By David Bicknell
It is interesting to see how the US Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel is pushing US departments to rationalise their email systems.
The Labour Department is the latest to be earmarked for email consolidation with seven contracts for separate email systems set to be shrunk down to one, the Washington Business Journal reported.
The federal government needs to eliminate duplication to save dollars but also to free up time and resources in agencies’ acquisition offices so more effort can be put into transformative information technology projects, VanRoekel told the recent Congressional Forum on Technology.
“There’s an effort under way to start to look at how many [information technology] systems people are running in these agencies,” he said. “How many email systems? At the Department of Labor there are seven. There’s an opportunity there to save money.”
VanRoekel pointed to rationalisation success at other departments. Three years ago, he suggested, the Agriculture Department was managing 21 email contracts and 1,000 mobile contracts to implement primarily a BlackBerry service.
The department reduced those numbers to one and three respectively. The new email system cost one-third as much as the systems that had been in place, and the mobile computing blanket purchasing agreements saved Agriculture 18 percent from its budget
Consolidation efforts also need to be strategic to ensure fair competition among contractors, VanRoekel said.
“Should we go extreme on consolidation, and run one email system? The Canadian government has done this; one email, one procurement system,” he said. “Contemplating how we’d manage that at our scale is one factor. But also, if we the government were to pick the winner, we would do a great disservice to business. We need to strike that balance.”
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