IT Consolidation Update

18 Dec

IT Staff,

Happy Holidays to you all! I hope this holiday season affords you the opportunity to rest, relax and spend quality time with your families.

Before Christmas and the New Year are upon us, I wanted to give you a brief update on our IT Consolidation project.

What’s happening with IT Consolidations? As most of you know, we kicked off the IT Consolidation project with our contractor Deloitte on November 11th. During the month of November, they analyzed data from a survey we administered with all of the agencies, reviewed current state documentation, and interviewed IT leaders in order to get an understanding of the current IT environments. This week the project moved towards defining the future state vision. They will continue the future state analysis over the next several weeks and help us define what the OIT organization, technology and services will look like going forward.

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Are there any findings to date? We asked Deloitte to help us identify some consolidation opportunities that we can begin working on right away. One of these opportunities is the consolidation of our multiple mainframe environments across several agencies onto a single platform. Another is moving to a vendor managed print services environment where the vendor will be responsible for maintenance and support of printers and we can bring our ratios of printers to staff more in line with industry standards. A third opportunity is taking advantage of cost savings by purchasing enterprise licensing for software packages such as ESRI’s AcrGIS which is currently purchased through individual agencies at a higher cost. We hope to begin pursuing these opportunities in the short term.

Do you have an idea for how IT Consolidation can save the State money? If so we will be providing a place for you to submit your suggestion on the IT Consolidation website.

I have communicated with many of you through the town halls and all hands meetings hosted at your agencies and I will continue to provide you with updates like this as the project continues. The team will also be updating the IT Consolidation website to keep you informed on a regular basis. Please check for updates, FAQs and other information as the project continues.

Please do not hesitate to contact me or my team with questions, comments or concerns.

Dickie Howze
State Chief Information Officer