[LINK] Race is on for carbon offset work

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Tom Worthington wrote:
> At 02:41 PM 20/01/2009, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>   
>> The Federal Government decided to review its procurement, so it did 
>> the Gershon review. ... Because of the hold, for the first half of 
>> Fin Year 2008/09 the rate of IT spend in Canberra has been well down 
>> on plan. ... In the next month or so the hold will come off and 
>> departments will be panicking to spend ...
>>     
>
> Given the Australian Government is short of money and wants to reduce 
> its carbon emissions, the logical thing to do would be to stop the 
> departments doing panic spending. Where spending is justified, it 
> could minimise cost and emissions by using the minimum of equipment.
>
> As an example, the newspaper article you cite ("Race is on for carbon 
> offset work", Karen Dearne, January 20, 2009 The Australian IT 
> <http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24934753-15306,00.html>) 
> mentions 20 new IT projects for the Department of Climate Change to 
> get online trading and oversight of emissions permits. This need not 
> involve a large spend on hardware, as the trading system will be a 
> tiny one, compared to something like the Australian Stock Exchange. 
> The trading system hardware would fit in a couple of pizza box size 
> units.
Tom, Tom, Tom, you just haven't been reading my previous postings.

Nobody puts (or should put) multiple (up to 20?) production systems 
costing tens of millions of dollars on to a couple of pizza box servers, 
real or virtualised.

It would have thought that it would be a good idea to work out what the 
systems are supposed to do and then determine the necessary hardware and 
other infrastructure. Defining hardware requirements first sounds a bit 
backwards to me. But what the heck, experienced IT architects like me 
don't get listened to, I should be used to it by now.

-- 
 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au