Tomorrow more than 200,000 people will converge on the National Mall for Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, a gathering, according to its website, for those “mad as hell, who aren’t going to take it anymore!” Just in case this turns out to be a rally against government spending, followers of GovLoop, a blog that advocates for civil servants, will be there to bolster support for government workers and government spending.

There are plenty of signs of cost insanity among our own customers. For example, earlier this week we held a preliminary meeting with a new government account. We’re eager to get this Remedy job started and we were briefed to the political sensitivity of the new upgrade. The customer will move from a simple ticketing system to a full BSM ITIL-based Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management system. As anyone who has attended any BMC sales training knows, an ITIL-based system should provide a much more rapid ROI than a non-ITIL system.

It turns out that the department heads are reluctant to embrace the new system because they fear the transparency that ITIL provides. My assumption is that the upgraded system may uncover duplication of efforts and underutilized IT assets, software maintenance, and service contracts. It could be that new processes will reduce the number of service personnel required, which would create a whole new set of issues.
Because of perceived government waste and mismanagement, there have been plenty of suggestions on how to reduce government spending. Chief among them is the proposed Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010, which requires each federal agency to set clear performance goals that can be accurately measured and then publicly reported to the taxpayers. It also directs agencies to identify their highest and lowest priority programs. Additionally, a consortium of industry CEOs known as the Technology CEO Council claims the federal government can save $1 trillion in ten years by streamlining supply chains, consolidating data centers, automating paper processes, and applying anti-fraud analytic tools.

How does this apply to RightStar? Beyond BSM, there is BMC’s IT Business Management or ITBM. Our pre-sales manager returned last week from ITBM training and reported several enhancements, notably the new Service Costing module and full integration to Remedy. This means that with ITBM Service Costing software and professional services from RightStar, we can help agencies get a firm grasp on what it costs to run their IT departments from a comprehensive software, hardware, and labor cost perspective. This kind of transparency may be frightening to agency department heads that fear potential budget cuts and realignments, but it’s an important first step to restoring sanity and getting a better grasp on exactly how agencies are spending taxpayer dollars.