Wednesday, 16 September 2009

Advantages of having a business component-level blueprint of all public services.

Sheri Loessl on the IBM Blueworks collaboration site pointed out the value of having your government blueprinted as though it was one large business enterprise.
Having a holistic view of the business of government will aid government leaders in their strategic thinking, and in decision making on initiatives or programs that must span multiple agencies or governmental jurisdictions. Having a unifying master business model of all areas of government, can help government officials to 1) identify opportunities to realize efficiencies, 2) deliver programs and services more effectively and innovatively, 3) identify and align roles and responsibilities to enhance collaboration across government (and beyond) and; 4) reduce time-to-service. The ability to look across program area or jurisdictions and find areas where sharing services and collaboration for better outcomes can be realized.
For all those working as enterprise architects in the public sector, there are benefits that can readily be realised from this approach.
  • Don't have to reinvent the processes of government for each department or agency (there is also commonality across systems of government - Westminster, Federal ...)
  • Goals and measures can be consistently applied from top to bottom
Lets get out there and share or borrow these organisational components before re-inventing the wheel ourselves.

Thursday, 10 September 2009

Smart Meter Privacy Issue

For the ultimate monitoring of your home life consider the humble electricity meter now being updated to the internet age. This post covers the issue in some detail. Smart meters, like other devices that are associated with what you do, have the underlying privacy genie that , once out of the bottle, will be a devil to get back in.

Thursday, 3 September 2009

Petabytes for your datacentre

This from Backblaze takes me back a few years when I had to contribute to a cabinet paper to plan for the purchase of a new disk drive (just one and well less than a gigabyte!).
There is a neat chart demonstrating the difference in cost between what you pay for raw disk units at your mail-order supplier and storage as a consumable. How does a pile of disk drives  at us$81,000 become a staggering us$2.8million from EMC or Amazon?
There is also a how-to which is complete down to the rubber bands needed to damp the drive vibration so I expect my geek son to be warming his flat with one of these.