TechFlash links to an analysis from the City of Los Angeles' Information Technology Agency (ITA) detailing (and in tone defending) the city's interest in transitioning a large portion of its IT operations from on-premises based systems to Google Apps. The spin on the article is the irony of the city's proposed funding for the transition, more than half of which consists of funds from the settlement reached with the company over anti-trust violations.

The analysis itself is available for download in PDF format and is not a formal presentation of options but rather a statement answering specific questions raised at a city council committee meeting. One would hope that a more formal and broad analysis of options was conducted; I like Google Apps, particularly as an e-mail solution (which is the primary use for which it is being proposed in LA) but hate to think that anyone is simply considering its adoption as fait accompli when such a broad range of options are available today. The primary content of interest in the memo may be the cost estimates, though; otherwise it's a fairly dry and non-technical presentation of considerations with which most CIOs are already familiar.

Most CIOs, however, probably don't have the resources of the City of Los Angeles for performing sophisticated budget and cost savings analysis, and the comparisons of staffing and support costs between the existing GroupWise system and a Google Apps based mail system may be of some use to others considering such transitions. Also worth noting is the estimate that some 80% of city workers could perform their jobs adequately using the Doc and Spreadsheet components in place of Microsoft's Office suite; though the transition is not touted as a replacement for Office, the IT Agency clearly sees that possibility ahead. The comparison between on-premises and Gmail uptime is also illuminating and illustrates a cold, hard fact that has been largely obscured by the very widely reported Google outages: most on-premises systems have far worse uptime numbers than Google offers. LA suffered outages totaling 550 minutes of downtime in a period where Gmail was out of service for only 15 minutes. You may be doing better, but from what I have seen, probably not.

It's also interesting, and perhaps useful, to see the sorts of questions that are being raised by the non-technical councilpersons providing oversight on the project, and the reasoned, rational responses offered by ITA. Those are common questions and concerns, and whoever put together the ITA memo did, in my humble opinion, a better job than most IT staff in answering them. It may offer a template for your own discussions of privacy, security, and other concerns with business management.