Government Technology - November 2008 - (Page 43)

every month, every week. Then we started the consolidation.” Weaver transplanted several FSSA staff members to the IOT. Those employees then recommended IT staffers they knew in other agencies who would be a good fit for the IOT. Weaver cherry picked those employees and also recruited from the private sector. “There were about 3,000 servers around the state, and now we’re less than 2,000. By consolidating on one e-mail system, we can eliminate a bunch of servers,” Weaver said. “We also use VMware to have virtual servers wherever we can.” The IOT also deployed Intel’s vPro motherboard technology that automatically shuts down PCs at night. It saves Indiana $400,000 annually in electricity bills. Equal Classes Indiana’s pre-IOT technology landscape created disparity among state agencies. Federally funded agencies, such as the FSSA, could afford to update their technology regularly. But agencies without federal funds, like the Indiana Department of Correction (DOC), could not, said Jake Moelk, CIO of the Indiana State Department of Health. “A lot of times with DOC, they’d wait until the FSSA got rid of something, and then they’d glom on to that stuff because it was a lot better than what they had before, even though it was four or five years old,” Moelk said. “All of the DOC’s funding had to come from the state coffers, and the state budget wouldn’t support a three-year refresh program.” Weaver’s team guarantees all agencies the same hardware and support services. Budget Magic Assessing its vendor contracts made Indiana realize it had a vastly better bargaining chip than executives realized. Some vendors had several different contracts with the state, all at different prices for the same product. The IOT inserted itself in the technology purchasing approval process conducted by the IDOA. That agency no longer approves technology purchases without the IOT’s agreement. The IOT established standards for statewide bulk purchasing, eliminated purchases from some vendors and renegotiated contracts with others. “I can’t even tell you the number of cell phone plans we had,” said Adam Horst, deputy director of the Indiana State Budget Agency. “Everybody was on a different plan. No volume, no sharing of minutes across users, just people accumulating huge overages.” The IOT negotiated a cell phone “family plan” for the state, saving $1 million. Unified standards, bulk purchase quantities and better negotiating at the IOT led to more beneficial contracts. That interested local governments, especially school districts. Horst said the IDOA previously offered bulk-purchasing contracts to local governments, which rightly avoided them. “They weren’t good deals, and they weren’t well publicized,” he said. “The locals and schools were saying, ‘Why would I ever buy off that?’ They might do their own regional consortium and buy together locally or through some other entity.” Pleasing the public schools and other local government entities paid off for the IOT. Roughly two-thirds of purchasing through the agency’s $31 million PC deal with Dell comes from local governments. The state now replaces all state workers’ PCs every four years and pays for the new equipment from the consolidation savings. The savings that funds the PC refresh is in addition to the $14 million in annual savings the IOT claims as a result of the consolidation. Operation E-Mail The state maintained several e-mail systems in 2005, making interagency communication cumbersome. If an employee wanted to e-mail someone working in another agency, he or she usually had to search that agency’s Web site for the e-mail address. Sometimes employees simply cracked open phonebooks. The IOT standardized agencies on Microsoft Outlook and put all 28,000 users on a single network. “That was challenging because four or five larger agencies had different e-mail systems, and when you get used to one thing, it’s not easy to change,” Weaver said. “We did this carefully because we knew if we had one failure, people would want to back off. We never did have a failure.” The IOT accomplished the e-mail consolidation by establishing thorough agreements with individual agencies about their specific support needs. “For example, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles is up on Saturdays,” Weaver said. “They’re not open on Mondays. State Police has a different requirement than everybody else. The Department of Workforce Development does a lot of their work on Sunday evening. In each of those cases, we had specific business agreements we defined, and then we measured against those business agreements,” he said. Farewell to the Grind Moelk managed his agency’s desktops, servers, network and help desk before the consolidation. He used to survey end-users every 30 to 60 days to measure help desk service satisfaction. The transition to a centralized, statewide help desk was difficult for the first few months, resulting in lower survey grades than normal. However, the situation changed after a few more months. “At the end of the first year, the survey results were better than the survey results when we had our own resources,” Moelk said. Now that Moelk doesn’t deal with the daily grind of network maintenance, he devotes more time developing agency-specific software projects. “I can spend a lot more of my time strategically with customers talking about next year’s grant. How are we going to attack this or where are we going to spend new money if we get it?” Moelk said. “Personally I find it a lot more up my alley because that’s part of the value a CIO should bring to an organization — talking about the future.” Data Center Central Agencies managing their own IT led to many underused servers and the unnecessary maintenance cost. The IOT consolidated the state’s five data centers into one. Weaver’s staff reorganized servers and deployed more efficient storage technology. Before the consolidation, some data centers doubled as storage facilities, housing stacks of cardboard boxes containing government property. 43 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - November 2008

Government Technology - November 2008 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for … Forward Thinkers Taking Tech Home Virtual Frontier Hidden Costs Uncovered Seeing Red For the Record In the Loop Benign Dictatorship Home-Field Advantage A Better Way to Park New Tools for Fighting Crime How It Works Spectrum Products Two Cents signal:noise

Government Technology - November 2008

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