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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 ----
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
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 :).
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make install -not war