IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

San Diego Seeks Consulting for Outsourcing City's Technology Services

To help plug deficits of around $200 million, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders pushes forward with plans outsourcing plans.

With debts soaring around $200 million, San Diego needs all the support it can get for less money. By outsourcing technology services provided the San Diego Data Processing Corp. (DPC), Mayor Jerry Sanders said the city could reduce its IT expenses by as much as 45 percent. On Thursday, June 10, Sanders said he wants to hire a consultant no later than August to complete the process of outsourcing these computer and phone services.

For three decades, DPC has provided the city with tech services and the quasi-city agency had a $43 million budget this year. In April, the City Council authorized a $1.23 million contract with a private company to replace DPC as the operator of the IT help desk for city employees. The one-year contract with Gardena, Calif.-based En Pointe Technologies begins in this summer, Sanders said, and will be reviewed for possible renewal. The city expects to save about $1 million annually. This move represents the first of four phases in his plan to allow outside technology companies to compete with DPC for contracts to provide various IT services.

"In the end," Sanders said in a release, "competition guarantees that regardless of who prevails in the bidding process, it is the public that ultimately wins because they can be assured that their tax dollars are being used wisely and efficiently."

These services include the operation and maintenance of the city's help desk; maintenance of the city's 9,200 PCs, 1,200 laptops and more than 10,000 telephones; and the operation of the city's Web and database servers.

Councilwoman Sherri Lightner cast the only vote against hiring En Pointe. According to the city, Lightner said she disapproves of outsourcing San Diego jobs to companies whose workers are in L.A. or India. Also, according to reports, city officials say that the cost of transition - estimated between $400,000 and $600,000 - could negate half of the first-year savings.

Similar outsourcing goals in San Diego County go back more than a decade. Back in 1999, Government Technology covered the impending outsourcing of San Diego County's IT functions. At the time, the county's IT infrastructure was outdated, with upgrades projected to cost $100 million. The county's 50-odd departments had individual IT staff. Systems didn't integrate.

An outsourcing partnership in 1999 brought about significant changes: 17 separate help desks were combined into one; five e-mail systems became one and 800 or more servers -- distributed across 300 sites -- were housed in a single data center.

"The first four years was designed to get a unified and predictable IT environment," San Diego County's CIO Michael Moore told the Center for Digital Government in a 2005 teleconference. "It changed my job from working on outages to working with department heads on how they want to transform their business."