Getting the most out of consolidating a distributed, siloed IT environment requires management, fair deals and not being a bully.
State CIOs who have finished e-mail consolidation projects suggest starting small, communicating widely and considering a tiered services approach.
Over the past decade, Michigan's Department of Information Technology has cut costs by consolidating resources and standardizing its approach to better meet the needs of the state's agencies.
The Army's mobile device efforts are gaining momentum, and the effort could potentially reach across the entire federal government.
As the department works out details on how to manage them, it is taking tentative steps toward acquiring handhelds.
The agency's Tournament Lab provides production-ready software to NASA and academic data to Harvard at bargain prices. And coders can cash in, too.
There always will be a need for internal staff members, but if the competitive outsourcing model catches on, their role could change.
Police are using technologies originally developed for business analysis to investigate cases, catch criminals and even predict crime trends.
A $45 million grant to help double the size of a nonprofit regional network is expected to add hundreds of jobs in the Northeast Ohio Rust Belt.
A $45 million federal recovery grant is helping the OneCommunity development program build out a 1,800-mile high speed regional network for Northeast Ohio being used by area governments, educational institutions and health care providers.
Link aggregation can stretch budgets and improve performance, but it is not a panacea.
Arizona's Maricopa regional 911 system is using virtual wide-area network technology to help manage the transition to full wireless and Internet-routed emergency voice communications.
Cloud-based customer relationship management system gives Census 360-degree view of data gathered by the thousands of partners that help conduct the census.
Getting data cleaned up and in and out of the cloud must be driven by a defined process and deliverable schedule.
Centralizing telephony operations allows the state's IT shop to become an internal VOIP service provider, simplifying services and cutting costs.