City of Chicago to Release Four-Year Technology Plan, Moving to Linux
CHICAGO – The City of Chicago in Jan. 2007 plans to release a four-year technology strategy detailing its goals through 2010, MidwestBusiness.com has learned.
“We are attacking this from three angles,” City of Chicago CIO Hardik Bhatt said in an interview. As a preview, Bhatt says he’ll be focusing on making city government departments more automated, making e-government processes more interactive with residents and on making an IT organization and governance board.
Bhatt says he wants to improve the city’s intranet and utilize a better platform for city workers to interact with citizens by way of more tools and applications.
In adding a long-term plan for automation and enterprise applications, Bhatt says he’s analyzing how Chicagoans use city government services and he is looking to technology to replace in-person services as much as possible. While some services naturally necessitate a person-to-person relationship, Bhatt wants the computer and the Internet to enter the picture whenever cost and time savings are inherent.
For example, he says restaurant inspections have been done via phone and can take eight days to schedule all the necessary appointments. Moving the scheduling function online, he says inspections can now be prepared in two hours.
In terms of Chicago’s aggressive goal to Wi-Fi the city, Bhatt says the current timeline has requests for proposals (RFPs) back on Jan. 2, 2007. An evaluation to select vendors would then commence and Bhatt says he’s still hoping for implementation in 2007.
The design of it all, of course, is to make things easier and faster with a reduced cost. As cost is a constantly top-of-mind factor for any city, Chicago has been busy migrating a multi-platform computing environment with more than 100 end-of-life Sun Solaris servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux software and servers.
The cost of replacing each Sun server is estimated at $300,000, City of Chicago platform architect Amy Niersbach told MidwestBusiness.com. Instead, the city selected HP servers running Linux at $50,000 a pop. Niersbach estimates that the city is saving between $200,000 and $400,000 on larger servers that have been scaled down to the Intel-based Red Hat system.
Still, there are even cheaper solutions available. While the open-source Linux environment is cheaper than the city’s predecessor, FreeBSD – which powers Yahoo! and other enterprise-grade operations – is even cheaper than Linux. While Niersbach says the city did analyze that route, ultimately officials opted against it.
City of Chicago CIO
Hardik Bhatt
Photo courtesy of the
City of Chicago |
“We’re a big Oracle shop,” Niersbach said. “We’re conservative. We look at who’s certified in Oracle and Red Hat was at the time. We’d rather take the conservative approach.”
A program called City Stickers – the motor vehicle department for Chicago – was the first to have switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. City Stickers is responsible for managing and tracking all vehicle permits and for allowing residents to purchase and renew tags and stickers online.
With the intent to reduce lines at City Hall and afford residents the option to buy city stickers online, Bhatt says only 300,000 people out of 3 million used the online service in 2006. He wants 50 percent of the population – rather than 10 percent – to use the capability in 2007.
Systems required for vehicle registration, online job applications and ethics training will also have Red Hat installed. Moving to Linux also made sense due to hardware maintenance and support requirements, which Niersbach says has turned very costly for the city.
Bhatt says maintenance of all servers and desktops is now being outsourced to Unisys in Chicago.
The city also wanted flexibility in choosing its vendors. Bhatt added: “We are ‘virtualizing’ our machines so we’re platform independent and hardware and server agnostic. One server is running multiple applications.” With the city’s choice to support open source, Chicago has embraced a “transparent government” that’s designed to be an “open, responsive and fiscally responsible” government.
Bhatt says residents shouldn’t notice downtime. He added: “The end user isn’t affected by the migration. It’s the platform that’s changing.”
Other cities are following suit, too. Last month, the French National Assembly announced that it is switching to open-source technology on desktop PCs to save cash. While the government must shell out money to finance the migration and for training on Linux machines, they claim the software will still result in heavy cost savings.
The city of Munich in Germany is also moving to “Limux,” which means “Linux in Munich”. Munich’s ambitious plans call to have four out of every five PCs switched to open-source technology by the end of 2008 while June 2007 is the scheduled date for 1,100 French parliamentary workstations to begin using open-source technology.
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