In June this year, theHong Kong Office of Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) secured a capital funding of HK$242 million ($31.2 million) to build GovCloud, thegovernment's first outsourced private cloud to be launched in latter 2013.
According to the Hong Kong Government CIO Daniel Lai, the procedures of seeking funding approval from the Legislative Council Finance Committee was "very similar" to that ofMTR, the Hong Kong railway company that Lai worked for 12 years prior joining OGCIO. "In the case of GovCloud, we sought funding approval from Legco's Finance Committee. While at the MTR, budget approval was made by the IT Executive Management Committee. So the budget approval process at both organizations involved committees."
Lai continued: "For every big project, budget approval is usually made one year in advance. To present such big IT projects to committees of this sort, we needed to set out the business case on written documents, as big IT projects must be built on business case and justifications."
Lai suggested some common questions that CIOs typically need to answer: Why are we doing this project? Will we get cost savings? Will we provide better quality of services as a result? Are we going to launch new services?"
To illustrate, Lai recalled that three years ago when he was still working on theMTRchome.com project at the MTRC, which deployed a hybrid cloud model, the entire project deployment time was reduced by almost 14 months, and achieved 20% reduction in the total cost of ownership. "So it proved cloud computing worked," he said.
After outlining the budget approval process for big cloud projects at OGCIO and MTRC, we now step back and see how the vendors help their clients set their business case, in particular, whether and how CFOs and CIOs approach cloud computing differently.