A side effect has been the loss of a desirable degree of compatibility and integration among systems, not to mention making the highly distributed costs hard to account for, as demonstrated by the fact that the City had to conduct special audits to find out how much is spent on technology. Customer service oriented support structure. The challenge ahead is to protect the advantages of having computing resources in the hands of employees and departments, where the best use of these tools can be decided, while counteracting the undesirable side effects of distributed computing. Seattle City Light was identified by the Distributed Computing Benchmark as having done this successfully, re-centralizing key components of application development and support services in line with their 1994 IT Strategic Plan. Execution of that plan included measures to protect quality and customer service, including Service Level Agreements, performance measures and customer surveys to insure that centralized services remain reliable, responsive to needs and customer driven.
Complexity drives up costs .
Standards and architectures are used to simplify IT by showing how things fit together and identifying a limited number of specific products which fit inside the overall structure. Best practices collect the earned wisdom of those who have implemented or managed technology successfully and make this knowledge commonly available. There are various existing pieces and examples of all of these elements within the City . Five years ago the City had about a dozen electronic mail packages, many of which would not exchange information with one another. The new standard was selected in part because it fit into the overall City architecture for communications networks, servers and support.