LOB said to promote services sharing

The Information Technology Infrastructure Line of Business initiative promotes the consolidation of agency hardware and software and sharing of infrastructure services, a General Services Administration official said recently.The same efforts also help promote energy efficiency and adopting IT polices that improve the environment, Eric Won, program manager for that initiative at GSA said May 20 at a conference on green computing sponsored by FCW’s parent company, the 1105 Government Information Group. “Green IT often results from the optimization of IT infrastructure,” Won said. One of those LOB activities, led by the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department, is developing communities of practice that will collaborate to identify metrics to analyze the performance of agency telecommunications and mainframe servers in data centers and compare how they compare with industry data center metrics. The results will be available in September for the first set of metrics, Won said. “We’ll be looking at specific solutions that may be pursued because they’re inherently good for managing your IT and as a side benefit you’re going to be greener,” he said. “There’s a handshake between what occurs between green IT and good management. Often times, if not most of the time, if you’re a good manager you’re going to be green,” he said. The LOB also concerns developing how to expand the SmartBUY governmentwide purchase program to bundle licenses for many similar infrastructure products and services that agencies buy but are not taking advantage of the discounts that would accompany government volume, . “SmartBuy is a wonderful way to not only bundle the products but to articulate the requirements in a more coherent, collaborative fashion than we have in the past,” Won said. Top priorities are network management and security applications. The time frame for a SmartBUY contract that includes the first category of priorities would be a matter of months, he said. “We’ve already begun the process of sorting and sifting through the automated tools being purchased,” Won said, adding that the SmartBuy program has appointed a contracting officer to work with the LOB.