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Counties Share IT Survival Strategies for Declining Budgets

IT plays a large role as county executives find survival strategies for declining budgets

The evolution of the CIO — from basic technician to full partner in the management and delivery of government services — carries with it broad exposure to major headaches when mandated delivery of services collides with financial meltdown.

At the Annual Conference of the National Association of Counties (NACo) in Portland, Ore., last week, CIOs and county officials met to discuss survival strategies that ranged from shared services to pension reform and staffing cuts.

Bert Jarreau, NACo CIO, said that every county CIO at a recent meeting had suffered budget and staffing cuts. "Wayne County, Mich., for example," he said, "lost 50 percent of their IT people in the last three years. That's slash and burn."

Wayne County, Mich.

Carla Sledge, Wayne County's CFO, drove home Jarreau’s point, saying that between 2002 and 2010, housing foreclosures increased to six times the previous rate, tax revenues dropped, employee health costs doubled even with plan changes and a larger employee share of costs, and pension costs shot up for the county's 7,700 retirees. Staff took 10 percent salary cuts, there were hiring freezes, layoffs, furloughs, and elimination of all non-mandated payments. Departments were consolidated from 12 to nine, and according to Sledge "we're being sued by everybody." If the county were a private company, she said, it would be out of business.

But since counties cannot go out of business, CIOs and county officials are partnering to come up with ideas to make ends meet and keep delivering services.

The Wayne County data center, said Deputy CIO David Edwards, was a single point of failure for all county operations. Maintenance and support costs were rising, and then one day, water rose ankle deep in the facility. Edwards says the county wasn't doing a good job of being in the "data center business." Building a new data center would be too expensive and maintenance costs would continue, regardless. So the county decided to outsource its data center management to Secure24, a private firm.

Edwards said the partnership solved the data center issues of disaster recovery with redundant centers. Management, security and other necessities were taken over by Secure-24 at a fraction of the cost of owning and operating the county's own center. The county also began to offer data center services to both public and private entities, which further lowered its costs. "We redirected our efforts to what we were good at," said Edwards. "I released my death grip on having to have control of the data center."

Another advantage was that companies who might otherwise be looking at moving from the region were shown the data center and offered competitive pricing. The county has the infrastructure now to support cloud computing, reducing operational costs and licensing fees.

Another efficiency, said Edwards, was combining all the county's e-gov services on one portal, and automating and streamlining antiquated internal processes with workflow so that "everyone didn't need to touch every single piece of paper." Data center outsourcing did not result in loss of staff, said Edwards, they were refocused on other priority tasks.

The county’s economic development team also created an application to assist those facing foreclosure.

For more survival strategies, such as hosted e-mail and shared services, read the full story at Digital Communities.