Teresa Carlson, Microsoft's U.S. federal government unit
Connecting state and local government leaders
Agencies could take advantage of business analytics and Web 2.0 technolgies in 2009, says Teresa Carlson, vice president of Microsoft's U.S. federal government unit.
Teresa Carlson
Vice President, Microsoft U.S. federal government unit
The top challenges include security, server consolidation, virtualization, infrastructure optimization, social networking, Web 2.0, collaboration, unified communication, project management solutions and business analytics.
The top two I’d say are business analytics and through-the-Web 2.0 capabilities around social and cloud computing.
I don’t think agencies have embraced the full usage of those technologies yet, but they’re very interested in how they can start adding to their enterprise road map and take advantage of those.
Another challenge for agency CIOs and CTOs…is being in alignment with President Obama’s agenda and his key priorities — and determining how agencies will work effectively and efficiently with this new government CTO role.
Agency CIOs and CTOs will need to look at new ways to innovate - using things like cloud services, consolidating data centers — so they can take budget dollars and start innovating with new capabilities and technologies that will get them to the next level — and adapting these technologies for a changing workforce. Look at how the new president raised money and communicates: It’s all across the Web.
Regarding what’s changing at Microsoft Federal, I think the federal government team probably challenges our product groups more than any on innovation.
One of the innovations we’re working on is virtualization. The other game changer is our BPOS – business productivity online services. Agencies today aren’t jumping on the cloud services bandwagon. But many are using these services already: If you look at the way agencies get their patches and updates pushed to them — that’s all Web-based technology.
So we have the new world of work. But now we have a new way to work. For federal employees, and the priority around telework and virtual work, that’s what these online services will help provide, with mobile applications in a Web browser-based ability to use Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word and SharePoint.