Governments have long been criticized for not being efficient. We get it, and know that bureaucracy is a necessary evil in many governments. While many in the general public might view extensive layers of approvals as a burden to getting things done, they also have their place, and can protect citizens from wasteful spending and ensure that their tax dollars are used in an efficient manner.
In Texas, the government isn’t necessarily sidestepping bureaucracy, but is finding a way to create efficiencies with shared services contracts. What Texas is doing is taking an approved government services vendor, Capgemini, and leveraging their services across a variety of needs for the state.
Capgemini will manage work in Texas’ data center, security services, their online digital service platform Texas.gov, and more. Using these services across multiple departments will allow the state to realize significant cost savings and manage its vendors more easily, while still providing the services it wishes to provide for citizens.
Other states, such as Virginia, have looked to Texas as a model for these types of shared services contracts, and have brought what might have been multiple bid awards that would occur in separate parts of the government into one place.
Implementing contracts like these certainly are not a panacea. Functional requirements across different departments must always be taken into account to achieve the best result, but it can often be easier to achieve this working with a single firm than trying to manage the requirements and abilities of a variety of tech companies.
Vendor consolidation is never something to be taken likely, as it plays a direct role in concentrating risk for a government. Outside of the obvious benefit of cost reduction that can occur with using fewer vendors, though, there is also a benefit to having multiple state-run projects work within the same architecture, making it easier to deal with issues that may crop up, customer inquiries, and to generally provide a more seamless experience to constituents using multiple state services.
Extract isn’t here to weigh in on what your specific agency should do with its contracts in terms of consolidation or risk dispersement, but we do believe that no matter what, the privacy and security of your citizens is of the utmost importance. This is why when your state or county provides records online, we’re sure to automatically redact sensitive pieces of information so your government can act with both transparency, but also a protection of its citizens.
If you’d like to learn more about how we protect sensitive information in public documents (or even documents you’d like to make public), please reach out today and we’d be happy to fill you in.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CHRIS MACK
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor's degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.