefense Network Centric Operations

Ensure a SustainableEnvironment

Transportation ManagementPower ManagementWater 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 Computingsupports SmarterGovernment bycreating a technology framework to support acollaborative, shared-serviceoperational modelthat delivers on the four keyimperatives of 21st centurygovernment.

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resources to be deployed elsewhere during off-peak periods. Smarter Computing’scloud capabilities facilitate the rapid deployment of new services, and can integrateservices and data across government agencies to provide a unified view of insightsand enhance collaboration. Importantly, the approach gives CIOs control overcapital and operational expenditures because existing IT infrastructures can betransformed, and need not be completely replaced. By using Smarter Computing,government CIOs can transform their IT infrastructures to effectively andefficiently enable the imperatives of 21st century governance.

Improving Citizen and Business Outcomes

Improving citizen and business outcomes relies on a set of applications and operationsto 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 wouldprepare an IT infrastructure to handle all the data for its citizen clients, whereverand in whatever format it resides. As well, it would enable master data management(MDM) techniques to create the single-view record of the citizen, provideauthorized access to parts of that record across an agency, and apply analytics tomatch the appropriate level of benefits with the citizen and to detect instances offraud, all while ensuring the identity of the citizen and his or her personal data iskept secure. This can improve the level of services delivered to the citizen, andimprove the management of public resources allocated to an agency. The AlamedaCounty Social Services Agency, for example, found these benefits when itimplemented Smarter Computing to create a single view of its clients, and appliedanalytics to its benefits payment operations to ensure its clients were given theproper level of benefit assistance. As a result the agency saves almost $25 millionannually by reducing benefit overpayments.14


Managing public resources effectively means not only improving data managementand analysis, but also improving the efficiency with which services are created anddelivered, which are realized in lower costs. This imperative uses the same set of ITapplications and operations as does improving citizen and business outcomes, and

The Alameda CountySocial Services

Agency implemented a Smarter

Computing approachand realized almost

$25 million in savings annually.

—Nucleus Research

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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 SmarterComputing for this imperative lies in using systems optimized to the various IT workloads, and because Smarter Computing infrastructures are cloud-enabledthey can operate with multiple delivery models, including shared-servicearrangements. Moreover, Smarter Computing enables consolidation andvirtualization, allowing flexible and scalable resource deployment in the event of unanticipated or unknown workload demands. Cloud capabilities also improvethe economics of service creation and delivery. North Carolina State University(NCSU), for instance, adopted this approach to address an unanticipated growth indemand for its computing resources. By using Smarter Computing, NCSU was ableto extend its resources to other educational institutions in North Carolina,increasing the average number of students served per license by 150 percentwithout incurring any additional capital expenses.15

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 previousimperatives, 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, forinstance, relies on accurate data collected from a variety of sources, and making itavailable for analysis to enable security commanders to evaluate the situation,assess the risks to the public and officers, and then deploy the appropriatepersonnel. Traditional methods of data collection often involve manual processes,and the data is seldom easily accessible or amenable to rapid analysis. A SmarterComputing approach to increasing traffic safety would enable a single IT platformto centralize traffic data collection, using automated sensors and video feeds, andintegrate analysis and reporting applications available to all commanders andofficers who need to act on the data. To illustrate this, the Inner Mongolia PublicTraffic Police Detachment, a governmental traffic administration agency serving thecitizens of Inner Mongolia in northern China, implemented Smarter Computing toenhance its ability to respond to traffic data processing. By using the approach, theagency reduced data collection times from an average of 10 days to only fourhours—a 95 percent improvement. Moreover, because traffic data collection isaccelerated, the agency is able to reduce its monthly processing costs and improvetraffic services and citizen satisfaction.

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Ensuring a Sustainable Environment

The governance imperative of ensuring a sustainable environment complements theother imperatives. Often, concerns over making sure large-scale physicalinfrastructures, the agencies that manage them, and the citizens they serve all operateto minimize impacts on the environment and conserve natural resources. ApplyingSmarter Computing to the digital infrastructures that run the physical infrastructurescan help governments protect the environment. The IT applications and operationsinvolved here include 1) citizen self-service; 2) asset management, tracking, andmaintenance; 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 bypublic safety agencies, for instance, place heavy workloads for databasemanagement, analytics, sensors and controls, communications, and complexmodeling on a weather agency’s IT infrastructure. Because of the cost in lives,property, and disruption that a severe weather event can cause, it is critical thatpredictions 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 thismassively complex. Traditional infrastructures cannot adequately handle themultiple, interdependent workloads tied to performing the service without largeinvestments in IT equipment, energy to power and cool it, data center floor spaceto house it, and manpower to maintain it.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Change in Germany (Potsdam Institut fur Klimafolgenforschung, PIK) models and predicts climate for the Germangovernment with a consideration for extreme weather events that arrive with little warning and last for comparatively short durations. The extremely complexcalculations that PIK needs to perform this service require an IT infrastructure that delivers extremely high performance and reliability, while cost-effectivelymanaging huge amounts of weather data. PIK was unable to provide this serviceefficiently using its traditional IT architecture. Instead, PIK used a SmarterComputing approach to design a workload-optimized, multisystem IT architectureable to provide the crucial prediction and advanced warnings capabilities at 30 times the capacity of its traditional architecture, while consuming 25 percentless energy than would have been the case.16

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 workloadsplaced on it, and has the flexibility to support multiple service delivery models in a 21st century government. Government agencies that are embracing SmarterComputing are delivering on the imperatives of 21st century government, and are enjoying the benefits from using the approach.

The Potsdam Institutefor Climate Change

uses SmarterComputing to provide

advance warning ofextreme weather

events at 30 times the performance and

25 percent less energy consumed

than traditional ITarchitectures would

allow.

—IBM Case Study

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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 agencyproviding social benefits and assistance to families living in France and its overseasterritories. The agency wanted to improve the speed at which it handles benefitsprocessing, sharpen its visibility into applicants’ requirements, and modernize itsoperations by shifting much of its administration from paper-based to digital processes.CNAF worked with IBM to apply Smarter Computing to redesign its IT infrastructureto better cope with disparate forms of benefits data, to optimize data centers to speedthe processing of benefits information, and to put all services online to better meet theneeds of its clients. Smarter Computing not only helps CNAF improve the outcomesof 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 123locations that provides benefits and assistance to 12 million families, students, andlow-income individuals, and manages more than €50 billion in public resourcesannually. For most of its history, CNAF has relied on a painstaking set of processesto examine a number of eligibility factors for each case and matching them to theappropriate level of benefits, while checking other accounting and legal practices tolimit fraud. This manual, paper-based process involves multiple departments, andrequires applicants to make several in-person visits to crowded agencies, and thenwait up to four months to have their applications confirmed. Moreover, the agency’sreliance on paper forms places a burden on the environment. As the number ofapplications increased in the wake of the economic recession, CNAF needed a wayto slash the processing time and efforts, while vastly extending the access toservices beyond the traditional agency locations, and still provide a high level ofservice 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 outcomesof its citizens and better manage the public resources, CNAF teamed with IBM toimplement a Smarter Computing approach across its infrastructure. The core of theinitiative was to implement a comprehensive and standardized portal structure toprovide easier, faster and more accurate access to eligibility information andprocessing for citizens and agency staff. IBM designed the architecture to handle thedisparate information submitted online by accepting electronic data and scannedforms from Web browsers and more than 900 new interactive kiosks deployed acrossFrance and its territories. The core of the portal is built around an IBM mainframeoptimized to handle all this disparate data, yet be flexible enough to handle 35 milliontransactions every day, and support peak workloads of 2.2 million page view requests.

The CNAFimplemented asmarter Computingapproach to its social benefitsprocessing, cuttingwait times from four months to one week, reducingcosts, and improvingits environmentalsustainability.

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“In addition toproviding the speed,

reliability andscalability we needed

to support ourenterprise business

intelligenceenvironment, thesystem fit within

our budget, which was a key deciding

factor.”

—Jaci Newmark, project lead,

enterprise businessintelligence

architecture, Miami-Dade

County

Vastly Improving Citizen Outcomes while Cutting Costs

CNAF soon saw the benefits of its new Smarter Computing system. By increasing theaccess 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 informeddecisions and reducing the potential for fraud. This reduced the need for citizens tovisit agency offices, making the process more convenient, as well as substantiallycutting 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 newkiosks, and by moving from a paper-based system to a digital system, it reduced costsand 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 growingneed for information sharing across its many departments. Building on anestablished platform, Florida’s Miami-Dade County worked with IBM to make its ITarchitecture smarter, and gained a powerful new business intelligence platform. Inaddition to increasing the county’s business intelligence functionality and scalability,the solution preserved investments in existing systems. This enabled Miami-Dade tomake 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 2,000square miles, Miami-Dade County is the largest county-level unit in Florida. Evenwith the recent economic recession, the county’s population grew by more than 10percent from 2000 to 2010. As would be expected of a county with this profile, allorganizations within the county government, from first responders to county parks,amass an extensive amount of data. Beginning in 1999, the county’s IT organizationwas using IBM business intelligence analytic applications to provide businessintelligence to its internal stakeholder agencies. The analytics soon became strategicassets to the county, but the growth of demand driven by the expanding populationbegan to outpace the IT systems’ ability to support the corresponding increase ininformation sharing between agencies. At the same time, funding in a state hard hitby the recession meant that existing IT investments had to be preserved as best aspossible. This led the county to search for a solution to provide the advancedbusiness intelligence capabilities needed, building on the systems in place.

Enhancing a Current System to Handle Advanced Analytic Capabilities

Because balancing the need for new analytic capabilities with preservinginvestments in current IT system was a primary concern, Miami-Dade Countyturned again to IBM to enhance its infrastructure to handle the increased data

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feeding into its business intelligence, data management, and transaction processingworkloads. The county’s IT planners and IBM enhanced the existing IT architecturewith two new higher-capacity mainframe platforms, and upgraded the businessintelligence software to ensure very high reliability for critical agency functions,particularly fire and police services. The project team built the enhancementsaround the need for a real-time situational awareness, and the new system enablesusers to view reports on a dashboard interface. The implementation plan alsoextended the data management and analysis capabilities to other departmentsbeyond 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 County’srequirements to extend the capabilities of its business intelligence system, managingthe resources of the county much more efficiently. This is helping the county tomake the transition to a more modern, collaborative, and smarter structure. It hasalready provided numerous governmental agencies the insight and predictioncapabilities of an advanced business intelligence system. Because IBM was able tobuild from existing systems, the county was also able to become smarter within itstight budget by saving on hardware and software costs. All of this provides thefoundation for the county to continue to expand its business intelligencecapabilities 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 ITinfrastructure that was insufficient for its needs. The city’s disparate IT systemswere inefficient, expensive to maintain, and could not accommodate the city’s desireto introduce new services for its citizens. Norfolk’s IT planners and IBMcollaborated to optimize its IT systems by transforming the city’s IT architecture tosupport new data-intensive workloads for the police and other departments, whichhelps 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. Thecity’s IT department, charged with storing and maintaining vast amounts of complexdata 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 wasjeopardizing the impending launch of the city’s new major public safety initiatives,anticipated to be highly data-intensive, such as storing police car video data. Themultiple storage and system devices were also power-hungry, which added to thesystem’s operational costs. The city’s IT department decided it needed to transform itsIT 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 existingdata volumes from the various city departments at their current rate of growth, butalso scale quickly and easily to meet unanticipated needs. Of particular importancewas the need for the IT architecture to handle the new public services that wouldgenerate massive amounts of data. The centerpiece of this was integrating its storageinfrastructure on a single IBM storage system, enabling automated processes,improving performance and security, and reducing energy consumption across theentire system. By optimizing the infrastructure to handle the new workloadsenvisioned, IBM and Norfolk consolidated storage needs from a wide variety ofmission-critical, data-intensive applications and systems onto a single platform.

Supporting New Initiatives, While Boosting Performance and Lowering Costs

Norfolk’s new storage system was optimized to handle the existing data sources,and to quickly and easily provision additional storage to support its new serviceinitiatives. These include transportation services designed to improve ground trafficthrough automated parking alerts and payment options, as well as public safetyservices, such as in-car video surveillance for the city’s police cruisers. Beyondhelping the city fulfill its mandates to improve citizen outcomes and strengthenpublic safety, the Smarter Computing infrastructure helped it to more effectivelymanage its scarce financial resources and improve environmental sustainability.Storage performance was increased by 40 percent, while power consumptiondropped by 50 percent. All of this helped the city reduce its operating costs, delivera 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 ITsystems under their administration. As the world changes, models of government aretransforming from traditional silo models, to being more collaborative. GovernmentCIOs who are faced with tight IT budgets, as well as those who are making a leap intothe digital age, need a smarter way to collect, analyze, and present the enormouslyrich and complex data that underlie the imperatives guiding this transformation.

The application and operational requirements to realize these imperatives comewith substantive IT workloads, and traditional IT infrastructures that were designedaround a one-function-one-hardware system principle cannot cope with theseworkloads. In today’s austere economic climate, government CIOs have theadditional requirement for their IT infrastructures to reduce operating costs, beflexible and scalable to deploy computing resources where they are needed, and toease collaboration across agencies, partners, the private sector, and citizens.

The City of Norfolkused Smarter

Computing tooptimize its storage

system to support its new public safety

initiatives. Storageperformance was

increased by 40percent while power

consumption droppedby 50 percent.

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The Smarter Computing approach can guide government IT departments along thepath of establishing the IT infrastructure to support the imperatives of a smarter,21st century government. A number of municipal, regional, and nationalgovernments around the world are beginning to realize the benefits ofimplementing a Smarter Computing approach. Government CIOs may wish toinvestigate using a Smarter Computing approach if they are considering:

• Modernizing large scale public programs—such as tax and revenue management,education, social benefits and services, and healthcare—to improve the level ofservices provided, and enabling agents to reduce unnecessary waste of public funds;

• Optimizing IT infrastructures to support new policing services, streamlinecustoms and border management processes, and enhance situational awarenessand personnel safety in security and defense operations;

• Revitalizing existing water, transportation, and power networks with 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 theircitizens responsibly and efficiently.

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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’ FiscalOutlook: 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 SocialDevelopment. Adopted on March 14, 2011, at the Fourth Session of the Eleventh NationalPeople’s 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” Pressrelease, CSC News, (24 October 2008).

16 IBM, Inc. “The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research takes on Smarter ClimateResearch”, 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. Thisreport may utilize information, including publicly available data, provided by variouscompanies and sources, including IBM. The opinions are those of the report’sauthor, and do not necessarily represent IBM’s position.

XBL03008-USEN-00

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