Government Data Center Consolidation - The Wrong Metric?

A recent article in Information Week Government : Federal IT Pros Question Data Center Consolidation Benefits indicates that data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says that agencies are expecting to close 195 data centers this year and a total of 800 or more by 2015.

Wow, this is quite amazing, but what the heck is a "data center" in this context.  Could it be that agencies are finding the proverbial "server under someone's desk" and moving that into a more consolidated infrastructure and calling that the elimination of a "data center"?

Statistics can lie, but so can definitions.  Does anyone really think that there are 195 data center buildings that are going to close this year?  Does GSA have a fire-sale going on for leased data center space that is no longer being used?

The problem here is that the directive and OMB are measuring the wrong thing.  By measuring data center closures as a measure of success, I am pretty confident that agencies are taking a good deal of liberty in the definition and their resulting activities to make the numbers look pretty.  A better measure might be to measure IT overhead in an organization and measure it against a benchmark of commercial companies for like services.

The drive for IT efficiency is not going to be arrived at by shuffling "data centers" and consolidating into fewer rooms.  Common infrastructure at an agency, managed by an Infrastructure Service Provider (ISP), drives two essential behaviors:

• It stops IT development organizations from running out and buying a new set of hardware and software every time they deploy a new application
• It drives efficiency in the operations of the ISP 

There are many facets it getting an ISP really operating (maybe a subject of future posts), but there are several essential elements that the CIO of an agency must drive:

• The ISP must be efficiently run, very responsive to its customer set, and provide highly available services
• The developers (which in many cases are contractors), must have in their contracts that they are developing applications for execution within the ISP environment and not a new standalone "data center"

This first step will consolidate within an agency, but it also sets the stage for multiple agencies to start thinking about sharing and consolidating their ISP infrastructure.  This is there the real savings will develop.

The good news, is that there are government CIOs that see this big picture.  Wouldn't it be great if we had a metric that talked about efficiency and sharing rather than some artificial count of data centers?