What is True Costs of Mainframe to #gov20?
Florian Mueller over at FOSS Patents continues to cover the mainframe and its costs. I have a good deal of experience here, much of it frustrating, in trying to get a true handle of the costs of the mainframe to Governments. I fought to understand it deeply as a State CIO in the United States and continue to work with governments worldwide to try and understand their true ICT costs including the fully laden costs of operating their mainframe infrastructure.
There is a dearth of information about how much governments spend on their mainframe infrastructures. It is difficult to find information in each city, state and central government agency. As this is public spend data it should be easy to find out through public records requests if needed.
What do folks out there working in the Governments of the world know about how much we are all spending on mainframes?
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Matt, there are two issues here. The first concerns access to information about the costs of internal government operations. We know that’s an issue generally. The second concerns the costs of mainframes generally, which in my corporate experience are typically included as part of overhead or infrastructure as opposed to individual application development and support costs.Asking what the costs are of mainframes requires, in my opinion, that we know how to calculate the cost of computers and software in general, and that’s a big question given how mainframe services are integrated with so many other systems. It’s answerable, but I’d be surprised if there are standard reporting practices across agencies and installations. Probably the organizations that would be in the best position to answer that question would be those that are seriously re-architecting their infrastructure but, given the number of years such projects typically take, I’d question whether the numbers on mainframes costs you’d get would be generalizable.
Dennis McDonald
Alexandria, Virginia
web: http://www.ddmcd.com
Dennis,
Great points.
I have found it difficult to accurately quantify IT costs in Government for some time now. When I was CIO I ran a centralized shop that also happened to operate and charge back for mainframe services. The individual customer agencies were always agitated about the mainframe costs and what was all included in the rate. It led us to dig deeper to understand the true enterprise cost of IT. I agree with you that what is needed is a more complete and at least accepted standard through which we could analyze and compare true costs.
Included in that should be an understanding of all of ICT, telecom, mobile devices, staff, strategic planning overhead, etc. It is not easy, but will help us in understanding where investment is needed and more importantly, where that capital could come from.