Have you ever wondered about the size of a state's typical information technology budget; what their infrastructure and management look like; and how they support their state government on the information technology level? In July, the chapter hosted Dr. Steven Nichols, chief technology officer for the state of Georgia, Georgia Technology Authority (GTA), and he answered those very questions.
Nichols gave the chapter insight into the care and feeding of Georgia's information technology engine. His organization supports 85 statewide agencies with 14 of those receiving full- spectrum support. The fiscal year 2010 Georgia State operating budget was just over $17 billion. The information technology portion of that budget is surprisingly small: around $220 million for information technology infrastructure and $163 million for related projects. Yet they manage more than 7,700 physical sites and 35,000 annual users with 668 terabytes of storage at more than1850 centers of excellence.
In 2007, the state conducted an audit to determine the health of information technology operations in 14 agencies that represented 80 percent of the state's technology expenditures. The results were not encouraging and prompted them to change course. Their new strategy was to outsource the bulk of the support going forward. Suffering from obsolescent equipment, repeated down time issues, a cornucopia of policies and standards, duplicate equipment and a lack of funding, they decided to split their outsourcing support into information technology infrastructure services and managed network services.
In 2008, the state awarded a five-year, $346 million contract to AT&T to provide managed network services, which include voice and wide-area network services. They awarded IBM an eight-year, $873 million contract to provide the information technology infrastructure services, which include mainframe and end-user computing, disaster recovery, and help desk services. The GTA is very pleased with the results to dates. The two contracts focused the efforts of the state. They reduced risk, shored up leaky data security issues and created a first-ever IT Disaster Recovery Program (which they have tested 3 times in the past year). Their network reliability improved to 99.9 percent up time, their customer support help desk improved to 24/7 service all year, and their policies and standards aligned and standardized. Information technology projects improved from 40-percent success in 2007 to 90-percent success today. |
 congratulates Dr Nichols (R) on an excellent presentation small.jpg)
