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i" issue, it gets so complex that you have trou- ble weighing betw~en what the stories are as to why an IT project failed or what the problems were. If we can have an agency that's savvy and accountable for all of it - to the members that made a lot of sense." Centralizing power into a stand-alone IT agency is a move that's bound to cause some angst in state agencies. When legis- lation creating the Department of Infor- mation Technology (DOlT) in California was first introduced, other state agencies called in outstanding political favors to en- sure the bill was weakened just enough to limit DOlT's reach. "There probably was a little bit of behind-the-scenes objections because agen- cies don't like to lose their autonomy," Duncan said. "That didn't really emerge as a killer, and quite frankly the mood of the Legislature this session was to ignore that sort of turf-building. The Legislature was pretty independent of those types of specific complaints by agencies." Though it's true Texas has been extremely fragmented in its technology management, there has been an shift in philosophy over the last three years that set the stage for H B 1516, said Dustin Lanier, the DIR's director of strategic initiatives. The shift started with SB 1701 in Texas' 78th Legislature, he said, a 2003 bill that sought to broaden the DIR's role in managing agencies' IT and telecom- munications projects. The state has been pushing for con- solidation for some time, but lawmakers Managing Centrally In his first report to the Texas Legislature, A Foundation for Change: Leveraging a State- wide Technology Infrastructure, Olson said 90 percent of the nearly $2 billion invested an- nually in IT resources by state agencies and universities is spent on an agency-by-agency or project-by-project basis. Based on results from surveying agen- cies on spending patterns, the DIR's report estimated that more than 60 percent of the state's annual IT expenditures go to buy- ing basic operational infrastructure, such as IT operations, user support services and back-office enterprise applications. That pell-mell IT spending caught the attention of Texas legislators and created widespread support for HB 1516's IT cen- tralization strategy, said state Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, who sponsored the bill in the Texas Senate. Duncan, who's been a member of the Senate Committee on finance since 1999, said he's heard myriad appropriations requests for IT, all of which shared no connection or commonality. "There's never seemed to be any real pro- gram on how to maximize the state's buy- ing power, as well as the efficiencies that can be achieved by uniformity and expertise in evaluating needs," Duncan said. "Where we have seen problems in the past is when the people doing it didn't have the expertise, nor did they have the ability to learn from the mistakes others have made." Despite learning hard lessons over the years on how agencies should approach IT procurement and projects, he said, Texas suffered because those lessons weren't shared between agencies. The state needed a centralized IT agency to play that role and force agencies down a common path. "We set the DIR up earlier to do that, but never gave the agency the ability or power to have the weight they needed to get things done properly:' said Duncan. "Those of us who've had experience with this, we've seen the mistakes that have been made. We'd rather have one agency accountable for IT. "You'd rather have one agency to call upon whenever you're having IT problems, as opposed to 20 agencies:' he continued. "Whenever you start trying to dig into an wanted to make sure the state woUld ha a chance to succeed. .'';'''V''f:~\ , "Texas has taken a slightly different p~th~. than some of the highly centralized tech~ nology governance models," Lanier said. "What I think differentiates what is going on in Texas is a clear commitment that DIR will focus on the areas of common inter- est and support agency independence to fulfill their unique missions through appli- cations and process automation. HB 1516 is a shared responsibility for Texas govern- ment to act on efficiencies when they are present, while preserving flexibility for agencies to act on their unique missions. We will consistently calibrate with state leadership to ensure we are focused on the right outcomes at all times." Liking What They See Because the consolidation is so new, it's too early to determine its impact on agencies' day-to-day operations. But agen- cies do recognize the pluses and minuses of the ongoing consolidation effort, said Adam Jones, associate commissioner for Operations and fiscal Management of the Texas Education Agency (TEA). for the TEA at least, Jones said, IT con- solidation means offloading the big utility computing functions - data centers, server administration and network administra- tion - to the DIR. "Agencies are quite often dependent on heroic efforts by staff," Jones said. "They get to the point where they're understaffed, . . www.govtech.netltexastechnology _21