Yesterday I attended the Dakota County Broadband Forum. I hope to talk more about it once all of my video uploads (I have ironically slow upload speed) but I wanted to mention quickly the keynote Michael Langley from Metro MSP, a regional economic development group.
He spoke about the advantages of regional planning. There are some simple economies of scale – but also it’s a huge advantage in planning to know what’s happening in the area to minimize the possibility of reinventing the wheel. More than that, it allows counties, cities, neighborhoods to develop complementary plans.
With that in mind, it was great to coma across note on how that is happening in terms of broadband planning in the Metro area. The following notes come from notes from a recent Dakota County Board of Commissioners meeting (April 19) but as you can see the work involves 7 more counties…
County Administrators of the seven Metropolitan Counties and Olmsted County are exploring opportunities for additional collaborations among their organizations. The administrators meet on a regular basis to identify and drive opportunities for shared services among participating counties. Initial efforts of the group have focused on 1) improving fiber connectivity among the counties to enhance the ability to share technology applications, and 2) the development of proposed legislation to improve eligibility determination processes for medical, cash, food and childcare assistance, which counties carry out (and locally finance to a significant degree) under direction from the Minnesota Department of Human Services. The latter effort, with assistance of the Human Service Directors from each county, had led to the inclusion of the “administrative simplification” proposal now included in the House Omnibus Health and Human Service Finance bill at the Minnesota Legislature.
The group has also decided to examine future opportunities for sharing large-scale information technology infrastructure and functionality initiatives undertaken by each county. To identify such opportunities with appropriate lead time, the group is creating a forum for explicit consideration of these technology plans for each county. In this forum the Administrators and their respective information Technology Directors will consider whether an opportunity is sizeable enough to gain efficiencies, whether shared implementation would expedite or delay implementation of an opportunity, and which benchmarks can be used to evaluate each opportunity.
The Information Technology Directors from these member counties are currently working to develop a one to four-year outlook with respect to potential opportunities for sharing information technology infrastructure. The Information Technology Directors will consider opportunities such as shared assets (fiber, servers, data center space, software applications), new emerging technologies (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Cloud Computing VoIP), and potential share services (regional data centers, shared applications). These plans and opportunities will be reviewed annually by the Administrators in the forum created by the Memorandum of Understanding.
These notes are interesting for several reason – first it’s a glimpse and broadband adoption (and increased demand) in the next few years. When we start talking virtual desktop and Cloud Computer, we start talking about needing fiber. Second, the Minnesota Ultra High Speed Broadband Report suggests collaboration and aggregate purchasing – I think these notes take that even a step beyond. I think we’ve been seeing the planning move from city to county-focused, which I suspect will help residents between or on the outskirts of cities, now we’re moving to regional. The next step might be a big statewide push.