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Top 10 State/Local Governments Storm Industry to the Cloud

SAP

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MiCloud in the state of Michigan offers Infrastructure as a Service to spin up new systems in only 30 minutes for less cost than commercial solutions. So when the Governor calls, the answer is yes!

Commonwealth of Virginia saves $30M annually with Software as a Service for procurement for hundreds of agencies, including cloud service purchases from the cloud service itself.

Lake Havasu City, AZ police in the field can email and collaborate via the cloud to coordinate public safety efforts on behalf of local citizens.

Larimer County, CO created a cloud-based “Single Point of Care” intake process for consolidating social services across agencies for needy families.

Pueblo County, CO built a Software as a Service for property tax assessment and online parcel viewing for 7 counties to offer citizens more sophisticated functionality than was previously possible for smaller counties.

Montana offers cloud-based IT Help Desk to support smaller jurisdictions in automating their delivery of agency services.

University of Kentucky runs enterprise apps in a private cloud with an even more progressive hybrid cloud vision in the works.

CA Department of Financial Institutions handles 3 times as many consumer regulatory complaints via the cloud in 66% less time.

CA State University at Chico delivers self-service business apps in the cloud to students and faculty to supplement teaching and research.

IlliniCloud in Illinois offers Infrastructure and Software as a Service for multiple apps shared across 150 K-12 school districts.

Cloud services can transform government services -- of any type -- from any agency -- in any jurisdiction.

We saw that repeatedly in our work on the TechAmerica US Cloud Commission for State-Local Government (SLG-CC).

As SAP’s Commissioner and SLG-CC chair of the Business Impact team, I met many SLG thought leaders who are pushing the envelope to drive unique cloud opportunities under the most challenging circumstances.

Above are just a few of their stories, and more can be found on the SLG-CC Community Portal.

The role of the Commission's combined industry/government membership was to develop recommendations for driving adoption of cloud computing in SLG, and offer a roadmap with proof points from those who have succeeded and are leading the way.

For these public sector cloud pioneers, it’s not just a matter of wanting to be innovative.  They are compelled to be innovative, because of ongoing budget pressures and the need to do more with less, especially in an election year.

On the Commission launch’s Vendor Panel moderated by David Kirkpatrick of Techonomy, I compared today’s SLG circumstances to Michael Eisner's management strategy at Disney called “creativity inside the box.” According to that strategy, Disney moviemakers were asked to produce motion pictures within a more restrictive “financial box,” yet deliver the same Disney quality and creativity enjoyed by the public.

On hearing Michael speak about this a few years ago, the outcome was even more creative movies within the budget limitations, because the desire to achieve the same result required even more creativity to deliver it.

As Michael had summarized: "Creativity can actually flourish with financial limitations.

"Creativity inside the box" is what we are witnessing with these cloud pioneers in State/Local government.

So consider this: if State/Local governments who work with such limited resources today can begin to provide citizen consumers with better government services at lower cost, then ... what if we fully empowered state and local governments to implement cloud computing to transform citizen services ...

and what might our government look like as a result?

What do you think?