NOAA does not hire a high priced consultant to move email to the cloud

This is a change for a government agency.  NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) had nineteen different email systems and over 25,000 email addresses they wanted to consolidate under one system to cut costs.  Surprisingly, they didn’t spend millions of dollars on a study or a consulting firm to do the move.

NOAA’s CIO (Chief Information Officer) Joe Klimavicz evidently could not figure it out on his own or didn’t want to re-invent the wheel.  I would like to think he didn’t want to re-invent the wheel and I give him credit for wanting to cut down on government spending.

Joe contacted Casey Coleman.  Casey, the CIO at the GSA (General Services Administration) had already done this with all the GSA email accounts.  In fact, the GSA, through Casey’s direction, had saved a lot of money using Google Apps for their email.

Joe calculated that he saved $12 million of the taxpayers money by moving the email systems to the cloud.  Federal News Radio reported Joe Klimavicz as saying “The transition happened over a period of a couple of months, through one earthquake and two hurricanes. We completed it on time and on budget. Less than one percent of all employees had any issues so it was a very successful migration.”

In fact, NOAA’s help desk fielded just 129 help requests.  That works out to just one-half of one percent of the employees needed help.

I think that is a remarkable accomplishment.  Joe attributes the smooth transition to the training that was offered to the employees with both web-based and personal guidance.

Now Joe wants to concentrate on NOAA’s network monitoring and sharing strategies.  He will definitely have the time for it now that the email problem has been taken care of.