By Dick Stark

On Friday, I was interviewed by BMC’s Senior Strategic Marketing Manager for an upcoming BMC thought leadership article. The topic: Top IT Leadership Challenges in the Public Sector.  I selected the below four challenges. Here’s a summary of that interview.

Data Center Consolidation. In former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s “25 point plan to Reform Federal IT Management,” data center consolidation received top billing. The goal is to eliminate 800 data centers by 2015.  The benefits are obvious: power and space savings as well as the consolidation of applications and servers. This is an admittedly difficult task, as the Feds must choose which of their children will live or die.

Fortunately there are several BMC tools that manage and optimize data center rack layout and environmental performance: nlyte, a BMC Marketzone partner, and BMC’s Capacity Optimization (BCO).

Cloud First Program. The Federal Government immediately assumed a leadership position in the exploding Cloud and SaaS marketplace.  By implementing a “cloud-first program,” agencies are required to evaluate safe secure cloud computing options before making new IT investments. And, NIST has jumped on board with an 84-page draft on cloud recommendations. The topics discussed include data protection, computing performance, reliability, economics and data compliance.  

BMC has wasted no time porting its on-premise software, such as Remedy to a SaaS offering, now known as Remedy on Demand.  BMC is also the market leader in cloud lifecycle management, allowing organizations to build and manage their own private clouds.

Do More with Less. Never have government CIOs been more challenged to do more with less than right now.  Nothing is sacred.  With the Federal Funding and Accountability and Transparency Act, even government contractor’s executive salaries are on display.  Last week, Government Contractor Executive Anita Talwar’s $3M Great Falls mansion made the front page of the Washington Post.  Her story is similar to many others thanks to the government contracting boom that occurred over the past 20 years.

Nearly every BMC product offers a significant ROI, but three in particular offer very rapid returns: asset management/CMDB, Service Costing, and Service Catalog.

Make IT Transformational. According to a recent WSJ article, the question should not be “how do I use technology strategically?” Rather, it should be, “What would be the ideal way to interact with and serve my customers?”  This brought to mind Orange County, a RightStar and BMC customer. Orange County is expanding its 311 service to their web site and utilizing BMCSDE for both self-service and direct callers.  The goal is not to just improve service to its citizens by offering an easy to use portal, but also reduce the number of agents required to answer the phone.