An average corporate technology refresh cycle is three to four years. While private companies recognise that business growth needs to be supported by adequate IT infrastructure that is upgraded comprehensively and regularly, the notion is lost on budget gatekeepers in the public sector.

As businesses grow, so do populations in public officials’ jurisdictions. As businesses have applications of varying levels of criticality, so do governments. While a glitch in a governmental organisation’s email system may cause little more than a few missed memos, downtime in a public safety communication system is a scary thought.

In Vernon Young’s eight years at the Contra Costa County, California, Department of Information Technology, not a single upgrade has been undertaken. Besides administration, operations, customer service, desktop and network services, the department is responsible for information security and operates the public safety radio system over a countywide microwave network.

In eight years (between 2000 and 2008) the county’s population grew by about 80,000, according to the latest figures provided by the US Census Bureau. It stood at about 1.03 million in July 2008.

Contra Costa’s new county administrator, David Twa, came on board last year, after his predecessor John Cullen retired. One of Twa’s goals is to revamp and consolidate the department’s IT resources, whose sprawl has come to cost a pretty penny to manage.

Young, operations manager for the county IT department, says Twa’s battle will be an uphill one, similar to those his counterparts in most budget-strained California counties are fighting.

“It’s going to be a hard fight because he’s dealing with the sheriff’s department; he’s dealing with the health services department – big departments that have their own IT department that (have) kind of grown and actually … made themselves larger than the Department of Information Technology,” Young said. “We would like to consolidate and it’s pretty hard when you have several department heads that really don’t want to make a change. They like their systems and they have been doing it for years and it’s hard to get them to make those changes.”

WHY CENTRALISE?
Young and Twa recognise there is a lot of money to be saved by replacing the disparate IT functions with one well-planned modern system. Of course, getting the five county supervisers to recognise such a project’s long-term return on investment during a public budget session taking place in the middle of a statewide fiscal meltdown is part rocket science and part proper alignment of the heavenly bodies.

“The crises are about the same throughout the State of California. Everyone is doing pretty much the same thing and everyone is looking to centralise and consolidate all of the departments into one. It’s hard to get a budget for that. It’s a lower priority,” said Young.

Contra Costa does have a data center and Young says there is enough room to accommodate most of the departments’ IT resources. Email would be a good start.

“We have about five or six different mail systems in the county and we need to bring that down to at least one or two, so we can all be on the same platform. Also, we have our production volume system and if we can just kind of keep that all under one umbrella, it would make it a lot easier.”

Young is not only looking to replace county servers and put them all under one roof, but he is also exploring virtualisation technology by reconfiguring the data center’s UPS system and back-up generators. He wants to bring in an expert to assess the county’s present state and make recommendations on the best way to go about the upgrade and consolidation project.

Outsourcing the job entirely is not an option. Not after the much-publicised experience San Diego County had when it hired Computer Sciences Corporation in 1999 to revamp and operate its IT infrastructure.

Three years into the contract’s duration, the original deal-makers had moved to different departments and those who were left to manage the mess were spending most of their time in “a bitter behind-the-scenes dispute over costs, service levels and a late ERP rollout”.

“They discovered they were not getting the support and they were not getting the service and everything they needed,” Young said. “That’s what we are trying to stay away from. It was an experience. Everyone has learned from it, so most counties are trying to centralise and bring everything … within (their own) departments of information technology together.”