What Keeps You Up At Night?

We in Texas state government have been asked by the legislature to reduce our general revenue funding by 10 percent in our upcoming appropriations request. So, our challenge is to make that cut without sacrificing the quality of the services that we provide. We aim to achieve this through efficiencies in our processing, economies of scale, information technology commodity procurement aggregation and IT consolidation.

There are two types of accountability issues that keep me up nights, the first being service levels to our customers. Currently, our department is consolidating a number of managed services — from data-center services and disaster-recovery services through messaging services — across the state. Ensuring that our service levels are commensurate with the demands of our customers is something that we take very seriously.

The second accountability issue is pricing. The state’s IT commodity supply chain, from customer relationships and support through IT contracting, is within my purview.

We have more than 350 contracts for hardware, software and technology services that we make available to all of our customers — from state and local government agencies to educational institutions. We must offer products and services to our customers that are below the prices on the open market. This continually challenges us to ensure that we’ve got the best price points in the state, if not the country, for our public-sector clients.