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Massachusetts IT Consolidation Under Way

"The current approach to managing IT is too complex, too difficult to maintain and impossible to keep secure."

The Massachusetts Department of Administration released a video yesterday explaining the commonwealth's IT consolidation plan. In the video, CIO Anne Margulies (pictured) says that IT consolidation is important because the commonwealth has a "massive patchwork of technology" that includes 183 data centers, 100 phone systems, 24 e-mail systems, and 15 data networks. As a result, said Margulies, staff spend too much time fixing what's broken, maintaining hundreds of internal firewalls and developing interfaces just so systems can talk to each other.

"The current approach to managing IT is too complex, too difficult to maintain and impossible to keep secure," said Margulies. The new model, she explained, is focused on more efficiency, more effectiveness, and more security.

The consolidation effort began with Governor Patrick's Executive Order 510 and is targeted to complete by Dec. 2010.

Wayne E. Hanson served as a writer and editor with e.Republic from 1989 to 2013, having worked for several business units including Government Technology magazine, the Center for Digital Government, Governing, and Digital Communities. Hanson was a juror from 1999 to 2004 with the Stockholm Challenge and Global Junior Challenge competitions in information technology and education.