I don't know about you, but from the beginning when the US Fed Gov't announced they were going to close data centers, I was getting some good laughs. Really you think the way to close a data center is tell the staff that their data center will be shut down? IT staff has learned to ignore the strategic projects from the CIO as he/she will be gone in 2 years.

Vivek Kundra who announced the Federal data center consolidation lasted 2 1/2 years.

Vivek| Kundra (Hindi: विवेक कुंद्रा; born October 9, 1974) is an Indian American administrator who served as the first chief information officer of the United States from March, 2009 to August, 2011 under President Barack Obama.

Network computing has a post on the three lessons learned from the Fed's data center consolidation. Jumping to the last two paragraphs.

To understand just how wrong a data center consolidation can go, consider the findings of MeriTalk’s recent survey of 200 federal data center operators. Not only did 56 percent give their agencies’ consolidation efforts a grade of C or below -- a clear sign of a project headed south -- a whopping 45 percent believe that it’s more likely they’ll win the lottery, the Washington Redskins will win the next Super Bowl, or another large meteor will hit the Earth than agencies will meet FDCCI objectives.

Far from a glowing endorsement, but it serves as a third lesson -- an important reminder to IT execs that they’d be well advised to consider their data center teams’ perspectives before going full steam with consolidation mandates.

The IT staff is getting a good laugh as they continue to do same job they did yesterday, the month before, the year before, and last decade. :-)