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July 26, 2011 By Sarah Rich
The budget agreement that ended Minnesota’s nearly three-week government shutdown resulted in legislation that will consolidate the state’s IT services and staff.
The new legislation will require all IT staff from Minnesota’s 70-plus agencies to move to the state’s Office of Enterprise Technology (OET) — the state’s central IT organization, said Cathy de Moll, the OET’s director of planning, communications and marketing. Once the consolidation is complete, the OET will have 1,800 employees — an increase from its current 350-person headcount.
Currently the OET is responsible for overseeing purchasing and contracting within the various state agencies, reporting to the Legislature, and provisioning primary infrastructure services, such as the state’s enterprise e-mail system. With the consolidation, the OET will expand its oversight role.
“We will be doing not only infrastructure and standardizing infrastructure, but then we’ll be overseeing and managing projects, and all IT expenditures and all IT staffing eventually,” de Moll said.
As part of the consolidation, state agency CIOs will be expected to move to the OET within the next 30 days, de Moll said. The details of that reporting structure are still being worked on. All agency IT staff in the state government is expected to report to the OET by October, she said.
As of Tuesday, July 26, the OET was in just its third day of the consolidation process; in the early stages, the OET plans to focus on the finances and HR components of the staff transfers.
How will the consolidation impact the state? According to de Moll, cost savings is not the primary goal. Rather, the aim is to create more efficiencies and become more standardized across the state government. The consolidation will likely build upon the enterprise services agreement Minnesota agreed to last fall with Microsoft, which includes cloud-based productivity software.
Minnesota’s government shutdown began July 1 due to a budget impasse. On July 20, Gov. Mark Dayton ended the dispute by signing a two-year budget that trimmed spending to bridge a $5 billion budget deficit.
Minnesota’s leaders see technology as being vital for the state government’s transformation.
“What the governor and Legislature see is an opportunity to reform IT in a way that makes it more efficient and effective. Therefore, the ultimate goal is that IT would become a foundation for a lot of the other reform that they would like to see happen,” de Moll said.
The OET plans to look at other states as well as private industry for ideas on how to properly handle the consolidation, she said.
As part of Minnesota’s government shutdown, the OET had to furlough 75 percent of its staff, leaving the agency only with a “skeleton” work force to handle critical services such as its network, telecommunications and e-mail.
The OET didn’t suffer a major backlog of work as a result of the shutdown, de Moll said, and has made a smooth transition back to its normal routine.
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How does this agreement curtail collective bargaining rights for public employees? It doesn't. And your link doesn't have anything about our collective barganing rights. Making things up, that's excellent reporting.
In defense of Gov. Dayton and his proposal to "adjust" the taxes paid by the top wage earners, it seems to me that the vast majority of the public does not understand the unfairness of the local and state tax buren is allocated. Here's a summary of the 2011 Tax Incidence Study... and these are facts, not numbers pulled out of thin air to support someones opinions. "The Minnesota Department of Revenue released its 2011 Minnesota Tax Incidence Study today, based on tax year 2008 data and the November 2010 forecast. The biennial study examines the overall burden, or effective tax rate, of state and local taxes on households at different income levels. In 2008, lower- and middle-income households paid a substantially higher percentage of income in state and local taxes than high-income households, according to the study. The overall state and local tax burden averaged 11.5 percent of income in 2008. The state’s highest-income taxpayers – the 10 percent of households earning more than $130,000 – paid an effective tax rate of 10.3 percent. The remaining 90 percent of low- and middle-income households paid a substantially higher effective tax rate of 12.3 percent. It gets worse. In 1990, the top 1 percent paid 11.2 percent in taxes, and in 2008, the very wealthiest paid only 8.9 percent in taxes." So, 90 % of us should be calling your legislators to make things fair... afterall that's what Minnesotans are all about. I even agree that the non-tax payers of the state should pay something - even if it's a token amount of thier government check - so they can be part of the solution and not the problem - as many people see it.
Clicking on the "curtailed collective bargaining rights for public employees" link and reading carefully...the resolution "lack"ed the change to collective bargaining, cloning, etc. While the article is confusing, Government Technology should have clarified to understand for referencing it. "with a lack of social policy changes that would have restricted abortion rights, banned human cloning and curtailed collective bargaining rights for public employees, 22,000 of whom have been laid off during the shutdown. "What's as important as what's in the bills is what is not," he said"
Thank you for your feedback in the comments. I've deleted the portion in question about the contents of the budget in order to avoid confusion. We appreciate your keen eye.