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California’s CIO Outlines Projects, Progress

"We have turned the corner and are making rapid progress on quite a few fronts," began California State CIO Clark Kelso yesterday, as he keynoted the Best of California Conference in Sacramento. Kelso provided a long list of projects — from laptop encryption to service-oriented architecture, new strategic sourcing initiatives and a revamp of the state’s Web portal — that are under way or are coming up. His edited remarks follow.

We don’t have a giant IT budget anywhere, we don’t have a giant IT governance structure in place, nevertheless we are moving forward and have had a lot of good IT procurement this year. Just before the State of the State, we had a very nice joint licensing of a Computer Associates product with Franchise Tax Board, and Department of Technology Services, that was a better than a best-in-class contract according to our third-party reviewer. We now have a shared cooperative license with Microsoft — it’s an extraordinarily good enterprise-volume purchase, that all departments have access to, based on a contract worked out for Riverside County. It’s an extraordinarily good opportunity for the state, and a sign that we really are back on track with IT procurement.

The way this contract works, you have to buy a certain number of seats to get the benefits — something like 20-25, and you have to buy 100 more to get a few other benefits. But you can join departments to aggregate their purchases to get up to those levels. So I’m going to be sponsoring a meeting of all departments who are interested in participating in a single joint-aggregate purchase. We’ll do that over at the Department of General Services, I suspect, and see if we can’t help out the smaller departments that really can benefit from that contract.

By Wayne Hanson

Full Story: http://www.govtech.net/news/news.php?id=97631

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