Daylong Meeting Assesses Where Technology In Texas Is And Where It’s Headed

by Peter Partheymuller

 

Last week, the Texas Association of State Systems for Computing and Communications (TASSCC) held its annual “State of the State” conference in Austin. The daylong event assessed the state of play for information technology (IT) in government and higher education in Texas.

The conference brought together technology directors and officials from state agencies, universities and the private sector to discuss how the state of Texas uses IT and to plan strategically the direction of its future.

 

There were sessions on many of the issues driving the conversation not just in Texas but the entire country, including thesmart grid and big data. Technology directors for the Department of Information Resources (DIR), the Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS) and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) joined together to kick off the day with a discussion of the State Strategic Plan for Information Resource Management that was developed by DIR and released at the beginning of this month.

 

Colby Harrell (pictured), a consultant with Strategic Partnerships, Inc. (SPI), attended the conference as SPI’s representative and came away impressed with the panelists and speakers throughout the day. Of particular interest was Jerry Mechling’s presentation on “Technology and Business Trends for Digital Government.” Mechling is a vice president with an international research and advisory firm, a retired lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and spent years working in the city governments in Boston and New York.

Mechling stressed the need for well informed decision-making, says Harrell. “He talked about the need for decision-makers to have a fully developed plan before costs are incurred. He stressed the idea of looking back to move forward.” The emphasis was on a deliberate thought process in the planning stage before decisive action is taken.

 

He opened this deep dive into the future of how government uses technology with three high-level questions before speaking on a more granular level about the issues. Mechling asked:

 

The short answer to these questions was a qualified yes, if government officials use disciplined, fact-based reasoning in reviewing IT costs, in negotiating contracts prior to a project’s commencement and, most importantly, in decision-making processes.

 

To that last point, Mechling described a process that he calls the “New Digital Decision-Making.” This decision-making process is a sort of continuous loop: Action leads to Results leads to Feedback leads to the next Decision (which leads to more action being taken and on and on). In practice, 95 percent of the process is taken up with action and results. The results that come from the action are informed by the scale of the project’s goals and the specialization of those taking the action. Observing the results will provide feedback, which then informs the next decision that needs to be made.

 

Mechling uses the phrase “Slow Trigger, Fast Bullet” to describe the process. “He says, everyone should operate with a slow trigger and a fast bullet.” What is meant by that, Harrell says, is “actions should be well thought out and planned, but once decided upon they should move quickly and efficiently.”

 

The panel of energy and utilities executives that spoke on the smart grid and its applications in Texas focused on the electric grid. When asked about the future of a wireless grid, the speakers said that technology was too far off into the future (more than two decades) to spend too many resources planning for it now. They did stress, however, the importance of being a smart consumer. Texans who have a choice of electricity providers should take advantage of that by doing consumer research. Utilities are interested in making their customers smarter, too, because a smarter consumer “affects profits,” the experts said, according to Harrell. The more consumers think consciously about energy conservation, the more the utilities are going to be saving as those habits scale up and become the norm.

 

What was clear from the day’s discussions was that, as Mechling said, IT has moved from a “support only” aspect of government business to become a strategic asset. IT solutions — be they hardware or software, onsite or in the cloud — are driving the decision-making process rather than supporting the process after the fact.

 

This article originally published by Strategic Partnerships, Inc.