Good advice from the former Postal CIO

It's always good to receive advice from a former chief information officer who once was on the inside. There is no hesitancy to tell it like it really is, and that definitely is the case with Robert Otto, who served as CIO and CTO for the U.S. Postal Service from 2001 to 2007.

In a column this week in InformationWeek, Otto applauds federal CIO Vivek Kundra for his efforts to pursue a sustainable data center strategy. Among the challenges facing Kundra, he says, is the highly decentralized way in which data center decisions have been made.

Until now, each federal agency justified its decision to develop an additional facility as a result of its own unique business requirements. Everyone has them, for sure, Otto says, but in some cases, a data center strategy evolved with little long-term planning.

"Empire building and pork barrel politics may have played a role as well," Otto writes. "Simply put, relying on a network of 1,200 disparate data centers, each designed and provisioned differently, adds unacceptable cost and risk to our federal IT operation."

Otto continues: "Furthermore, it's at odds with our efforts to be more energy efficient and green in general. It would certainly be a lost opportunity to have created the role of the federal CIO and not empower him with the ability to make the meaningful changes that we know are required."

He suggests that each agency be required to show by 2010 how they would leverage a shared services model to meet 50 percent of their data center requirements. He also believes that it would be a realistic goal to cut down the number of government data centers from 1,200 to 250 in the next 10 years.

For more on Otto's excellent column:
- see this InformationWeek article

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