Results tagged “Jim Albert” from FastGov: Where Government is Going

Microsoft's new Bing decision engine is now powering the search function on the Washington state portal, Access Washington.

In a statement released today, Jim Albert, Deputy Director of Operations at the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS), said "Adding Bing to Access Washington will improve the relevancy of search results on the portal, allowing users to find the information they are looking for faster and with greater accuracy." The statement also says the change to Bing comes "an no additional cost to Washington taxpayers."

The announcement comes the same week that Microsoft and Yahoo! unveiled plans to join forces and use Bing to take on search giant Google.  Indeed, Google and its search appliance enjoy high adoption even among state portals in the tricky business of getting search right.

For its part, Washington state was early to use a third party to create a better search experience.  It originally contracted with the parent company of ask.com to allow users to get answers to questions asked in everyday, natural language, as well as traditional keyword searching.  As a cousin to AskJeeves, the only state named for an individual named its search function AskGeorge in honor of its namesake president.

In an unrelated conversation last night, newly appointed state CIO and DIS director Tony Tortorice told me, "the governor is serious about government reform and we're going to get it done."  That apparently includes getting it done in big ways -- implementing enterprise shared services and building a new $300 million data center -- and in smaller ways, like going bing.

Last December, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire promised a state budget with something for everyone to hate.  Well, not everybody.  To be clear, there is a lot to hate in the painfully balanced budget, which made deep cuts to higher education and health to balance the budget in the face of a $9 billion deficit.  But a new state data center will rise from the budget ashes.

Interim state CIO Jim Albert says that the governor saw the data center and adjoining office complex as so central to her campaign for government reform that the administration held on tight to the new data center as budget negotiations came down to the wire last week.

The new data center would bring the state Department of Information Services (DIS) under one roof for the first time in the agency's history.  It would also provide a fully modern and green platform for the technology component of the administration's shared services strategy, a priority in the administration's reform agenda.

An earlier cost estimate for the new state data center was pegged at $242 million, which would buy 160,000 square feet of data center and another 160 square feet of office space for DIS.  The final deal includes another 80,000 square feet of office space, the occupants for which will be decided by the Office of Financial Management.

The secret sauce in getting a new data center through a nightmarish budget season is the financing structure.  It will be built as a lease back under an arrangement struck by the legislature last year.  Albert says that, with addition of more office space, they have not reached a new guaranteed maximum price with the firm that was selected for the building project.  Those details will be worked out before construction begins.

After a long and often emotional hearing on a separate bill about same sex benefits, a characteristically brusque committee chair Darlene Fairley (D 32nd District) told the people who had stayed to testify on Senate Bill 5256 that she only wanted to hear from three of them due to the lateness of the hour.

At issue, the proposed elimination of the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS).  Fairley summarized the sponsor's motivation for closing DIS as "gathering up money for his social services" although committee staff said the benefits or costs of such a move were either "indeterminate" or "over $360,000" depending on how you read the as yet incomplete fiscal notes.

As for choosing only three people to testify off a long list of those who had signed in as "opposed" to the bill, Fairley acerbically concluded, "I know why you're opposed ... because you go away."

With that as his introduction, Interim DIS Director Jim Albert, appointed just over a month ago, reminded the flagging committee members of how his agency provided a wide range of technology goods and services to some 600 public entities in the state that would have to find replacement providers -- possibly at a higher cost.  Albert said that one in five state residents receive services from or through DIS, whether that is a payroll or benefits check, electronic funds transfer or eligibility letters -- not to mention the 700,000 unique visitors who visited the state portal for information during the December storms.

With Albert's two minutes up, Department of Personnel CIO Steve Young itemized the DIS provided services on which his agency relied -- e-mail, security, secure file transfer and server hosting among them.

Washington Federation of Labor Lobbyist Alia Griffing was last up, saying simply that the Federation had 349 members at DIS and the reasons for the Federation's opposition were "self evident."

But by themselves, evidently not enough.

Washington Governor Chris Gregoire is elevating Jim Albert to Interim Director of the Department of Information Services (DIS) as of January 1, 2009.  Albert has been the deputy director of the agency for the last four years under Gary Robinson who is leaving at the end of the year.

According to the announcement released by DIS this morning, Albert will serve as Interim state CIO "while a search is conducted for a permanent replacement." 

Albert is a long-time hand in the state's public sector IT community.  His resume includes time as IT Director at the the Office of the Attorney General when Gregoire served in that post.