A new agency is not necessary, nor is it necessary to have centralized IT. Nor is it even necessary to have a single person in a permanent position to enforce standardization. Each of those things may or may not help. But the Federal Govt achieved something similar without doing any of those things. Oregon can learn a lesson from the Federal Govt. (Disclaimer - please do not make inferences about my personal political affiliations from this post - I am attempting to be objective.) The Clinton/Gore administration was elected in large part on the platform of reducing government waste. Gore became a "Tsar" in this respect. Even more than the State of Oregon, the Federal Governemnt is a huge sprawling beurocracy comprising hundreds of agencies, each with different technologies, different practices and standards. Gore set about to slay the biggest dragon first - the Department of Defense, making a prominent example for the rest of the federal administration. He succeeded. In the early-1990's Gore met with the Secretary of Defense (proabably several times). The result was that the Sec agreed to a complete purge of DOD, getting rid of ALL the MIL-STD's, and replacing them with cheaper commercial equivalents. This of course was immensely unpopular in the various armed services, and different procurement offices. But Gore and the Sec stuck to their guns and forced it through. Exceptions were (and are) granted in cases where no equivalent commercial standard exists. In many cases DOD actually went to the private sector (mostly ANSI and ISO) and worked with them to convert the government military standard to a commercial equivalent which could be used by industry as a whole, and be administered via ANSI (a not for profit) instead of via the DOD. There is little doubt that this is saving a ton of money in the long term, although it required quite a bit of up front investment and banging folks heads together in the short term. The cultural sea change was painful, but actually happened remarkably quickly. In the space of about 2 years it was a done deal. Nothing was centralized, no new beurocracies were created. There was simply an agency wide dictate coming from the White House, and persistence from a "Tsar" (Gore) to make sure and follow through. Once the biggest dragon was mortally wounded, all the other agencies saw the writing on the wall and did not kick up much fuss when it came their turn to standardize. As a part of this, ISO-9000 compliance now is a requirement for the entire Federal Government. Something similar could be done in Oregon, if the top executive decides to make it happen.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Sep 24 2002 - 14:26:13 PDT