Officially, Governor Brown solicited the a Top 10 Action items from the Bureau of State Audits and the Little Hoover Commission; however, since TechLeader.TV (TLTV) has been generous to this point in its recommendations to the new Administration on how the state could cut waste and abuse, we are more than happy to reiterate here our suggestions. The Governor asked for responses by March 4, 2011 which leaves us about five working days, which is more than enough time; and of course, TechLeader.TV will try to restrict ourselves to information technology related items… but we make no promises.
As our TLTV’s reach has always exceeded our grasp, we will attempt to identify at least $1 billion for each working day until the March 4th deadline – say a goal of $5 billion. We are going for this higher number because of the nature of IT spending which in many cases involves spending over several years and rather than attempting to parse these savings over time we’ll just look at the macro picture. Let’s get started:
DAY ONE: February 25, 2011
Eliminate $1.8 billion Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) Project
Discussion: There is no greater, nor longer-standing proponent of a new, robust financial system for the State of California than I, ever since I walked into the State Capitol in 1995. If you can’t measure it, you can’t reform it. And it took more than a dozen years before the Department of Finance’s luddites got the message.
However, the state has gotten along fine more or less ever since my old boss Ronald Reagan approved his Finance Director, Cap Weinberger’s plan for a statewide financial system. CalSTRS while woefully out of date will suffice for now; and the work-around financial systems developed over the last decade by the larger departments are much more capable.
And, besides the point that this over-planned, over-scheduled, over-budgeted monstrosity of a computer system is projected to take another dozen years to fully implement (an absolute formula for failure if there ever was one), a three year postponement will cause little indigestion except within the vendor community. This could then be followed by a more rational, abbreviated, rapidly deployable cloud-based alternative for one-quarter the cost.
DAY TWO: Coming February 28, 2011