Meeting with the CIO

Today John Culbert, the vice President of DPPA, and I met with the CIO, David Villanueva, to discuss the IT Consolidation and the Budget for next fiscal year. The Consolidation RFD is due today, March 23rd, 2009, at 3 pm. David says that his team will decide who gets the award within 3 weeks and then whoever is accepted will have 120 days to complete the recommendations for Consolidation of IT.

The Budget for the next fiscal year is 168.5 million dollars short fall over this year’s budget. We were real lucky that David Villanueva was able to save the one IT employee that was cut this year. But starting in the next fiscal year we have to come up with a lot of money. Unfortunately, the contractors will probably go, but that may not be enough. Be prepared for a bumpy year ahead.

Meeting of the Consolidation of Information Technology Team

Today I was invited to go to the meeting with the Consolidation of Information Technology Team. In this meeting David Villanueva, the Chief Information Officer, introduced all the team members; Rob Schultz from DHA, Ray Reis from DHHS, Jeff Leveroni from MSA; Rami Zakaria, Debra Nadolna, Chuck Parker, Jim Reiner and Alan Douma from OCIT, Cynthia Silver from ISA and Craig Rader from Purchasing. Each member got up and gave what their tasks were.

The Team has already done considerable thinking on what they want to see in the new structure. What they came up with were four groupings, Infrastructure, Application, Service Desk and Office of the CIO. They are hiring a consultant; that has done similar consolidations; to study what the County has now and recommend the new IT structure. They are doing this so they can get it done right the first time and not waste a lot of time redoing steps.

The CIO and all the members of the Consolidation of Information Technology Team talked of a new Information Technology Structure; not OCIT; that everybody would be moved into. They are not doing a critic of the jobs that all of you are doing, simply redoing the structure of your managers and where you might sit. I felt real good that they are doing a necessary job, despite what the Budget says.

They are looking on having this new structure figured out by the first of the fiscal year.