For one thing, we’ve opted to try out a clean, simple graphic look for the front cover. For another, there will be fewer of those covers this year — six, to be precise, rather than last year’s nine. The good news is those six issues will be packed with as much useful public sector IT news and information as we can squeeze into them, and will provide a forum for exploring in greater depth some of the issues that are becoming increasingly important to the government sector.What are those issues? It depends on whom you ask. According to Tech Compass columnist Dan Perley, the use of open source is one of them, as is the migration of data centres to blade servers and organic computing (story page 20).
And according to Municipal Report columnist Rob Carnegie (story page 18), city IT managers will have to decide whether they can live with good enough computing power for employees, rather than force taxpayers to continually fork out for new machines. Over the course of the year, we’ll explore these issues and more in depth, so stay tuned.