Dear California, Start with these

The CTO of the State of California, responding to being called out by Tech Crunch and the San Francisco Chronicle for setting aside $50 million to maintain an antiquated 70′s-era legacy system just to process unemployment checks, has challenged the public to “walk the talk” and propose better ways his state can conduct its IT operations.

Even though I don’t live in California, I can’t resist such a challenge.

Here are my ideas (which I’ll be cross-posting to the official crowdsourcing site):

• You currently utilize 100 different email systems for only 180,000 email accounts. Convert all of them to Gmail. Publicly ask Google, a corporate resident of California, to assist you with this.
• You currently operate 9,494 servers. To get an idea how excessive this is, consider that Facebook (which has orders of magnitude higher storage and processing demands than any government) currently operates about the same number of servers. Make your 130 department-level CIOs each produce a public online report that: (1) justifies each server; and (2) for each justified server, explain why it cannot be virtualized, put on a SAN or moved into a cloud for a fraction of the cost. I suspect you will find thousands of unnecessary servers.
• Implement a “Crowdsource Waiting Period” for new IT projects. The Statewide IT Capital Plan proposes the development of at least 25 web-based applications. Before awarding any of these projects to the usual gigantic IT vendors for the usual gigantic cost, require the Departments requesting these systems to post the functional requirements and a sample data set online and allow a 6-month period where any developer can submit a no-obligation prototype at their own cost. You will find that many of the systems you propose building from scratch can be developed at a fraction of the cost by building on top of existing platforms with existing tools. Some of these projects will still go to the giant IT vendors, but those are the ones which should.
• Any state government website that is merely informational or does not require transaction processing should be converted into a hosted blog (which can be operated for free at WordPress.com or Blogger for example) or to a Social Network group (which can be operated for free at Facebook or LinkedIn for example). Then you can get rid of some of your 400 web servers.

That should get you started.