This week Carlos Ramos formerly accepted the reins of office from Acting State CIO Christie Quinlan seen here reintroducing Carlos to the state IT infrastructure at a mobile command center at the California Technology Agency’s Public Safety Communications Office.

Courtesy of The Tech Blog

Bill Maile, California Technology Agency Director of Communications, has penned a touching and fitting tribute to Christie and her 39 year state government career.

Carlos will have his work cut out for him, taking over statewide technology direction for a governor whose strategic IT vision to this point has centered on confiscating employee cell phones and signing an Internet Tax bill which devastated 25,000 state business and their employees.

In addition, state IT consolidation efforts, the hallmark of previous State CIO Teri Takai before she left for the Obama Administration last year, are threatened from many quarters. While Christy’s stewardship was marked by a faithful continuation of the consolidation afforded by AB 2408, cracks in the tectonic plates of consolidation and centralization have been surfacing since Takai’s departure. From IT industry associations, and individual vendors to departmental CIO’s, reservations are being more and more openly expressed concerning everything from closing Tier 1 and 2 data centers to mandatory migration to one of the state’s two new state email systems.

One major state agency recently commissioned a surreptitious rate comparison study targeting OTech’s vaunted federated data center against the private sector hosted model, with striking financial results favoring of the outsourced solution.

The musings around Sacramento aren’t much better for the state’s dual (one critic labeled “bi-polar”) email solutions, the Microsoft cloud hosted California Email Services (CES) and OTech’s state operated system CA.mail. Somehow the critics still believe that the more email systems the state has the better…

And finally, there are the ongoing problems with several major and expensive state IT projects: the nearly $2 billion Court Case Management System fiasco; Department of Ed’s CAL-PADS; the Controller’s seemingly interminable payroll project; the scary $1.8 billion, 10 year implementation FI$CAL project; other agency ERP initiatives; huge eligibility system modernizations, and so on.

Carlos has accepted our invitation to come on TechLeader.TV, so we’ll have a chance to cover all these matters very soon.

In the meantime, we will be elaborating upon all these developments…stayed tuned.