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California Should use Open Source and VoIP
Albanach writes "ZDNet is reporting that a report from independent auditors and experts has recommended that the State of California adopts open source software and Voice over IP as part of a series of moves that, the report says, could save the state $32 billion over five years. Additionally, they recommend the State establishes a centralised technology division to handle all their IT needs reducing redundancy and generating further savings."
Open Source in California Government
Normally state government has a lot of redundancy. Most departments/divisions/agencies ( depending on they are called in California ) are nearly autonomous units, from the director right down to the mail room people.
There are reasons FOR this, since a lot of departments are forbidden by law to share resources ( funding sources ) and information ( privacy ).
Is this stupid? Perhaps in many cases, ( not all but many ) but its the way things often work in any governmental situation.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My brother went over to Vonage a couple of months ago, and the sheer audio quality is brilliant... especially on trans Atlantic calls (back here to the UK).
Mind, him having a 5Mbit Optimum Online account probably helps avoid any latency/speed issues (unless the systems goes down).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
We got a VoIP system at work a couple months ago.
I love it because I can not answer my phone and then tell the person that was trying to call that the phone system had crashed.
I also love it when it decides to just disconnect my phone conversations in the middle of a
It's like using a mobile phone, only without the convience of being wireless.
I want my POTS back. I want a phone that works when nothing else does. I want a phone with 99.99999% uptime, because it turns out that a phone with 97.2% uptime really, really sucks. You wouldn't think it, but those couple of percentage points are the difference between critical tool and useless gadget.
This would be perfect for government agencies, who really don't want any contact with the people they're supposed to be dealing with, but can't appear to be avoiding them. I see this being a major cost saver.
"Hello DMV, can I help you?"
"I just want to know..."
-click- beep beep beep beep beep
They can reduce time wasted on calls to an average of 2 seconds, all thanks to the miracle of VoIP.
My former workplace, a county government, is in the process of switching everyone over to VoIP. A lot of the employees are in one building and so sit on the gigabit backbone throughout the building. They also employed traffic shapers to make sure that VoIP traffic had priority.
Saying all that, the quality was excellent. It was rare to have any glitches, and at the time we had close to a thousand of the employees on it. I even had a Cisco softphone on my laptop that I used to make calls while connected over VPN from another country that was crystal clear.
I think, if you have the bandwidth and the sysadmins for it, it is a wonderful technology. But I wouldn't use it at home unless I had a dedicated pipe coming in.
Random Musings
Mostly on a city basis, The Ontario City library (yes this is california we're talking about here) uses these linux thin terminals (they run off of cd.. and have no HDD) with a modified blackbox to run netscape. They paid a one time fee for the things and that's it.. they get online so you can get into the online catalog and reserve books or check them out online if they're not available at that branch.
When the World Trade Center, and surrounding buildings including Verizon's "7 World Trade", collapsed after the 2001 planebombings, NYC's phone system collapsed with it. Essential to managing the disaster, the NYC government's 70,000 desktop phones needed to come back ASAP. 2 days later, over 50,000 of those phones had been switched by the City's IT department, DoITT to VoIP. Shortly afterwards, that department produced a study that showed that the City's annual Verizon bill is over $100M: that's almost $1500 per phone, every year. After the 2003 blackout, and then a 1-hour Spring 2004 911 emergency switchboard outage that cost someone their life, DoITT has announced they're putting that fat Verizon contract out to bid. Despite any law requiring that, or even any precedent in the century of Verizon (by whatever name) operation of New York City's phones. NYC is currently receiving proposals for voice/data networking and moblie wireless networking projects, worth billions of dollars. The City Council (legislature) Technology in Government Committee has held public hearings on public wireless spectrum issues to ensure emergency services have access, and emergency 911 calls over VoIP service, to ensure that the move from circuit to packet switched phone calls preserves New Yorkers' service expectations. With 10-15 million people here every day, and everyone talking around the world, NYC is leading the way in planning for the transformation of VoIP. We're glad to have California along for the ride :).
--
make install -not war
I know for some state agencies it will be tough - there are three state departments that made thier reports Windows centric, one requires reports using Excel Spreadsheets with some Active-x specific macros in it (to circle the errors, nothing big, but the popup controls keep us from filling them out without using the macros, I'm sure they could have done the same using standard formulas), next one requires an Access database (sigh), and the other one has a web access DB portal that limits users to I.E. 5.5+ only (I think to retain the pretty formattiing more than anything).
Being an all Mac agency ourselves I usually get a hold of thier management and later theier techs to try and talk sense into them ("what about the other agencies using Mac or Linux?") All these things could be made universal with a little bit of work and then any agency would have no problems with it. Usually management doesn't understand or care and the techs can only do what management says. So for those exceptions we fire up Virtual PC and it gets us there without having a special computer dedicated to the task. This is actually a good example of the fragmentation, each state agency has a different electronic filing method; the better ones want only a tabbed or CSV text file.
Maybe they will get the message when more agencies like us look into the Linux alternatives.