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State Savings
Aug. 13th, 2004 10:16 amSlashdot has an article on the report Arnie just got on how to save up to 32 billion for the state.
I only really can argue realistically about the IT section... but my argument is simple. The majority of the large-number savings are pie-in-the-sky lunacy. They want to consolidate all email to one place. Oracle (!) is having trouble helping us build a 20,000 user mail system. What'd a 500,000 user system run like? Shit, that's what. Don't even try it. Maybe, just _maybe_ you could do it with Exchange, Active Directory, and a crapton of servers. It'd still be a management nightmare, a privacy hazard, and a big ol' target.
Running the entire state phone system on VOIP (Voice over IP) is similarly silly in ways I needn't discuss. Suffice to say it's an immature technology.
Some couple of them are vaguely practical - there's an initiative to create a code cache for code reuse purposes, two up from the need to rework the state Portal - Poly's built a relatively robust portal scheme called uPortal which runs on Websphere nicely. Perfect for the state portal. Will it get used? Almost undoubtedly not. We're really sucky at communicating to the brain what the left pinky toe is doing.
So yeah, looks like they let a clever little futurist write parts of this dream. Nice try tho, and good PR.
I only really can argue realistically about the IT section... but my argument is simple. The majority of the large-number savings are pie-in-the-sky lunacy. They want to consolidate all email to one place. Oracle (!) is having trouble helping us build a 20,000 user mail system. What'd a 500,000 user system run like? Shit, that's what. Don't even try it. Maybe, just _maybe_ you could do it with Exchange, Active Directory, and a crapton of servers. It'd still be a management nightmare, a privacy hazard, and a big ol' target.
Running the entire state phone system on VOIP (Voice over IP) is similarly silly in ways I needn't discuss. Suffice to say it's an immature technology.
Some couple of them are vaguely practical - there's an initiative to create a code cache for code reuse purposes, two up from the need to rework the state Portal - Poly's built a relatively robust portal scheme called uPortal which runs on Websphere nicely. Perfect for the state portal. Will it get used? Almost undoubtedly not. We're really sucky at communicating to the brain what the left pinky toe is doing.
So yeah, looks like they let a clever little futurist write parts of this dream. Nice try tho, and good PR.
