[A] group of three private-sector leaders is telling the state government to embrace information technology as a core part of operations and drastically improve the way it manages projects along the way.
The three-person Special IT Committee, which the Legislature passed a law to create during in the 2015 session, met from September to December to come up with recommendations on how the state could better manage IT projects in the wake of problems with Vermont Health Connect.
The committee issued a 20-page report Jan. 18 outlining the state’s strengths and weaknesses, and cautioned that its recommendations were “a starting point for action and further exploration, not the end.” The committee then presented its findings Friday to the Senate committees on Institutions and Government Operations.
According to the most recent information, the state currently has 132 projects worth $1.3 billion on a list that the Department of Information and Innovation keeps. It doesn’t include projects with five-year life cycle costs under $500,000. And the existence of the list doesn’t mean the department has a lot of direct control over those projects that are on it.
The most expensive item on the list is Vermont Health Connect. The two-year cost for implementation and maintenance of the state’s health insurance exchange is $302.3 million.
A new Medicaid records system could cost an estimated $317.3 million over five years. The estimated cost of a program Vermonters could use to sign up for benefits like food stamps and heating assistance is $174.3 million.
Mike Schirling, the chairman of the Special IT Committee and former Burlington police chief, said the state does not have an adequate strategic plan or year-after-year road map to get those 132 projects done. The Department of Information and Innovation does have a strategic plan, but he said it’s problematic because it doesn’t include lower-cost projects.
“We’re in this transition phase where technology is becoming a core component of government operations,” Schirling said. To that end, he recommends making the state’s chief information officer, who is currently Richard Boes, the commissioner of a Division of Information and Innovation, a Cabinet-level position.
Boes said in an interview that the committee has several good recommendations. He said the members kept bringing up “this issue of comprehensiveness,” where “at the smaller levels, and on these smaller projects, these things just aren’t being followed.”
Boes said the state also should seek to be more transparent about managing IT projects. “I think there can be some tuning of how we organize IT,” he said, “and I think transparency is the key here.”
The committee also recommends the state hire professional project managers for large projects; communicate better on the progress of projects so it can find out about weaknesses more quickly; and break up projects into small pieces instead of pursuing larger ones.
With regard to funding, the committee told the Legislature not to develop IT projects in order to chase federal funding. When the state does pay for IT projects, the committee recommends it develop a new type of funding source; lawmakers therefore shouldn’t choose between using one year of general fund dollars to fund IT projects or 20-year bonds that are often used for roads.
Tim Kenney, who works for MyWebGrocer and was a member of the committee, said the state also should focus on improving efficiency in its management protocols before looking to IT solutions. Once an agency makes its management processes more efficient, he said, it should use an IT system to build upon those improvements.
“If you start building your system to match the way you do things today, you’re just going to end up with a new version of the exact same process,” he said. “We don’t build a new Interstate 89 beside the old one.”
Sen. Chris Bray, D-Addison, told the committee he used to deal with IT and learned that “the root cause of the failures were not technical problems. They were a human problem.”
“It was really humans communicating clearly about how to create a project,” Bray said. “I’m tempted to think of how we can look at it from a human aspect, rather than worry about the particular technologies.”
Sen. Peg Flory, R-Rutland, said many lawmakers are technologically challenged. She thanked the Special IT Committee for bringing an outside perspective and said, “All of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, I get what they’re saying.’”
Here are some other weaknesses the committee identified, according to its report:
• No clear definition for information technology, causing confusion when state workers talk about IT.
• High turnover at the executive level, resulting in inconsistent project management.
• Lack of project management training for jobs that would be better handled by an external project manager.
• No data governance worker to make data available to state workers and members of the public.
• “Inconsistent, inefficient and time-consuming” procurement processes.
• Failure by state agencies to research how other states are solving problems before seeking bids on an IT project.
• Seeking to build a new IT system from scratch rather than seeking off-the-shelf software or subscribing to a similar software through an online cloud.
• A large and expensive backlog of IT projects resulting from infrequent replacement of legacy IT systems.
• Inconsistency in funding of projects, often through 20- to 30-year bonds, one-year general fund spending or unpredictable federal funding.
