Mark Raymond
March 24, 2021
CT to centralize hundreds of IT workers
HBJ Photo | Steve Laschever
State Chief Operating Officer Josh Geballe
By Matt Pilon
In an effort to modernize and more effectively wield the state’s information technology resources, Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration plans to consolidate nearly 500 IT personnel into a single agency over the coming year.
Those approximately 490 state workers, who are currently based within numerous executive branch agencies, will join the approximately 130 other IT workers already employed by the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), which will oversee the entire group once the move is complete.
At DAS they will report to Mark Raymond, the state’s chief information officer, who said in a recent interview that the reorganization is happening ahead of an expected retirement wave; 30% to 40% of the state’s total IT workforce will be eligible for retirement over the next year.
As workers retire, Raymond’s boss -- DAS Commissioner Josh Geballe -- wants to hire personnel with skills in increasingly important newer IT disciplines such as machine learning and data analytics. Raymond said having a centralized structure in place will make it easier to onboard that talent.
“If an agency loses their one Microsoft Access person, instead of having to hire someone, we can support that need with a pool of people who have that skill,” Raymond said. “We’ll have knowledge transfer and backup, and then we hire someone with expertise in emerging areas.”
Centralized and specialized expertise will be important in the coming years as the state pushes more of its interactions and transactions with the public onto the web, Raymond said.
It will also mean more oversight of agency IT budgets and investments, and the stakes are high, as the state’s IT spending last year totaled approximately $240 million. The spend averages about 1% of state expenditures in a given year, which Raymond said is common in state governments.
The reorganization will give DAS more authority over individual agency IT budgets. There may be some savings produced from increased bulk purchasing of software licenses and services, but Raymond said cutting costs isn’t the point of the move.
“This is not a cost-savings exercise,” he said. ”This is an effort to use our resources more flexibly and efficiently.”
He said having all IT personnel within one agency will also make it easier for the state to stay on top of an accelerating stream of software patches and new operating systems, as well as cybersecurity defenses.
“The velocity of change is now such that we need a different approach than we've had historically,” he said.
Transferring IT employees to DAS will take place over the next year, governed by a series of pending memorandums of understanding DAS will sign with other agencies.
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments