Initiatives & Planning

Enterprise Business Planning

For the first time, DTS and the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget (GOPB) will facilitate a business planning session as part of the 2006 Executive Cabinet Budget retreat in August 2006 addressing areas in which the state's IT services can better enable business to meet its needs. This will be a follow-up to the initial retreat held at the March 2006 Cabinet Meeting in which "communities of interest" were defined representing common interest areas in state government. The initiative will explore potential enterprise opportunities to improve services to citizens and reduce costs. DTS' Business Consulting function will support this effort by providing agencies with needed information to move forward on enterprise IT initiatives. This next phase includes identifying a lead from each of the "communities of interest" as they were defined at the initial meeting. Those communities and their respective state agencies are currently identified as:

1. Government Operations
   Administrative Services
   Human Resource Management
   Technology Services
   Governor's Office of Economic Development
2. Social Services
   Community and Culture
   Health
   Human Services
   Workforce Services
3. Public Services
   Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice
   Corrections
   Public Safety
   Transportation
   National Guard
4. Regulatory Services
   Agriculture & Food
   Alcoholic Beverage Control
   Commerce
   Environmental Quality
   Financial Institutions
   Insurance
   Natural Resources
   Labor Commission
   Public Service Commission
   Tax Commission

Employee Conversion

An important part of the DTS transition was the ability to have control over all IT resources to be able to quickly adapt to shifting business needs. A major step in that transition is the conversion of over 91% of DTS employees from merit career service status to at-will status. The objective was not to have the ability to fire and hire at will, rather, it provides the needed flexibility and opportunity to make DTS an agile, high-performing organization with the ability to re-deploy resources as needed. DTS employees have exhibited a high level of trust in DTS' Executive Management by voluntarily giving up their merit status.

Establishment of Internal Service Funding

An Internal Service fund means that all services provided by DTS to the Agencies are to be provided at cost. The establishment of DTS' service rates is a significant step to identify actual costs and will be one of the mechanisms used to identify IT inefficiencies throughout the state. Additionally, it provides a true cost-accounting of DTS services to the agencies so that they can make more informed IT-related decisions.

These rates prevent an IT service from subsidizing the cost of another, helping DTS provide a more equitable and balanced rate structure for services utilized by each agency. It also helps to identify mission-critical areas, their owners, and if there's a requirement to be addressed before the Legislature for additional funding. DTS rates include the following criteria in order to be considered efficient:

1. The service is provided at cost.
2. The DTS rate of the service is comparable with market rates.
3. The service must be provided at a level and rate that an agency is willing to purchase.

This process provides for accountability on the part of DTS and accurate expectations for the agencies, better enabling DTS to accurately and efficiently meet the business' needs. Agencies also benefit as they will be better enabled going forward to accurately identify their IT budget needs each fiscal year.

By establishing cost-based rates in DTS, the bar is set higher than even the private sector. The old saying "good enough for government" isn't good enough anymore. DTS is on the forefront of a unique and exciting new era of IT accountability in state government.

Conceptual Design of DTS

A significant step in becoming a "World-Class" IT organization is the development of an "Organizational Design" document to guide us in how we make decisions, and what our future organization will look like. This document outlines our Mission, Vision, and Values which define how we will measure our actions, it defines our operational themes, which are the boundaries through which we will operate, and defines the attributes of what world-class entails for IT in the State of Utah.

Optimization

The DTS Transition is not a consolidation, it is an optimization.

DTS is implementing an optimization process that seeks efficiencies, adjust how it operates and reports, and focuses on customers. Three initial areas have been identified as areas to be explored for optimization in DTS to reduce costs and improve services to the State of Utah. They are:

Communications

This plan proposes to combine all DTS enterprise communications services into a single collaborative organization under the DTS Infrastructure function. DTS's network services currently reside in various functional groups and operate under various procedures without always clear standards. These proposed changes are expected to improve service delivery as presently there are many interdependent processes relating to the communications infrastructure functions that operate under different management. Because of the disparity customer service, resource utilization, and service delivery has potential improvement opportunities. Consolidating the DTS communications services will bring together multi-disciplinary teams across the organization to improve communications services. This end-to-end control will enable DTS to more accurately measure the costs (and rates) for communications services across the enterprise.

Client Computing

By examining how DTS can better improve its technical support services to the outlying areas of the State, we can reduce the amount of transportation time, resource deployment, and support costs of desktops and servers. By refining client computing services, support technicians will be better-enabled to support personnel for other DTS functions such as enhancing support coverage, connectivity, and enterprise system support.

Email and Messaging Services

Now that DTS is able to administer functions from an enterprise level, a review of the State's email and messaging services could provide potential opportunities to optimize those services. Although there was an analysis done some years ago, the new DTS organization provides us with new opportunities that did not have existed previously.

These first initiatives are not only an opportunity to improve specific functional areas but will also help better define an adaptable process that is easily replicated for future optimization initiatives. As always, however, we must ensure that the analyses of these initiatives will go forward without any disruption to current DTS services. We plan provide continued updates in these areas as the initiatives move forward.