1

In a recent virtual town hall event sponsored by Cisco and 1105 Media, seven public sector IT leaders came together to share their stories of how they are using technology to transform their organization to help them connect, innovate and save. During this town hall meeting, conducted via telepresence, ideas were shared about data center virtualization, collaboration, teleworking, distance learning, security, wireless and mobility. Below is a transcript of this conversation.

To navigate directly to a particular section, click on a link below:

• Speaker Introductions: Meet the Panelists

• What is “Connect. Innovate. Save.”

• Discussion: Panelist Strategic IT Challenges and Objectives

• Solutions to Challenges

• Collaboration, Telework and Virtual Desktops

• Discussion on Security

• Cultural Changes/Lessons Learned with Telework, Distance Learning and in IT with Virtualization

• Design, Execution and Resources

• ROI and Results of Projects

• Looking Ahead at Next Steps

Speaker Introduction: Meet the Panelists

Moderator

Welcome you to our National Town Hall on behalf of our hosts at Cisco and 1105 Media.

Now, we’re going to be talking about a topic today that nearly every government and educational organization is grappling with these days. And that is: How to use technology to not only cut costs, but also to increase productivity and performance.

Or, in other words, talk about how your organization can connect, innovate, and save.

Now we’re holding this discussion in a town hall format, via Cisco Telepresence.

And this allows us to engage multiple panelists from education and government organizations from throughout the United States, and our Telepresence experience also is being shared with hundreds of government and educational professionals across the country via this interactive webcast.

The goal of this session is to learn from those who are in government and in education who are implementing and using technology such as virtualization, cloud computing, collaboration, mobile computing, and video to transform their organizations.

And so we’ve assembled a great set of panelists for our discussion, and they’re here to provide both insights and advice and lessons learned based on their experiences helping their organizations to connect, innovate, and save. They’ll be highlighting the challenges and opportunities that are specific to their organizations.

And so, with that said, I’d like to introduce you to our panelists today, and what I’m going to do is ask our panelists, please tell us a little bit about yourself, and about the organization you work for.

So let’s start with Danette Campbell, who is seated right here with me in Washington, DC.

Danette?

“Connect. Innovate. Save.” Customer Town Hall

2

Danette Campbell, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Thanks so much. Good afternoon everyone, and certainly, thank you for having us today.

My name is Danette Campbell, I’m the Senior Advisor for Telework at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The United States Patent and Trademark Office is the federal agency that’s responsible for granting U.S. Patents and registering trademarks. We advise the President of the United States, the Secretary of Commerce, the U.S. Government Agencies on intellectual property, policy, protection, and enforcement, and promote stronger and more effective IP protection around the world.

Our agency is primarily comprised of scientists, engineers, and attorneys, and much of the work that we do is production-driven. We’re an agency of about 10,000 employees and we currently have about 7,000 of those teleworking anywhere between one and five days a week.

Ted Beck, from the City of Aurora, Illinois.

My name is Ted Beck. I am the Chief Technology Officer with the city of Aurora, Illinois. We are the second-largest city in the state of Illinois, and we are using a variety of different Cisco products to both innovate and save.

Tom Sullivan, from McHenry County near Chicago.

Hi, I’m Tom Sullivan, Director of Information Technology in McHenry County. We’re a county of about 325,000 people. Fifty miles northwest of Chicago. We’re using Cisco products to virtualize our environment and save money in terms of power and cooling.

Hugh Miller, from the city of San Antonio, Texas.

Hugh Miller, I’m the Chief Technology Officer for the city of San Antonio. We’re the seventh largest city in the United States with over 1.3 million citizens. ― 460-something square miles. We’ve leveraged several technologies to try and advance the city. We installed fiber throughout the city to help connect those 400+ sites. We’ve virtualized our environment to about 85%. Currently, a lot of the technologies we’ve leveraged are Cisco technologies, plus others, and we’re trying to advance on several other things that will be talked about today.

Garry Lough, from Boise, Idaho.

My name is Garry Lough, and I handle communications for the Idaho Education Network. We are a statewide managed private education network that connects all high schools (and schools, for that matter) to institutions of higher education. In addition to the equalizing level of connectivity across the state, to all of education’s consumers, we also provide video teleconferencing equipment, and we standardized on Cisco Tandberg equipment throughout the state. It allows our schools to collaborate with one another in a variety of learning modalities throughout the state so they can achieve their education goals.

Scott Smith, from Charlotte, North Carolina

My name is Scott Smith, and I’m the Chief Technology Officer with Mooresville Graded Schools in Moorseville, North Carolina. We’re about 30 miles north of Charlotte. If you are a NASCAR fan at all, Mooresville is the home to NASCAR. But, our school district, we serve about 5,600 students. Nationally speaking, we’re an average-sized school district. But one of the things that’s unique about Moorseville is we are one of the only public school districts in the nation that has issued Macbooks to every third through twelfth grader. So, that constitutes about 4,500 computers for us.

Every fourth through twelfth grader has that machine and takes it home. They have it the entire school year and use it for their instructional purposes. And, on the back-end, we are a Cisco shop with Cisco Wireless N technologies and our Unified Messaging System, etc. and so on.

So, we are excited about what’s happening with the changes of education and the new technologies that Cisco and our other partners provide for us.

3

Gail Roper, from the city of Raleigh, North Carolina

Good afternoon. My name is Gail Roper. I’m with the City of Raleigh. My title is Chief Information and Community Relations Officer. What we’re doing in the city of Raleigh is a fast-paced growing of our infrastructure. Forbes Magazine named Raleigh the most wired city in the country, based on broadband penetration and usage of broadband. So, the new norm for our citizenry is to have access throughout the city. We have implemented Cisco’s CPT, Carrier Packet Transport on our network and plan to move into partnerships with our local universities and to use city assets as a way for our citizens to interface with the city.

Moderator

Thank you. And now I’d also like to introduce my co-host for this event, Dan Kent, of Cisco. Dan?

Dan Kent

Thanks Steve, and welcome, everybody.

My name is Dan Kent, and I’m the CTO for Cisco’s Federal team, as well as the Director of Solutions for our overall public sector team. And, in that role, I get to work with the panelists and their teams as well as many other state, local as well as federal customers to look at technologies, newer technologies, and see what we can do to help modify business processes to help with the connecting, the saving as we integrate these new technologies into those business processes. It’s a very exciting job, and obviously the areas my team is focused on with most of these customers are cloud computing, the mobile workforce, as well as cybersecurity, which I’m sure is at least, in your top five.

Back

What is “Connect. Innovate. Save”?

Moderator

Thank you, and Dan, while we’ve got you here, why don’t you help us frame our discussion today: now, tell us, what do we mean by, “Connect. Innovate. and Save?”

Dan Kent

Sure, Steve.

It’s really obvious now that with all the press that the budget, the declination of the budgets are getting in the press, that our customers, the state, local, and the education leaders they’re all seeing it’s increasingly difficult to meet the challenges of obviously, the highly technically-savvy workforce that they all have, as well as meeting the needs of their constituents and meeting their mission needs in this difficult budget environment.

However, we’re seeing our customers, and certainly the panelists are going to talk about what they’re doing to help meet and achieve these needs, through looking at technology, connecting the technology with their business processes, possibly changing business processes, leveraging the technology, to connect to the individuals - those individuals might be the constituents, or might be in the sharing of information amongst government employees, amongst themselves.

So how do we connect people? As we look at innovating, there’s a lot of new technologies out there. Innovation comes with technologies. I also want to make it clear that innovation certainly isn’t incongruent with austerity. Quite the opposite is what we’ve found. So, usually, when times are tough, we find technology as a place to innovate and if we innovate, we change processes and in the end it actually ends up saving.

So, how do we put all of these together? Well, that’s what the panel is here to talk about. Some real case scenarios on how they are innovating, how they are changing processes and saving while they are connecting this next-generation workforce, as well as their constituents.

Back

4

Discussion: Panelist Strategic IT Challenges and Goals

Moderator

Thank you, Dan, and that’s a great way to kick off our discussion. So now let’s turn to our panelists to get their perspective. W hat I’m going to ask each of you is to set the stage for the technologies and solutions you adopted. To set the stage for that, let’s hear from you first - what were the chief challenges or problems you were facing, or perhaps, what were the goals you were trying to achieve?

Danette Campbell

Thanks so much for asking.

In 1997, our trademarks organization started a pilot telework program. Now, for those in the audience to get a real feel for what we do, I need to tell you that there are basically three corporations within a corporation at the Patent and Trademark Office. We have the trademarks organization, which is about a tenth of the size of the patents organization, the patents organization is very large, it’s the largest business unit at our agency, and then, of course, we have the corporate business units.

So again, back in 1997, trademarks, who I sometimes refer to as “the little engine that could and did,” decided that they would test this telework initiative. They started with a pilot of 18 examining attorneys who partnered to share office space when they came into the office and work from home just a couple of days a week.

Now back in 1997, and with only 18 examining attorneys and a pilot program, it was very easy for us to deploy this equipment, this technology, to their homes. And we would also deploy, not only the equipment, but we would send an IT support individual out with them.

Well now, if you fast-forward to 2012, we have 7,000 teleworkers. It would be very difficult, impossible, quite frankly, to send an IT person out with every teleworker. But back to the problem that the trademarks organization had, the challenge, if you will, was that they wanted to continue to recruit and retain a highly skilled workforce, which was of course, the trademark-examining attorney. And this was one of the ways that we could, again, recruit them and retain them - was by offering this telework initiative.

Ted Beck

As most communities that have grown from small communities to large communities face, in 2006-2007, we began the process of trying to get a handle on our overall network design. We had a variety of different networks in place that made this kind of spider web-like entity that was our network. We spent a huge amount of our time trying to figure out what services we could support in what facilities, and which ones we couldn’t. So, we began constructing a fiber optic network that was city-owned in 2007. We lit it in 2008 and have been using it since then.

And now we spend very little time trying to figure out what we can run from where. Where we can virtualize, where we can’t virtualize. We spend no time, really, talking about a constraint and bandwidth that’s available.

Tom Sullivan

Hi Steve. We were having problems in our server rooms with power and cooling, and we were also continuing to virtualize our backend servers and our front-end applications. We’ve been an HP shop for about 15 years, and we were going to continue being an HP shop, but, just to try and get HP’s price down, we started looking at the Cisco UCS products. As we looked at them, it became more and more evident that Cisco UCS was really built for virtualization and lended itself easily to that. And the

5

processors with the reduced power and cooling needs lowered our need for power and cooling by about 30% so it was a good investment for us.

Hugh Miller

When I started with the city about seven and a half years ago, we had many deficiencies in how everything was laid out for an enterprise. So, with the organization size that we are, with eleven and a half thousand employees, and with the city as large as it is, with over 400 sites, there were a lot of things we had to do in a fairly radical and fast-paced method.

So, we began to identify a need to connect. We partnered with the local energy, the municipal-owned energy outfit, and ran fiber throughout the perimeters of the city ―throughout the whole city. We built redundant rings, and started leveraging many of the deficient connected sites. We had many of our fire stations that were strictly dial-up. We had a lot of the remote sites that were smaller, had either dial-up or a very small circuit so we began to change those. And at the very same time we had a mandate to transform our traffic management project into centrally managing all of the traffic lights throughout the city. We have over 1,200 traffic lights that we had to centralize and begin to manage and leverage this fiber and wireless technology throughout the city.

At the same time we had issues with the demands of the departments. We have 37 internal departments and with those are all of the main functions of the city, with police, fire, public works, library, airport, health, etc. Each of them had their own desires to advance technology and so we had to very rapidly get involved with them to build virtualization in the data center so we could actually scale, manage the power and cooling issues, build a virtual infrastructure inside the data center, to the desktops and to remote locations.

We began to rapidly change everything and made really hard decisions on technologies that we chose, items that would actually have good ROI’s behind them. They had employees that were available for us to hire and were cost-efficient. And so we leveraged many technologies, changed them at a rapid pace, and now we’re starting to advance these technologies into other arenas.

Garry Lough

If the viewers could see the view that I have, they would understand what our challenges were to start with. We’re a rural state with a lot of geographical challenges and because of that, many of our schools lacked an equalized level of bandwidth that we needed to overcome. Concurrently, we also had difficulties attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers to serve those needs of those students. And so, we just finished the first phase of the Idaho Education Network, which was to connect

all high schools to one another, and formalizing a private education network. This would allow students from any part of the state, whether they’re on the Canadian border or down on the Wyoming and Utah border to have the same access to education opportunities as anybody in the urban populations like Boise here.

That being said, we also learned, having started in 2002 ― early to the game with online learning and web-based learning for students―learners were demanding a more interactive environment and the video conferencing equipment, while be it an older technology in some respects, had advanced a great deal in recent years. We used Tanberg at Cisco to standardize on it across the state.

The idea being that those students who needed those synchronous or interactive learning environments to advance throughout their education process, would have that at their disposal in every school, no matter their location or zip code.

Scott Smith

Much like Garry, as he just spoke on the education area, one of the issues for us was providing all students equitable access. And so one of the challenges for us was to do that, especially in a school district where 40% of our students are on free or reduced lunch and how we could level the playing field between those. So for us, that solution again looked like handing every

6

kid a Macbook and building an infrastructure in the background to be able to handle the bandwidth and the need of what our students and teachers were going to use in the classroom.

Our goals, obviously, were academic achievement. We wanted students to achieve. We wanted to help graduate students that would be 21st century learners that would have what we call the “C-words” - the creativity, the communications, the collaboration. All those types of skills, so when they get ready to graduate and go into the workforce, they would be productive citizens for other businesses and ventures― for them to be hired and to be more marketable. Also for them to be more ready for further education should they choose to go on.

So, the big challenge for us was to get all kids to achieve, and to level that playing field. And so we were able to do that - about four years ago is when we started, and we’ve had huge success since then.

Gail Roper

In Raleigh we may have a unique situation in that we have a fast-growing population. Even in the economic downturn, we’ve had a 9% growth in our population.

The connect, innovate, save scenario is exactly why we embarked on this effort. The first thing we did in terms of growing our infrastructure was to adopt a strategy to cut costs so that we could redirect funding into innovation for the city of Raleigh.

With budget challenges, we’ve had 4+ years of budget challenges. We’ve had rising costs in our ability to deliver basic services to our citizens, and then, with that, we’ve had technology looked at as a way to drive efficiency, productivity, and transformation in the organization. So we started with the idea of having a better way to connect our satellite offices, to drive down the leasing costs that were associated with connectivity, and then to drive up the ability for us to increase bandwidth and speed to those buildings as business applications became more resource-oriented.

So I would say connecting was the first strategy - and then, of course, finding ways to drive technology into a very tech-savvy population was the next step.

So I think that those challenges are probably similar across the country but I would also say that we have had no downturns and no exit of population for the city, but more of a demand to deliver higher visible productivity in the organization but also to lower costs and provide more functions within our organization and external to it as well.

Back

Discussion: Solutions to Address Challenges

Moderator

Thank you that’s a very interesting sort of cross-sections of different diverse needs there. So now, although some of you have talked about some of the technologies that you put in place, maybe we could elaborate some and see if there’s anything more as far as to talk about solutions. So, Danette, with what you described of what you were trying to achieve, what were some of the solutions that you put in place in your department?

Danette Campbell

Well Steve, as I mentioned earlier, you know, initially, we deployed PCs to every trademark-examining attorney. Again, those were 18 examining attorneys. Then we transitioned as telework started to expand and grow at the agency, and was deployed incrementally and started moving into the patents organization, our engineers came up with what we call the Enterprise Remote Access Program. And that was the deployment of a laptop, a docking station, cabling, routers, Voice Over IP with headset, dual monitors for our hoteling employees, certainly our examiners who were teleworking one, two, or even three days a week.

7

Now we have moved to what we call the Universal Laptop Program which is really a more cost-effective model. It’s where every employee, whether they’re a teleworker or not, receives a laptop. That laptop is what services that employee, when they arein their office at the Alexandria campus, and when they’re working from home as well. We do have additional peripherals again for our examination employees to include the dual monitors and any other special software that needs to be installed on that laptop.

Moderator

And Ted, did you have anything else to add, as far as what you did with your virtualization project, the type of technologies or solutions put in place?

Ted Beck

The network design component, even after we built our own network, we wanted to be very very smart consumers of those strands. So we implemented a variety of CWDM and DWDM technologies so that we could use the strands to their fullest. That we could have public safety and municipal and partner needs on the same strands, but utilizing different colors of light.

We also went forward with an initial design of redundant, self-healing rings, and we got a little bit of pushback about that extra expense initially, but we were tested by a backhoe about three days after we lit the network - that we actually had a backhoe dig the fiber and break it. I scurried over to that facility where that backhoe operator was and the people that were working out of that facility, didn’t know why I was there. And that was the best moment that I’ve had with Cisco technology about “proof is in the pudding”, that if that facility didn’t go down, that was a perfect example of the extra investment in self-heal.

Moderator

Tom, you had the datacenter virtualization project - anything to add about what you did there?

Tom Sullivan

We’re about 90% virtualized, I’d say, with our servers and applications... right now we’re working on virtualizing desktops.

We’ve been running Citrix for about ten years, and now we’re starting - a pilot program for Citrix XenDesktop. We’ve got about fifty to 100 people running on that, and our hope is by 12-18 months we’ll have most of the organization running with a virtualized desktop. We’re getting a lot more iPads, things like that in there, so we’re trying to be, you know, device-agnostic.

We’re also working on fiber throughout the community. We have a consortium put together and we’re working on getting that put together.

We’re working on some business continuity reciprocal agreements with community college and other agreements with municipalities and people within the community to reduce replication of services throughout the government.

Dan Kent

This is Dan - it’s interesting to see, even though across the panel they’re very different scenarios, different use cases or problems that they’re addressing, it really does start with the infrastructure.

Once you get the infrastructure in place, you integrate the security, you put in the resilient network that you have, then you can start working on those advanced capabilities, like the video that impact the business side.

So, I guess, from the outside looking in, it’s very interesting to see how the team really has started getting their infrastructure in place and I’m sure they have next steps on top of what that infrastructure now provides them, to add these newer, higher-level applications to add value.

8

Gail Roper

This is Gail Roper, at the RTP, Raleigh. I wanted to add onto what you just mentioned in regards to that it starts with the infrastructure. What I wanted to say about that, is that we have always kept our objective to be the relevancy of that infrastructure. So, building it out, connecting assets, but also making sure that we have an end objective of making the infrastructure really suit the mission of the organization and to make sure that we have lots of conversations about the relevancy of what we have on that infrastructure.

So, many of our community-based initiatives have come from that dialogue, around, “so what are we going to do with it?” Once we have it designed properly, once it’s innovative, what are we actually going to provide to our constituents as it relates to this infrastructure that we have available to us?

Moderator

Let’s ask Scott, with your project then, with your schools, issuing laptops to your students. Did you have to put in place an infrastructure to support that, or was it already there?

Scott Smith

It was not here, as a matter of fact, and when we started, Wireless-G technology was the norm. We actually did a pilot project with that. We had 400 machines on carts. But we found out very quickly that that was not adequate. And so, as Cisco Wireless-N technology was being ratified, we installed it.

One of the first places to install it was in our schools - and it was a godsend for us because it really increased the amount of bandwidth we had available. My philosophy on bandwidth has always been: it’s kind of like that movie, ‘Field of Dreams’. “If you build it, they’ll come”.

And especially, in our environment, in education, kids today do not know the difference between downloading a full-motion video or downloading an email that’s a tiny little bit. All they know is, when they click on it, they want it to work. And it’s my job, and I think it’s a lot of our jobs, to make sure the stuff is in the infrastructure to make that happen. So for us, yes it was a paradigm shift. It was looking at this differently, it was putting money into the infrastructure so that your return on the investment on the back-end would be much greater.

Moderator

I’ll turn finally to Garry and then Hugh on this question. Garry, talk to us a little bit about the infrastructure that was in place when you began, and the infrastructure that’s in place now. And, perhaps, even the infrastructure you’re looking ahead towards.

Garry Lough

Well, you can imagine as we transition from an industrial-age education system to an information-age education system where it’s not a ‘one size fits all’ proposition of how learners learn, it’s a ‘one size fits one’, that the infrastructure that needs to be in place so that students can access all of this content curriculum is really critical. When we started our project two and a half years ago, we had schools with 256kb DSL line to their school to run the whole district. So, in many cases, we knew that if we were going to accommodate that, we had to elevate that to a level that would be competitive in a global economy. We’re going to bring, like Scott has already brought his 4,500 students on a one-to-one device, we’re going to bring 90,000 high school students on with laptops and the level of connectivity and infrastructure that’s required to support that is exactly what we’ve forecasted and built within our private network.

Moderator

Hugh, What kind of infrastructure did you have in place, and what are you moving towards?

9

Hugh Miller

When I first got to the city, we had a very poorly designed network and really, the whole strategy around managing servers, etc. was not quite there - it was more like a small office type of mentality.

So we had to literally rip out that whole layout and change the philosophy of how people thought about the network, the servers, etc. - how we delivered services to the employees and to the citizens.

So we originally had a very poorly laid out Nortel network and I spent probably a year and a half preparing a case to present to our city council to basically say that I need to change that strategy completely.

And in doing so, I ended up going through a lot of municipal integrity investigations, cases, etc. but I knew I had to continue down the road of what I knew could be stable, supportable, I could hire staff that I knew would end up supporting it. And so we ended up just chugging through that, built a completely different datacenter design. We built a second datacenter in an area where our emergency operations center is.

We leveraged the fiber to build multiple rings so that the datacenters are actually also self-healing so if I dropped a storage area network, it would also be running in our redundant datacenter.

Then we had the issues with delivering desktops to the employees, and we had no lifecycle management strategy and so we had to change that completely. Really everything got completely ripped out from the infrastructure - changed the people’s mentality, some of the people - and just began to sell what the change was to the organization.

So we partnered with Cisco from a network standpoint. We leverage their video teleconferencing, originally it was Tanberg, and then as it moved over to Cisco we leveraged that for a lot of emergency operations, all of our firehouses and police substations have video teleconferencing for emergency events.

We also leverage it for certain high-caliber meetings. We had one of the city council members in China and during a city council meeting, we teleconferenced her in to the meeting and collaborated from China into San Antonio for the meeting. So now they’re actually looking to move that teleconference scenario out to the citizens so the ones who can’t show up to city hall can actually participate in city council meetings.

So, there’s just a lot of things that we knew we had to change – such as the foundation of how everything works, and then begin to leverage the services as the demand came.

And so, again, like the gentleman mentioned earlier, as you build it, they’re going to come. And consistently, that’s the case. So it’s a difficult thing to try to fix the sins of the past, where there was a lot of neglect, yet keep today alive, and then continue to advance for tomorrow ―all at the same time.

So, partnerships, etc. are very very important, and we’ve been able to leverage that and yet it’s still this churn of demand, constantly on us.

Back

Discussion on Collaboration, Telework and Virtual Desktops

Moderator

Well then, we’ve gone through all of the projects that each of you have discussed from your different areas. I want to get to results, but not quite yet. But first, I want to have some of you elaborate on some of the things you’ve been able to do. As Hugh was just talking about, build it, and now they’re starting to come. With that, we’ve had Danette talk to us about telework, and I was wondering - are there any others of you who are using telework or, rather, have been able to build telework into the services or applications that you’re now using in your organizations?

10

Hugh Miller

From San Antonio - We have also had a virtual desktop infrastructure for quite some time which then gave us the ability to do teleworking. Outside of some of the complexities we have with HR, where they want to come in and ensure that someone’s home is fit for work, so there’s no liability issues, we’ve been very successful. Last year around this time, very close to this time, we had a big freeze and snow in San Antonio. And, you know, we’re not fit for handling that type of weather so it pretty much shut down the whole city, yet we still had a lot of city services that had to function. So early that morning, like probably 3 in the morning, city manager’s office called to let us know we weren’t going to have people come in, but do we have capacity from a virtual desktop perspective and remote work perspective and went through without a hitch. So we built the capacity knowing that it would come - and there are times now that it’ll come.

So as we’ve progressed, part of my mission is to help sell that into the city, that this is much more of a viable option, and the same concept as mentioned before. I want to reduce the footprint on our buildings, the cost of running those buildings, which was like, the most expensive piece. The other part is being able to open up the arena for the new e-generation employees that are coming in with a completely different expectation of the workforce that we can leverage that intellect, and their mindset on how they can approach work and have that open for them to be able to leverage.

Moderator

Yes, so you’re already looking ahead to the future of your future workforce and how they can leverage these technologies.

Hugh Miller

That’s correct, yes.

Moderator

Well, let’s see then - somewhat related, not exactly telework, but of course collaboration is very close. Scott, let me ask you - with a school, you’re not talking about telework with your students, but are you able to use what you’ve done for collaborative work?

Scott Smith

Absolutely. And all the things that were just mentioned are the things that we want our students to graduate with, and be able to go into the workforce with. So there’s a very nice dovetail there. But, one of the things that we are able to do now with the accessibility and the tools and the technologies that we have is we’re able to collaborate more than ever - between student and student, between student and teacher, between teacher and teacher. And not just in that building, but across the country, across the globe. So, collaboration is huge for us. And, like I said, having that technology there makes that possible for us, where as before, we couldn’t do that type of thing.

Moderator

Yes. So you’re, in essence, training these students and giving them the expectations that when they arrive in San Antonio or some other place, they’re going to continue doing this.

Scott Smith

That’s exactly right.

Moderator

Well then, let’s stay with schools a little bit, and I’ll ask Garry - Garry Lough - are you using collaboration or video, or anything of that nature with what you’ve got in place now?

11

Garry Lough

Collaboration is probably the biggest cultural change occurring in our state because of the technology. You have remote mountain towns like McCall, Idaho that are able to team-teach with others from over the mountain range. Where three weeks of the month, a student’s using a teacher from Council, Idaho to teach government back to the kids in McCall. Conversely, you also have a more blended environment, where you have students that can progress through their curriculum online want an enhancement where they can access a subject matter expert through video to improve the quality of that content. And so the ability to understand happens because of that collaboration.

Dan Kent

Hey Garry, in terms of what you’re doing from the overall state for the education, would you consider that a cloud offering? Are you a community cloud, or the services that you’re providing?

Garry Lough

I think you could make that case. The intent was to equalize the connection and allow them to grow based on their own device. So, I think you could make that case, it hasn’t necessarily been how we’ve coined it, but I think you could make the case.

Dan Kent

Will you be having shared services come on to your network, or are you kinda going to let them be distributed?

Garry Lough

You know, I think we’re going to let them be distributed at this point. Not sure. I mean, I think that’s open for debate.

Hugh Miller

To follow up on that here in San Antonio, we actually are doing shared services with other regional entities where we share public safety applications with entities nearby that are smaller, so we do the cloud offering to like a private cloud offering or a G to G offering, which is helpful because a lot of what we do has specific restrictions around it and security restrictions. Which if I’m in the same arena as another public safety entity is, I can then host their stuff and so as building this network infrastructure and server base infrastructure, we can then allow them to join in with a much more affordable arena of cost.

Gail Roper

Hugh, were you finished?

So, just to elaborate on that a bit, what we’ve been able to do is to develop strategies to partner with our local community college. We also are using the city’s assets, our community centers, as base points for the community college. So, in our urban core, we’re using our community centers, one - as an intake center for students who want to come in and enroll in college and fill out financial applications, those kinds of things - and the community college actually staffs that and uses the city’s infrastructure as a point place for young people.

The other thing that we’re doing is, we’ve built and renovated team centers in our city. And we’re actually using Cisco’s telepresence video conferencing as a place for our teams to come in two days a week. We call it a “digital connectors program” which you can see on YouTube, there’s a video out there. A national program that helps our students to gain 21st century technology skills. So we’re using our assets -the city’s assets as a way for us to expand into the community, but also partnering with Cisco with our standardized network to bring students up to par in terms of their skills. So we’re seeing more and more interest from our local universities and our school district to utilize more of our infrastructure.

And I think Hugh mentioned the G to G, so we’re going to begin to develop a statement that will help memorandums of understanding with these entities to talk about shared infrastructure.

12

Moderator

Yes , so they will actually then use some of the infrastructure you’ve already put in place, it will be shared with schools, colleges, and the like?

Gail Roper

Absolutely.

Back

Discussion on Security

Moderator

Something I wanted to follow up on, as well, that Hugh, when you were talking, you mentioned some security issues that you had - can you talk a little bit about what some of those issues were, and perhaps how you dealt with them?

Hugh Miller

Sure. From the beginning of the fiber infrastructure, we had a couple of security issues. One was just physical security―access to the fiber and equipment. So, we mitigated that through several different avenues with leveraging substations for the energy company, etc. The other part is that we were splitting the network, as was mentioned earlier. We were changing the color of the light to essentially share the fiber with multiple entities who had their own security restraints.

So, the energy company has specific DOE-based security restrictions. We as a city have our own. And so, the management of security of the fiber infrastructure and the network infrastructure is very important. We worked very closely with Cisco as we laid out that network and built security there.

Then as you step into the desktop arena, when we hand off a desktop to someone working remotely, the intent is to not infuse any issues that they may have on their home system, or even any personally identifiable information, or whatever, on their home system, in with the corporate system, and vice-versa. So, we segment off the desktop that we hand to someone’s computer at home so that it doesn’t cross over and if there is a need for it to cross over it’s a very difficult process for someone to prove that they need that sharing of information. So we segmented it off to where now I don’t have to worry about the crossover of information from one’s desktop into the corporate network so that we don’t have to manage their issues, and so a couple of the main things there were our security issues that we dealt with during a couple of our main projects.

Moderator

Ted, did the city of Aurora have to deal with any similar issues as well, with your projects?

Ted Beck

Well the security is always an issue when networks become this complex. We certainly on the public safety side, like was mentioned earlier, have a bunch of different databases from a bunch of different sources, all with different security components. So it’s something that has to be factored in.

We are also beginning to utilize video for doing firefighter training that, on one hand, I adore that firefighters train as often as they do - but, on the other hand, if my house is on fire, I very much appreciate the firefighter being in their home station. And we see a video offering being the best way to get that done.

Moderator

And Danette, with telework, what are some of the security issues that your organization has to consider or deal with in order to make sure that your teleworkers are working securely?

13

Danette Campbell

Because of the nature of the work that we do at the Patent and Trademark Office, we have to move massive documents back and forth in a highly secure, encrypted environment. So, our technicians or OCIO are constantly testing and revamping our systems to ensure they maintain their safety and their security, for our patents that are moving back and forth. Same holds true for any other kind of data that’s generated by a distributed worker.

Moderator

Thank you. Well then, Dan, to bring you back in, perhaps you could give us kind of an overall perspective - with these types of projects, since they’re so diverse, are there any common elements of security that people should be concerned with?

Dan Kent

Absolutely. And I think there are some great best practices, and you’ve heard some in the panel here. It really comes down to knowing who and what’s on your network. Being able to have visibility and plan actions based on if that is an anomalous type of work or not.

I will say the one thing that it starts with is identity and access. Right? And that’s easier said than done in today’s world of mobility. But that’s really where we’re helping a lot of our customers understand - that’s where it starts. We’re no longer having a nice tight perimeter anymore to put our security around. It really becomes a true borderless network. We also see that security, unfortunately, is not just a single, simple answer. It has to be truly integrated throughout the architectures, whether it’s the video systems you’re talking about and making sure you’re having integrity with that video, or whether it’s the remote access or teleworker, or you’re controlling the endpoints themselves, or whether it is in the datacenter and we have lots of data going back and forth, and being able to have integrity of that data as well as monitor for data loss.

So security in itself has to be an architecture that’s integrated with all the other segmented architectures that we have. And really, that’s the best thing we can help our customers understand - it’s great that there are lots of new widgets that you can put in your network that can help address one piece of security, but it really has to be holistically looked at and holistically deployed as part of the architecture.

Hugh Miller

I mentioned something too on security, and you know, one of the things that’s becoming very complex in the IT arena and managing corporate IT are the consumer-based devices that continue to proliferate our environment. And so, how is it that we can embrace them, right, not reduce the leverage of the tools that someone wants to use for work but then how do we keep them safe and secure - which, at the end of the day, we’ll be responsible for anyway.

So, the modern proliferation of devices, and the change in those devices, is very rapid. So getting a hold and understanding the device and being able to manage it effectively becomes a very strong challenge as we progress in the future.

Danette Campbell

Yes, I just wanted to say, I think it’s really important regardless of what environment we’re talking about that security policies and procedures are in place and that these are communicated on a regular and recurring basis not just to the distributed worker, but to the manager. To those people who are on site as well. I just wanted to add that point.

Back

14

Cultural Changes/Lessons Learned with Telework, Distance Learning and in IT with Virtualization

Moderator

We’ve been talking a lot about workers, students working remotely. In essence, people today, they want to work from anywhere. And so, the question is -, we’ve been talking about the technological part of this - but what I was curious about is, are there some cultural issues that you had to deal with as far as either embracing telework, or distance learning - such as new policies to put in place, management training, security training for employees, that type of thing... Garry, how about you out there in Boise? Was there anything of this nature that you had to do to make sure these worked properly?

Garry Lough

We are definitely enduring a big cultural change within our education community, because we’re realigning our interests with that of the learner and using the technology to do it. I’m sure Scott has gone through some of this as well. But, by allowing the student to define how they want to receive the content, whether it be online or by video, really puts a little bit of a pressure on acceptance from folks in the education community, and there’s always a fear in change and so, one of the ways that we’ve helped them is just to continually work with educators to introduce them to the possibilities and kind of allay those fears.

Danette Campbell

Well of course. And, you know, although I wasn’t at the agency in 1997 when Debbie Cohn started the telework program, I’m sure that she met with the same kinds of challenges that my colleagues on this panel are talking about today. I mean certainly, management resistance. The managers, and perhaps at the time, agency executives couldn’t imagine how we could actually do our work and maintain production if we weren’t in place. That paradigm has changed by magnitudes at our office. We now have, as I mentioned earlier, almost 7,000 people teleworking anywhere between one and five days a week - and 3,500 of those are teleworking full-time. 700 of those are outside of the Washington metropolitan area and are living all over the country.

So, yes, there are challenges associated with telework. You know, anything that’s new, I think there are going to be challenges associated with it. But if you start small, and you conduct pilot programs, and you gather metrics along the way. You report those metrics back. You report out to your agency executives, or your stakeholders on a regular basis and show them your return on investment. One of the things that I find very very interesting and certainly is relevant, I believe, for today’s panel is the fact that if I had to bring back all 3,500 hoteling employees - those are our full-time teleworkers - today, in this economy, in this real estate market, I would have to secure about 20million dollars in additional real estate to bring those folks back. That’s huge.

And even for those people who may not completely embrace distributed work, that is certainly a fact that might make them think twice about embracing it.

Hugh Miller

This is Hugh again in San Antonio. I am really happy with what’s Danette done, it’s something I’ve been talking about in our organization quite a lot. And part of the problem, some of the hurdles we had to deal with, were - we were a self-insured organization, so, HR came along and we began to talk about this. we opened it up that they wanted to go into homes that had an employee that wanted to telework, and ensure that there weren’t insurance issues with, like, liability-type insurance issues. So it became very complex whenever we started going down this road and so it’d be interesting to know how that was sort of addressed and how you get around it, because it’s the idea and the concept is solid, I believe. But yet, the belief inside the organization and making that change throughout the organization I think is fairly complex at certain organizations. So that’s part of what we’re dealing with, is setting down these policies, we have internal security policies, etc. and we try to educate them regularly.

But then transforming the organization to a better place. Sometimes becomes a little bumpy because you end up having a mindset that’s not quite ready for that change, and getting past that is a very difficult thing at times.

15

Danette Campbell

You know, one of the things I’d like to suggest is that you conduct on a regular basis, facilitated discussions with your managers. Facilitated discussions with your agency executives. I don’t like to call these ‘trainings’ - but when you call it a ‘facilitated discussion’, I think people are more excited about attending and sharing their feelings, and sharing their fears.

You really do need to take a good look at your policy and the structure that’s in place. One of the things I just wanted to throw in is that we do not deploy anyone to Telework. Unless they received thorough IT training and non-IT training which addresses, again, the policy issues, the telework policy issues, the rules of the road, the security policies. How to communicate in a distributed work environment.

We do the same thing for managers of teleworkers. But it’s critically important to communicate that policy - a safety checklist - to all of your managers on a regular basis. You know, this initiative really is a work in progress. It’s not static. It’s always changing, just like any other good initiative. We’re always trying to make it a little bit better, either from the IT perspective, or the policy and the training perspective.

Hugh Miller

And I think one of the things that’s important, too, are that essentially you’re changing your management style, right? Because if I traditionally manage someone, whether they’re sitting in a cube or a desk for eight hours, it’s not necessarily effective - but if I’m managing based on deliverables, and I define deliverables that are supposed to be delivered within a window of time, now, I can then be more effective where you are, whenever you are, and I think that’s one of the paradigm shifts that is very difficult in a lot of organizations.

Danette Campbell

And that’s why I think that revisiting your performance measures for your organization on a continual basis - you know, again, as you say, it’s not so much where you are working, but what you deliver.

Is it timely? Is it of quality? Is it in the format that it’s supposed to be?

All of those things need to be revisited from time to time, and it’s not just about the teleworker. It’s about those folks that are in the brick and mortar environment as well.

Dan Kent

Actually, Steve, I’d like to ask Tom a question in Chicago.

Because what I see when I go talk to the public sector around cloud computing, virtualization... IT culture fits in - comes into play. Right, it is about people losing, possibly, some of the work that they’ve been doing in the past as we virtualize servers and we virtualize applications. So I guess the question to Tom is that you virtualized your servers - have you seen that culture impact on your IT group? And do you see it going forward as you go more down that journey to cloud? I’m assuming you’re going to go to a private cloud?

Tom Sullivan

Can you give me some more detail on what you’re looking for.

Dan Kent

Well, I was just wondering if you have, when we see virtualization... who owns the servers? What about the marriage of the server with the storage people? Is your organization large enough to have distinct roles between application owners, server owners, storage owners, and network owners, and as we go to this true virtual world, they kind of have to come together, and act as one.

16

Tom Sullivan

Yes - I see what you’re saying - yes, we did have to merge those groups. It wasn’t working as they were disparate groups. At first we tried to set up the storage on the front end of it, and then advertise where that storage was and how it was to be used, and it just wasn’t flexible enough. So, we just had to put all those people together, and have them work together. It took a little time, but, you know, it’s a flexible arrangement right now.

Dan Kent

You had to actually reorganize to meet the new technology, the new business model.

Tom Sullivan

Yes definitely.

Gail Roper

Yes this is Gail in Raleigh - I would say that we absolutely had to have some overall discussions with staff, our systems administration, individuals, and the relationship between our network folks in regard to when we consolidated the network with some of Cisco’s new monitoring tools.

And it became a scenario where one segment of the staff could see the other side of the system, and there was some threat to the system’s admin people that what they had traditionally monitored was now being shared. We had to have conversations about where we would go in the future in regard - had nothing to do with the technology - We saw, initially, a lot of resentment to moving in that direction because of the shared access. So, we absolutely had change management issues associated with the newer technology that had to be addressed with staff so that we could move forward.

Dan Kent

So, any advice to people following in your footsteps? Was there lessons learned?

Gail Roper

I really believe that there was. And I think a lot of it happened in the conference rooms, just kinda hashing out what the concerns were. I think reviewing the policy and security. Making certain that the roles and responsibilities were clear and that we would never see - you know, we even had to liken back to mainframe days to bring back stories of the past that related to the coming together of the IT organization and that, you know, from a long-term, future, innovation perspective we’re going to continue to see this kind of a transition away from a traditional model. So we really had to have some heartfelt conversations, and I don’t think that there was any training or any technology that could help with that. It really had to be a sit-down conversation.

Moderator

That sounds like what you were saying as well, Danette. About making sure people have a chance to express their concerns, fears, etc.

Danette Campbell

Absolutely. And one other thing I wanted to add...

If there are agencies or organizations out there listening that are starting a telework initiative or expanding one, it really is important to have that top-level support. Fortunately, since I’ve come to the agency, I have always had that support. Our current director, David Kappos, is formerly from IBM. So, he really does understand the reality of having a distributed workforce. And

17

he often tells the story of working with teams from all over the world on a regular basis that he’s never met in person. So, that’s important - it’s really not so difficult. It’s not so much about the technology anymore as it is about bringing the other pieces together to make it happen for organizations.

Gail Roper

Could I make one more comment in regards to the teleworking? So, we’re in the sixth year of a teleworking model which was actually in existence when I came to the organization. And I think the strategy that I appreciated was that the staff actually were the developers of the teleworking strategies in the organization, that the staff really began to develop that.

And keeping in mind that they had to market it and sell it to not only the public, but to our city council as well. So I think with the staff being intimately involved in the development of the strategies, they owned it. So, they were adamant about making sure there was accountability, so that they could actually stand up in front of the city council, with the cameras on, and sell this initiative as one that was going to drive productivity in the organization.

Danette Campbell

I agree with that, and I think you’ve made a wonderful point. When telework started at the agency with the trademarks organization, they were the first to actually start the working groups. And in those working groups, they included employees, representatives from management, and certainly our unions so that everyone worked together on developing and designing these telework initiatives and agreements. So that’s sort of been the model throughout the history of telework at the agency. Another reason I think that it works very well.

Hugh Miller

I think that what they’re saying is - they’re right on with where we had to step through some of these issues. You know, one of the complexities as a human being is, we’re creatures of habit, and a lot of this stuff is dealing with change, and you end up going into an organization that’s very large that has specific things that they’ve become comfortable with, and yet now you’re shifting gears on them with a completely different mindset. And so, collaborating with the whole organization with some of these changes that are coming down the road is very important along with the employees.

One of the hard things right now in the organizations that we’re in, we have essentially four generations of people that we’re supporting. And each one of them has a unique desire in communication. There are some that want specifically face-to-face, touching, all the way down to someone who you could be sitting next to and they communicate with you on an electronic device without even looking or talking to you with your voice. So, that whole paradigm of opportunity becomes very complex when you’re trying to design things to become a must for someone to work in - and trying to blend all of that together with all the right entities to then move it forward becomes important, and also complex. So, that’s kind of what we’re dealing with.

Back

Design, Execution and Resources

Moderator

The projects we’ve discussed are very complex, and so I was wondering, did your organizations have all the resources you needed to design and execute these projects or did you engage, perhaps the services of a third party? Scott, what were your experiences in that regard?

Scott Smith

Well, you know, as a school system, we are not large in terms of our technology department. I mean, there’s myself and seven others, and we take care of nearly 6,000 computers and the infrastructure and everything else. So we just don’t have that kind of capacity inside our organization. So, yes. We had to turn to those on the outside to help us. For our infrastructure piece, obviously, that was part Cisco and partner third party Presidio was the company that helped us there to make that happen. But,

18

one of the questions that we get, and you touched on this just a minute ago, but one of the questions we get a lot is: how do you afford this?

How do you afford to put a laptop in the hands of every kid? How do you afford to build the infrastructure that you need?

And, it’s making some of those hard decisions, and it really goes back to the conversation that everybody else was just having about the paradigm shift. You have to think about, in our case, you have to think about the teaching and learning environment differently. Because it’s a much different world when 25 kids coming in and instead of opening a textbook, they open a laptop, which is a window to the world. It changes. You have to have that paradigm shift. So when you have that shift, then you can talk about your resources, and things that you used to spend money on you don’t necessarily have to spend money on them anymore. Just as my counterpart was talking about, real estate. Same type of thing for us. We don’t need to spend money now on encyclopedias and dictionaries and calculators and all those things when they’re right there in front of the kid on a Macbook. So you have to think about those resources, and reallocate them differently. For us, we were able to do this as a cost-neutral project. So we were very blessed.

Danette Campbell

Scott, I have just one question, and that is - I think this is fascinating. And as a former educator, I think it’s an incredibly exciting project. And I certainly commend you and your school district. But I would like to ask this: And again, when we’re looking at return on investment, and policy, and procedure, how exactly do you handle the missing laptop? The lost laptop? Is there immediate replacement? Are policies in place that parents have to sign at the beginning of a new school year? Asset management? I mean, just a couple of things that I’m curious about.

Scott Smith

Sure. All great questions, all things that we have addressed, and still struggle with some of them, to be perfectly honest. So, asset management - you know, we barcode everything. We have discussed software that tracks the machines. But honestly, it’s been cost-prohibitive for us. We do have policies in place now that parents and students have to sign. We’ve moved from an acceptable use policy now to a required use policy. It’s not just acceptable for us anymore, it is required that you sign this, and abide by these rules. And we put ownership back on the parents and the students. There is a small technology fee so that they have a little skin in the game, if you will. And really, what’s happened - and this comes from that paradigm shift, and building the culture, is that students now realize that they can’t function without their computer. And they’re going to do whatever it takes to make sure they have the device in their hand. Now, there’s always outliers. You’ve got 4,000 machines, there’s always some that happen. But one of the proudest things, for me, was out of 4,000 machines last year, I only could not account for seven. And that was either due to theft, or loss, or whatever. And I’ll take those odds.

Danette Campbell

Absolutely. That’s incredible. Thank you.

Moderator

Ted had mentioned an incident you had with a backhoe, and that you had put in a self-healing system - and I’d like to just ask you, Ted, you know - did you go into you project with the intention of having sort of a continuity of operation - or a strengthening of your continuity of operations, and if so, in what ways have you been able to do that?

Ted Beck

Well the self-healing, like the story I told earlier, has proven out very very effectively. In our older network where we were reliant on outside vendors, our response time was hours if not days. So that has worked well for us, and continues to, that we certainly do everything in our power to make sure that our fiber gets located properly, but there is - and will continue to be - mistakes. And, the example that I gave, is one that resonated with our city council. They understood the extra expenditure for getting to that level of reliability.

Back

19

ROI and Results of Projects

Moderator

Well, we’re getting near the end of our time now, so I want to make sure we talk about the results of your projects. And we have been talking about it to some degree, but if there’s any more to elaborate on - and one of the things I wanted to ask about, is, whether you put in place as well some metrics or performance measures to actually measure the ROI on your projects. And to Gail, I think you had mentioned something to that nature, have you put metrics in place where you’re at?

Gail Roper

Yes, there are two things that we’re majorly focused on. I mentioned the economic development aspect, and our convention centers, and what we’ve been able to realize from that is a clear increase in the kinds of venues that our convention center is able to compete for.

So basically the convention center is now bringing in the Internet 2.0 conference and the Gig.U, which is a university high-speed broadband access conference, because of the technology in place. So we’re actually monitoring the kinds of venues that the convention center is able to attract, and the amount of revenue that is coming into the city based on those venues coming into the city.

The other hard dollar realized cost savings for us from an ROI perspective has been the redirecting of funds, the cost associated with connectivity. Two things - one, that we’re lowering our cost, based on not having to use leased lines - and the other thing that we’re doing is we’re getting increased speed and bandwidth throughout the city. So we’re measuring. We’re actually reporting on the reduction in telecom costs to our city council periodically, on a quarterly basis.

We just finished a workshop on Monday where we brought all those dollars together. So we look at costs we’ve been able to lower, we look at redirected cost, and then we’re also looking at cost avoidance. Basically, those three items, and then the revenue generated from the benefits of the infrastructure, and then a long-term strategy to look at how the infrastructure will begin and will actually pay for itself. The most recent effort that we have is to bring in a consulting group that is actually going to look at our business model and our relationship with the partners, to make sure we’re doing the right things in regard to the city’s assets.

Moderator

And so it sounds like that will enable you to continue making your business case year after year for what you’re doing.

Gail Roper

Absolutely.

Moderator

Scott, how about in your school district, did you put metrics in place to try and measure the impact of all of those laptops?

Scott Smith

We have, and, you know, one of the things with education - and when you start dealing with the public and their children, they want to know: so what? So one of the big deals for us from the beginning was academic achievement. We made that perfectly clear that that was our number one goal. After all, we are education, we want to educate children.

So, with that, we put a lot of different things in place. We have quarterly data meetings where we look at information on each individual student. And one of the things the technology has afforded us is the ability for instantaneous feedback. Whether it

20

comes from grading, or it comes from assessments, or whatever it is, students and their teachers and their parents can have instant access to information. And that’s a game changer. Because a teacher can be going down this road and then realize, very quickly, from the metrics that we have, that it is not being effective. And they can change their strategy. Or, it may mean that these three children over here need remediation, or these three over here need acceleration.

The technology in place allows us to individualize instruction for each individual child. And as a result, and as I’ve said, we’ve been doing this, we’re in our fourth year now, as a result, our graduation rate has increased - we’re now the second highest district in the state, with 91% of our students who started ninth grade actually graduating high school. There are 115 school districts in North Carolina, and we’re number two, and we’re very proud of that.

In addition, our dropout rate has decreased drastically. Kids want to be at school. They’re engaged. Our discipline issues have plummeted by 64% at our high school. So, that’s been huge as well.

And then other things than just increase student engagement― our attendance rate is up, our end-of-course test in elementary school - I mean, high school - and our end-of-grade test in elementary school - by all performance measures, everything is much better than it was.

Before we started this, Mooresville was down in the 30s in terms of academic achievement in a statewide ranking out of the 115 districts, and now we are number three.

Ted Beck

We have some exciting ROI-type numbers that, like Gail mentioned, we are saving a ton in terms of prior lease blind cost, that our 2012 numbers going into this budget year are about $485,000 annually saved in lease blind costs.

As one of our other panelists mentioned, we were able to leverage our infrastructure for a citywide traffic signal synchronization process that was entirely grant-funded and we have currently received about $15 million in grants for that project against an 8 million dollar build cost for our infrastructure. That is the kind of ROI that makes my city council and my mayor very very happy.

Garry Lough

Absolutely. And much like Scott, we started this project with a theme called Connect, Instruct, Achieve and so achievement ultimately is going to be the outcome we’re going to measure. Because we just finished connecting all the high schools, I think the biggest ROI that we can point to before the instruction part really begins, is that when we started this project, we had a demand for 1.6 gigs to connect all the high schools and for nearly the same price, we ended up connecting them with 3.1 gigs.

So, we finished a year ahead of schedule and 16% below budget. And I think whenever agencies embark on these types of enterprise projects, it’s difficult for them to finish ahead of schedule and below budget. So I think that’s one thing that we would all point to as an ROI.

But, beyond that, as far as student achievement goes, we know that if we can use the technology to reach the student in a fashion that helps them learn, we know that we can change the game. And the more education a student gets, the more return there is for the economy. And we have schools already that have leveraged the technology that we’ve provided to go from zero students graduating with college credit out of high school, to nearly sixty percent in one small rural school. And I think, those of us who are parents can attest to that value, because it is at a reduced cost, and their probability of going on and completing is much higher. So, in years to come, I think we’ll be able to point to many of the achievement factors that Scott has been able to enjoy in his own state, just like we will in Idaho.

Moderator

Yes, thank you. And Danette, I wanted to ask you, with regards to telework, is it possible to put in place effective performance measures, and if so, how did they work?

21

Danette Campbell

Oh, absolutely, and we’ve been doing that for years. Again, our primary employee base is production - driven. So those performance measures are very clearly defined. And those performance basics, if you will, those numbers have got to be met by our production workers every bi-week. So they know exactly what they have to produce at every bi-week.

From an agency perspective, when we look at the telework picture as a whole, we measure retention rates of hoteling employees - those are the full-time teleworkers - versus the non-hotelers. We measure the production rates. We measure the impact that hoteling has on our transit subsidy. Certainly we measure the positive impact that hoteling and telework has on our emissions reduction.

Certainly, the Washington Metropolitan area now is the winner, if you will, of the second-place award for the worst commute in the country. And so we really are attuned to traffic congestion and air quality issues.

And then finally, as I mentioned earlier on in our presentation today, that $19.8 million, that almost 20 million dollars, that’s associated with the avoidances associated with real estate.

Moderator

And now the magic question: does productivity go up with telework?

Danette Campbell

I will tell you from the studies we have done, yes we have seen an increased rate of production of those people who are hoteling versus those who are not hoteling.

Moderator

Tom, with your virtualization project, I think at the datacenters, among the things you were trying to do was reduce energy consumption, is that right?

Tom Sullivan

Yes, we reduced our electricity consumption by about 30%, which is a pretty big number for us. And then additionally we were able to free up some space in that room - or, in those rooms - and what we’re looking at is a reciprocal agreement with the community college in our area for a business continuity arrangement. Not only for services, but for space as well. So that’s going to reduce our business continuity expense by about 60 to 70 percent.

Hugh Miller

Going into them, a lot of the efforts weren’t necessarily reliant on ROI to actually go into them. They were just things that needed to get done, and so part of what we wanted to do was raise our uptime to 99.999% when we were sitting probably at 99.5%.

So it was a very immediate must to drastically change that uptime, but in doing so, we’ve been able to benefit from tons of things that have been discussed here. I mean, our datacenter is - we’re about 66% of the size we were when we started, the energy consumption’s gone down, the availability, like, essentially, one of the things we wanted to do, too, was increase the bandwidth to any remote site or any site we had, drastically, without raising any operating cost.

And so, through a lot of these efforts, we’ve actually reduced the IT operating cost by millions of dollars. We’ve actually reduced the amount of employees necessary to be in IT by ten over the last three years, but yet our service count - the IT services - has drastically increased, and the demand put on us has drastically increased, so essentially, the reduction in employees would actually be more, but I’ve had to take and shift them into new types of work. I’ve taken vacancies and shifted them into different

22

types of work, so that we can maintain the demand. So the efficiencies and the investment that we’ve put in have drastically shown in many different things. We’re leveraging now the fiber for community, public safety cameras, so that in heavy-crime areas, we stick cameras out there so that we can reduce the amount of officers that need to stay there - they only now show up when things are going on.

There’s just so many different things, that once you’ve invested into the infrastructure, into the applications, that you can then start placing on top. So we’ve been very very successful at all that.

Moderator

Yeah. So again, the build it and the innovation will come.

Hugh Miller

Exactly.

Back

Looking Ahead at Next Steps

Moderator

I won’t call on all of you, but my question is this: in this discussion, we’ve talked a lot about some great technologies, and how you’re using the infrastructure you built, and the innovative technologies, how you’re using them now, and I’d like you to just take a quick look ahead at what your next steps might be to take advantage of this and to continue connecting, innovating, and saving. And so, Garry, I’ll call on you first - what are your next steps, that you see ahead?

Garry Lough

Our next step, real quickly, is to roll out a one-to-one laptop initiative to all of the high school students, and that’s going to entail about 90,000 laptops. So, we anticipate that really starting to test our network, and look forward to the challenge.

Danette Campbell

Well, the United States Patent and Trademark Office really is a leader in federal telework, and we will continue to expand our telework programs. We will continue to expand our hoteling programs, probably at an average rate of 500 deployments per year. …… And as I mentioned earlier, we currently have 700 people who are Patent and Trademark employees who are living all over the United States. So, those are the three top of mind things that we will be moving forward with.

Gail Roper

We are going to continue to implement our fiber network. We’ll have 125 miles of fiber going into the city - city’s 148 square miles - so we want to stay focused on the 29% of those individuals that do not have access to broadband basically because of the cost of broadband in other regions.

We want to make sure that we continue to focus in on 21st-century skills for youth and continue our partnership with the school district, our programs in the community, we want to be multi-generational so that the students are actually going in to the communities and teaching their friends and family how to use technology to benefit from it. So we see a lot of non-dollar related value in what we’re doing and want to continue in that vein.

Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1007R)

23 © 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Hugh Miller

There are a handful of things, one of them has to do with making the city of San Antonio the desired workplace to bring people in, whether that’s with technology or with the environment that we have. So we want to invest into a lot of things that are being discussed here, with teleworking, bring your own device, you know, several different things.

We also have a very economy struggling school system, so we have an abundance of school districts - like 16 school districts in San Antonio - and they have a lot of redundant things. Part of what we want to do is start offering up our communications services to them, so they can lower their footprint of cost and so we’ve built our infrastructure around the ability to do that, and then offered up also to peripheral public-sector entities, and then continued to increase our stability on public safety applications, invest in the airport, and all the things that are necessary to continue to have San Antonio continue to be, as we were rated, the number one place for sustaining business in the U.S. So it’s trying to continue to look ahead, and invest in new strategies, and monies into things that are going to help us continue to advance.

Moderator

Well, that’s all the time that we have for today, but this has been a terrific discussion. And so on behalf of Cisco and 1105Media, I’d like to extend a big thanks to all of our panelists who’ve been here today, and shared your experiences and your insights. It’s been terrific.

And I’d also like to thank you, our audience, for joining in and participating today in our discussion on Connect, Innovate, and Save. I’ll just say, hope you enjoyed our presentation, and hope you found it as interesting and useful to you as it was for us, and thank you, and this concludes our National Town Hall broadcast for today.

Back