Despite undergoing budget cuts, The City of Los Angeles needs to continue delivering services to its growing population. Amidst this climate, CTO Randi Levin has embraced the next-generation of IT services by deploying Google's enterprise solution for email and calendering in order to both reduce costs and allow staff to email and schedule meetings, whether they're on their mobile or at their desk.
Joined by Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise, Levin and Girouard answer questions posed by Tim O'Reilly about the unique challenges and opportunities of using 'the cloud' in government organisations. Levin identifies the objections to cloud services, which predominately come from the uncertainty and fear of moving to a new way of doing things.
With government agencies holding data on people and organisations, it's important that the owners of the data are able to obtain it. Of equal importance is allowing owners the ability to use the data, which means using open standard formats, rather than proprietary ones. This also aids governmental organisations in avoiding vendor lock-in.
As more and more governmental agencies look to adopt cloud technologies to futher their IT effectiveness during restricted budget times, Levin and the City of Los Angeles offer a positive case study.
Dave Girouard leads a team responsible for sales, marketing, product development and customer support at Google. Prior to joining Google, Girouard was senior vice president of marketing and business development at Virage, a provider of multimedia search and content management software. He came to Virage from the worldwide product marketing organization at Apple, where he spent several years in product management. Prior to that, Girouard was an associate in Booz Allen & Hamilton’s Information Technology practice in San Francisco. He started his career in enterprise systems development and integration in the Boston office of Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting).
Randi Levin has 20 years of experience managing information technology departments for leading Fortune 500 companies in Southern California. For the last eight years, she has served as a Vice President for NBC Universal. Prior to NBC Universal, Levin worked as a corporate executive as well as an information technology consultant, and has invaluable experience in project management, system development, strategic IT planning, and business process re-engineering. Her previous experience includes work at the Walt Disney Company, L.A. Gear, Inc., Price Waterhouse, Goldman Sachs & Co., Korn/Ferry International, and Hughes Helicopters, Inc.
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Summit. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of CollabNet, Safari Books Online, and Code for America.
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