Education and Government IT Top Priorities

According to Gartner's VP of Research, Rishi Sood, "Education organizations are making some tangible investments on two fronts: areas of IT to reduce long-term management costs and broadband/mobility services."

He listed five areas toward which IT departments in education are shifting their focus:

• IT cost optimization;
• Consolidation/rationalization;
• Cloud-based services, particularly SaaS;
• Broadband and wireless services; and
• Content management.

According to NASCIO, state and local governments are focused on the following areas:

A. Priority Strategies, Management Processes and Solutions

1. Budget and cost control: managing budget reduction, strategies for savings, reducing or avoiding costs, activity-based costing
2. Consolidation: centralizing, consolidating services, operations, resources, infrastructure, data centers
3. Shared services: business models, sharing resources, services, infrastructure, independent of organizational structure
4. Broadband and connectivity: strengthening statewide connectivity, broadband and wireless 
5. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: execution, support, reporting, data management 
6. Security: risk assessment, security safeguards, enterprise policies, employee education, data protection, insider threat 
7. Transparency: open government, performance measures and data, accountability, access to government data 
8. Infrastructure: data centers, infrastructure investment, critical infrastructure protection 
9. Health information: architecture, assessment, partnering, implementation, health information exchange, technology solutions 
10. Governance: improving IT governance, data governance

B. Priority Technologies, Applications and Tools

1. Virtualization (storage, computing, data center, servers, applications)
2. Networking, voice and data communications, unified communications 
3. Document/content/records/e-mail management (repository, archiving, digital preservation) 
4. Cloud computing, software as a service 
5. Security enhancement tools 
6. Enterprise resource planning (ERP)/legacy application modernization-renovation 
7. Geospatial analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) 
8. Business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA) applications 
9. Identity and access management 
10. Social media and networking (Web 2.0 services, wikis, blogs, collaboration technologies and social networking)

It's exciting to see that Cisco provides solutions to many of the listed Priority Technologies from virtualization to networking, voice/data communication, unified communications (Cisco's bread and butter,) to SaaS with WebEx, to social media with WebEx Connect, Cisco Show and Share, and Cisco Quad.

Comments

[Jenny Rice]

I thinks it was a very good idea that now education and the government now see the important IT today. It's a great deal of knowledge for the young people to have an open information on how IT will gonna help them in their future.
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