Due to budget cuts in the department of the American city of Miami had to cut staff the IT department.
IT department of Miami had to cut the staff from 102 to 80 people. To prevent a reduction in the volume and quality of urban services, the department decided to compensate for the lack of staff with new technologies.
IT Companies Cut the Spending
The first results are already evident. For example, city residents now can use web application Miami 311, to track the status of requests for some municipal services, such as road repair and towing abandoned vehicles. The municipality is also considering the introduction of commercial Web applications for business.
The situation in Miami is typical for many government agencies and companies: they have to start new technologies. However, they are often more effective.
For example, the American Lincoln Property Company decided to use Gmail instead of Google to save some money. Before it, they had used Novell GroupWise package. The savings turned out to be more than substantial: using of Novell GroupWise cost about $ 25 per employee per month, but now it costs about $8,5.
Los Angeles municipal government decided to do the similar thing. 30 thousand employees of giant IT department were transferred to the Google Apps cloud platform.
The pressure of the global economic crisis on small and medium business is really great, says an analyst of IDC. As a result, IT spending in this sector will amount to no more than 5,5% in the period from 2010 till 2014, that is significantly lower than was projected earlier.
In addition, experts allocate more points that will be relevant for small and medium-sized businesses in the near future. Thus, by the end of 2014 the volume of IT spending here will reach 629.3 billion dollars.
