City of Los Angeles, California

Project: E-mail & Office Productivity

The City of Los Angeles has 34,000 employees across 40+ departments. In 2009, the city faced a $400 million deficit. This budgetary crisis and the resulting IT staff layoffs exacerbated existing frustrations with the city’s in-house IT systems. The city’s Information Technology Agency sought to find a new e-mail and IT provider which would streamline productivity and create more efficiencies in day-to-day operations. The city received 15 proposals for possible replacements to its in-house system.

In October 2009, the City of Los Angeles announced plans to transition to Google Apps with the help of systems integrator, with a five year services contract. The city plans on having all employees on cloud-based e-mail by June 30, 2010 and has begun initial use of other products within the Google Apps Premier Edition suite and to the cloud as city employees have become more familiar with using the Cloud for workplace productivity.

The City’s Chief Technology Officer estimated a direct savings of $5.5 million over five years as a result of the implementation, with the potential ROI for increased productivity possibly reaching $20 to $30 million as city employees become fully trained on cloud-based applications. The city is now able to offer each city employee 25 times more storage space, and can provide much more capability and add new users without ever needing to worry about hardware availability on city servers. City employees will also benefit from cloud-based integrated instant messaging, video conferencing, simultaneous review and editing of documents by multiple people, and the ability to access their e-mail and work data from any computer or mobile device.

While at first some city council members and staff were skeptical about moving city data outside of direct city control, the vendors have ensured that from a security and disaster recovery standpoint, data being stored in the cloud environment exceeds both the City's contractual requirements and current environment. The city’s new system and its data will be safe from earthquakes and other potential natural disasters that could and have affected the city. In addition, the City of Los Angeles retains full ownership of all data on the servers and the vendors must request access to see City data, stored in the clear. These were critical hurdles the system had to clear before being recommended by staff and accepted unanimously by the City Council. With these protections and the productivity benefits, moving to cloud computing was a natural step for Los Angeles and in keeping with our focus on innovation as well as fiscal responsibility.