The Web Conferencing Blog

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.

Cloud Computing in Collaborative Education Environments

Rachel Smith, vice president at NMC, said the first technology likely to be adopted in one year or less is cloud computing, which she said is essentially many computers networked together that share storage and applications, and swap off computing power. “And what we’re seeing is a lot of schools are using cloud computing for the shared apps and the storage,” she said, “but not as many schools are using them for the higher end computing power that’s used in research.”

As outlined in the report, cloud computing “can offer significant cost savings in terms of IT support, software, and hardware expenses. It has become common for schools to use cloud-based applications to manage calendars, rosters, grade books, and communication between school and home.”

The second technology, also likely to be adopted in 12 months or less is collaborative environments, which Smith said are simply online spaces where people can work in groups and they’re typically used for collaborative creation of content and as social networking spaces.

“What teachers are finding out is they can connect their classrooms with classrooms across town or in another part of the country or world, and their students can actually work with these sister classrooms,” Smith said. “No matter where they are, they can explore the differences that happen because of different cultures or environments, and the students can work together to create products with people they may  never meet in person.”

By Jessica B. Mulholland

Race to the Top Phase Two Finalists Announced

The U.S. Department of Education announced the finalists for the Race to the Top phase two competition. The finalists are as follows Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

The finalists will now have to make formal, in-person presentations before a judging panel next month. The U.S. Department of Education expects to award the remaining $3.4 billion to 10-15 states.

The Race to the Top competition has led to states adopting sweeping changes to their education systems such as removing the cap’s placed on charter schools, building robust data systems and taking steps to transform the lowest-performing schools.

BY Joe Morris