West Virginia lawmakers are in town for their monthly interim session. On Tuesday, they held a public hearing on a proposal to outsource work from the state’s Office of Technology.
Members of the union and employees of the West Virginia Office of Technology met in the House Chamber. They were there to speak their mind to legislators about a proposal by Chief Technology Officer Kyle Schafer to outsource about 600 computer programming jobs.
Schafer addressed lawmakers first. He says having technology workers spread throughout several state agencies costs the state about $35 million a year. Schafer says he has three options: doing nothing, addressing the situation internally, or looking to an external company to provide support.
“To be able to assess all those options, we have to have the information,” Schafer said. “We have the information about our internal systems, we don’t have the information about what third party providers can offer. So my proposal is to get an expression of interest out on the street, have people, have vendors respond to our request, and then we’ll have all the information where we can sit down and very succinctly evaluate option one, option two and option three.”
The employees of the Office of Technology who spoke at the hearing worry that it’s already a done deal, pointing to communications Schafer has already had with IBM.
Craig Cotsmire works under the Office of Technology, and he blamed current problems in the department on Schafer.
“I want to state that the CTO I believe has failed his duties by not producing the biannual reports he was mandated to do, for stopping all IT training since 2006, and then blaming the state IT staff for not being up to speed on the new technologies and skill sets that are needed to go into the future,” Cotsmire said. “And using that as an excuse to outsource the IT divisions in the state of West Virginia.”
Cotsmire also said that he feared retaliation for speaking up in the public hearing.
West Virginia Public Workers Union Local 170 has been fighting the outsourcing, and points to dismal results for similar situations in Texas, Indiana and Virginia. The union has sued the Office of Technology and Schafer, trying to block the outsourcing.
Bob Bryant works for the West Virginia Division of Labor. He says his agency is dependent on Office of Technology workers, and he fears privacy breaches under outsourcing and workers who aren’t familiar with all the nuances of West Virginia law.
“One of the biggest problems with outsourcing is you lose the total control of your systems, the knowledgeable personnel that managed those systems and know what is needed to support your business processes, infrastructure and software. Once it is gone, it is very hard to get back,” Bryant said.
Legislators listened to the ten speakers, and then asked Schafer a few questions. Delegate Randy Swartzmiller (D-Hancock) made a motion.
“Basically what I’m just asking for is that we bring in somebody from the outside to conduct an independent audit on the Office of Technology of exactly what they’re proposing, what they’re trying to accomplish and to try to look at what the fallout, if any, is going to be at the end of the day,” he said. “We want to make sure that the taxpayers are getting the biggest bang for their buck, and at the same time, we want to make sure that we know what’s going to happen with the employees that are down there working now and are doing a tremendous job.”
Swartzmiller’s motion passed, so the Committees on Economic Development and Technology will request funding from the Committee on Government and Finance to pay for an independent audit.
Source:http://www.wvpubcast.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=16675
