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Ohio expects ‘big dividends’ as it aggregates its networks

Ohio has been consolidating its IT infrastructure over the last few years in its state data center, state CIO Stu Davis said.

“If you look at 2011, our IT operational spend and infrastructure spend was about 80 percent of the IT budget because it was all in the 26 different agencies,”  Davis said in a StateScoop TV interview at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ midyear conference in April in Baltimore. Now, that number has dropped to 50 percent.

Davis hopes to move the state to a 70-30 split — spending 30 percent on IT operations and infrastructure maintenance, and 70 percent on “the things that matter to the citizen,” like services and apps for residents.

“We’re still working through the network, I think we’ll see big dividends as we move through our effort to aggregate the networks,” Davis said. “The things we’ve talked about for probably the last 20 years have been done in literally about 30 months.”

He also said recently universities, counties and cities, have taken an interest in using the state data center as a way to save money and become more efficient.

“In 2013, we were managing about 675 environments, and right now we’re managing 5,500 environments,” Davis said.

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