Budget crisis: a new bill

House Bill 3178 (read it here) was submitted Monday and sent to committee. My boss has been asked to provide opinion on some amendments the committee is considering, so we know this bill is under active consideration. This is something of a big deal. And this is why...

(4) For the 2009-2011 biennium, the following limitations are established upon information technology procurement:
(a) State agencies are not permitted to purchase or implement new information technology projects without securing prior authorization from the office of financial management. The office of financial management may only approve information technology projects that contribute towards an enterprise strategy or meet a critical, localized need of the requesting agency.
(b) State agencies are not permitted to purchase servers, virtualization, data storage, or related software through their operational funds or through a separate information technology budget item without securing prior authorization from the office of financial management. The office of financial management shall grant approval only if the purchase is consistent with the state's overall migration strategy to the state data center and critical to the operation of the agency.
(c) State agencies are not permitted to upgrade existing software without securing prior approval from the office of financial management. In reviewing requests from state agencies to upgrade software, the office of financial management shall grant approval only if the agency can demonstrate that upgrade of the software is critical to the operation of the agency.

In case your eyes glazed over at that, here are the bullet points:

• No software upgrades without approval from Olympia (what about service-packs? Is that an 'upgrade'?).
• No server or storage purchases without approval from Olympia.
• The State will be greatly incentivising (stick-style) usage of the State's central storage services.

Holy kill-joy, Batman! If everything we here in Technical Services has to spend has to be approved by Office of Financial Management in Olympia, things'll get real slow. But there is more. Several new sections too big to quote here go into detail about other things:

• A centralized State PC Replacement process with, "at a minimum, a replacement cycle of at least five years," with a master contract containing no more than three providers of PCs with no more than four models on each contract. Which means no more than 12 PC models available at any given time.
• All mobile phone contracts are to be centralized in OFM. Presumably this includes things like Blackberry Enterprise Server, though that's not stated in the bill yet.
• The State shall develop a comprehensive data retention policy. That's OK, we probably need one anyway.
• Establish a centralized tiered storage service for use by State agencies, and all storage purchases have to be approved by OFM.
• Establish technology project standards for all K-12 school districts, mandated and overseen by OFM.
  

Apparently the plan is to centralize everything in order to leverage scale for cost savings. Or something. What is not yet clear is just how permissive OFM will be on those items that require approval from OFM.

We will be keeping a close eye on this bill, yes sir.