Earlier this month, Texas issued a request for proposals, which are due by the end of May. The state plans to select a vendor for the project by year's end, said Leslie Mueller, assistant director for customer services at the Texas Department of Information Resources in Austin.
The state's IT oversight agency believes that Texas "can get tremendous value" from such a project by eliminating duplications in its infrastructure, said Mueller. Analysis determined that annual data-center operating costs in Texas total about US$107 million.
The state legislature mandated the consolidation in a measure approved last summer. The agency hasn't yet decided how many data centers will remain after the consolidation is completed.
Consolidation Trend
Texas is hardly alone among state governments in planning a consolidation project, but its initiative is one of the largest.
For example, a survey of 34 states, including Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey, by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), shows a solid push at the state level toward data-center consolidation.
The survey also found that many states are considering moving to shared-services delivery in an effort to cut costs. Several states are looking to companies to provide data-center operations, communications systems, payment systems and disaster recovery as services, the NASCIO survey found.
According to the NASCIO report, about 77 percent of the state officials surveyed said that they had either consolidated data centers or have projects in progress. In addition, nearly 85 percent of respondents reported shared data-center services projects under way.
The consolidation efforts and the use of and demand for shared services "were higher than I expected them to be," said John Gillispie, who is chief operating officer at the Iowa Department of Administrative Services' Information Technology Enterprise. He is also co-chair of the NASCIO committee that conducted the survey and reported some of the findings. "I think everybody is seeking efficiency," Gillispie said.
There are several factors driving the consolidation and shared-services efforts by the states, including aging IT workforces, legacy systems and the advent of technologies that many staffs aren't prepared for, said John Lovelock, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
The Stamford, Conn.-based research firm predicts that by 2010, at least half of all state governments will investigate outsourcing initiatives to support major operations.
Lovelock called the use of shared services "an enabling step" that moves a state closer to outsourcing, because it's "taking responsibility a half a step away" from the state agency that uses the service.
The data-center consolidation in Texas, for instance, is seen as a step toward improving interoperability between various agencies, setting the stage for the use of shared services.