Recently, I was asked by Mr. Peter Hastings (NH DoIT Commissioner) to take a look at cloud development concepts and see if there was any benefit for our development teams across the enterprise. After some investigation I could see that if all users/developers were on one server that contained all the licenses for the tool and the assets were centralized, and the SCM tool was standardized, the state could save money in various ways on activities related to software development and transform state government with more status accounting and visibility into software development not only for state developers but contractors as well.
I met with Commissioner Hastings and explained that developers would have less of a learning curve from department to department if the tool was standardized. The only thing the developer would have to learn is the application to develop code. The tool would already be known because SCM supports all the development platforms used at the state today. The state develops in Java, multiple versions of Visual Studio, COBOL for legacy applications, multiple versions of PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, etc. The list goes on with every agency that gets implemented in the enterprise as there are new tools I was unaware of and new ways of using SCM integrated with them.