Google and LA will be the business case for other government entities
Randi Levin, CTO of the City of Los Angeles, John Zeberlein of CSC, and Deborah Hafford of Google Enterprise offered a wide open Q&A session into one of the nation’s first cloud computing service deployments for a local government, Los Angeles. With roughly 30,000 email users moving from Novell Groupwise to Google Apps, this migration is not a simple process.
Ms Levin’s situation was such that the City of LA was in a total budget crisis. They were tasked with providing continuity of services with about 30% fewer resources. In addition, the Information Technology Agency (ITA), employed unionized workers, faced furloughs and were unable to pay for overtime. These economical concerns meant a change was necessary.
From a technical standpoint, the ITA employed Novel GroupWise 7, but they had many issues. Users were extremely unhappy with the email system, the calendaring, the sync requirements, and the lack of compatability with the iPhone. Lastly, the ITA was unwilling to pay the $30M necessary to upgrade the current data-center due to its location (under 20 floors in earthquake land!!). Ms Levin needed to move to the cloud, and move without a large upfront investment.
In their evaluation process, Ms Levin had many concerns; security, existing application integration, price, Public Records Acts/Secret Subpoenas, and more. Through these criteria, the ITA selected Google Apps, implemented in partnership with CSC. The ITA had no disaster recovery management plan, so a move to the cloud was essential (especially in earthquake ground zero).
The ITA is extremely happy with the features of their Google Apps deployment. This includes increased mobility to their end-users, guaranteed up-times, and a huge amount of web storage. The ITA also enjoys the anti-virus protection and security provided by Google.
In terms of adoption, Ms Levin is finding a great positive response from her customers. Revisions are coming faster and sharper. CSC is leading the training project, and finding the largest struggle is changing the culture and workflows to fit Google Apps. Adaptation came fast to the techno-savvy, under 40 crowd, but there is a true age gap in ease of use and adoption. Currently, they have transitioned 10,500 employees, and will hit 30k by the end of July.
The totality of the contract is $7.25M over five years, providing a savings of $5M, and an ROI of close to $20M. I think that we should pay close attention to the City of LA and how the handle their Google Apps deployment into the future. Google Apps will change the way that many firms do business (and business apps). But Google might find their sweet spot to be in the public sector, due to the fully fleshed out offering for a smaller cost. It can be deployed across small and large enterprises, maximizing cost savings and interoperability.
About RyanKamauff