The city confuses the media on IT

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T.C. Broadnax and Kirk Watson could not have asked for better press for ONE-ATS, the IT centralization initiative, than they've gotten so far from local media. Consider this in yesterday's Statesman:

Five Austin City Council members are proposing a resolution that would halt a plan to consolidate more than 1,000 IT workers – a cost-cutting effort officials say could save up to $142 million a year – just weeks before it was set to begin.

The funny thing is that this doesn't appear to be a claim the city is making. And yet I doubt anybody from the city manager's office is going to ask for a correction. The confusion is useful.

Check out this recent presentation to City Council by city budget staff:

As you can see, they're projecting that the staffing consolidation plan (ONE-ATS) will save $2.9 million a year for the general fund.

In the same presentation, they suggest the savings will grow in the coming years, but certainly not to the astronomical numbers invoked in the press. They project $27.1 million in savings over the subsequent four fiscal years — or $6.8 million per year.

Now, that's just the general fund. Perhaps there are major savings to be found at Austin Energy, Austin Water, the airport and other enterprise departments that aren't supported by taxpayers, but those are also the agencies with the most sensitive functions that you definitely don't want to screw up.

The report by consulting firm Gartner noted that AE, AW and the airport were inconveniently the largest and most important departments AND the ones most opposed to forfeiting control of their IT operations.

While savings for local utilities are great, it's not really relevant to addressing the city's budget challenges, although I suppose you could argue that savings for the utilities would allow them to make bigger transfers to the general fund.

So where did the Statesman get the "up to $142 million" figure? A separate report — by tech consultant Parsolvo — said the city could save $49M-$142M by retiring superfluous IT contracts and applications ("application rationalization").

As far as I can tell, city staff hasn't actually projected a savings from consolidating the IT workforce.

At an April 21 work session, however, Chief Financial Officer Ed Van Eenoo said that staff had begun to use "ONE-ATS" to refer "more broadly to all of the IT optimization efforts around organizational design, application rationalization, contract negotiations."

So it's no surprise that the result has been a lot of confusion about where the savings will come from.

The bottom line: there probably is money to be saved by overhauling the city's tech systems. And if the city manager himself won't say it, I will: centralizing IT staff in one department may very well lead to savings through reduced headcount.

But the savings are likely not nearly as great as was initially suggested and there are risks involved.

Unfortunatelty, I think the impression people have gotten from the press coverage is that city staff has identified a MASSIVE piece of low-hanging fruit and the only thing standing in the way is a self-interested union trying to protect archaic systems and redundant jobs.

Do better, Austin media.

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