[LINK] IT can lead to big savings: Tanner

Tom Worthington Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Thu Apr 17 12:44:21 AEST 2008


At 05:56 PM 15/04/2008, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>Tom Worthington wrote:
>
>>... Yes, there may be thousands of people searching for a job and 
>>hundreds applying at a time, but they are not going to use much in 
>>the way of computer resources.
>
>Is that an assumption based upon it being a "small" application? or 
>are you  familiar with the sort of infrastructure required of such a 
>system? ...

It is an expert opinion, otherwise known as a guess. ;-)

>Server hardware is actually quite cheap, compared with all the other 
>things you need to support and manage them. ...

Using your estimate of 20 servers per agency, if each server costs 
$5,000, for each 50 agencies, that comes to $5M. While that is not a 
lot in the overall federal budget, it is still $5M, which can't be 
spent on schools or indigenous health.

>And that's also a good reason to be very careful of virtualisation. 
>Some versions introduce unfortunate dependencies. Similarly for 
>sharing dev/test with other applications.

Okay, so just buy 20 severs for the application across government and 
save them money on the other 980 servers.

>... Sharing a complex thing like an enterprise Information System 
>adds complexity, dependencies and cost. Simplicity, specialisation, 
>clear control and minimum dependencies work makes systems much more 
>efficient and effective. ...

We are talking about a system for processing job applications, not 
ballistic missile defence. It is not that hard (someone tried to sell 
me a ballistic missile system when I was at HQ Australain Defence Force).

As you pointed out previously, federal government agencies can't make 
legal contracts with each other because they are part of the same 
enterprise. As they are an enterprise it would make sense for them to 
share an enterprise system for job applications. Otherwise how do you 
explain to someone applying for some government jobs that they need 
to keep entering the same stuff over and over again because the 
different bits of the government are pretending they are separate entities?

>I would suggest that you probably don't sit at your personal 
>computer 24 hours a day. On what basis would you be prepared to 
>share it with someone else, other than immediate family?...

My company web site and education server is provided by a commercial 
company in Sydney and the email on a server in New York run by a 
Melbourne based company. I am more than happy for them to run it on a 
shared system. I use shared online services provided by several other 
companies (I tried out the Google package of services for small 
business but was not entirely comfortable with their "we will do 
everything" approach). It would be sillily for me to run my own 
servers. I have some material on my laptop, but nothing I depend on. 
My laptop was used for presentations at the Open 2020 Summit.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU  




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