HEAD: The strife in parting the sheriff with his IT closet

DECK: IT officers in California counties are stuck window shopping

An average corporate technology refresh cycle is three to four years. While private companies recognize 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 organization's email system may not cause much 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, Calif., 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 U.S. 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 organization'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 will be an uphill battle, similar to one 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'd 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've been doing it for years and it's hard to get them to make those changes."

Why centralize?

Young and Twa recognize that there is a lot of money to be saved by replacing the poorly stitched quilt of IT closets with one well-planned modern system. Of course, getting the five county supervisors to recognize such a project's long-term return on investment during a public budget session taking place in the midst of a statewide fiscal Armageddon 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 centralize and consolidate all of the departments into one. It's hard to get budget for that. It's a lower priority."

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 what we need to do is take 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."

He is not only looking to replace county servers and put them all under one roof. He is exploring virtualization technology;he is looking at 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 well-publicized experience San Diego County had when it hired Computer Sciences Corp. in 1999 to revamp and operate its IT infrastructure.

Three years into the contract's duration, the original dealmakers had moved to different departments and those who were left to deal with the mess were spending most of their time in "a bitter behind-the-scenes dispute over costs, service levels and a late ERP rollout," according to an excellent 2002 article about the disaster on www.cio.com.

"They found out they weren't getting the support;they weren't getting the service and everything that 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 centralize and bring everything ... within (their own) departments of information technology."