Governor Deval Patrick's Budget Recommendation - House 1 Fiscal Year 2014

Improving Government Performance


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Governor Patrick    FY 2014 Budget Recommendation:
    Issues in Brief

    Deval L. Patrick, Governor
    Timothy P. Murray, Lt. Governor

 

The Patrick-Murray Administration will continue to maximize the use of every taxpayer dollar and reduce red tape for Massachusetts businesses in FY 2014 through a variety of initiatives that change the way government does business.  Through innovative technological solutions and enhanced business models, each of the following initiatives strives to create the efficiencies and savings necessary to run a modern, customer-focused state government. 

Regulatory Review

In support of Massachusetts’ small businesses, the Administration is leading a comprehensive review of the Commonwealth’s regulatory processes to find duplicative or overly burdensome regulations that can be eliminated in order to make it easier for businesses to thrive. In March 2012, Governor Patrick announced the beginning of a thorough review process for rules and regulations, focusing on finding regulations that are duplicative, out-of-date or in need of update and creating the changes necessary to improve or eliminate those regulations. In 2012, 446 sets of regulations had been reviewed, leading to 286 opportunities for reform – which accounts for 64 percent of regulations reviewed and approximately 14 percent of total state regulations. Agencies are now in the third round of review.

In January, the Patrick-Murray Administration filed a set of licensing reforms to reduce burdens on the business community and increase efficiencies of our Division of Professional Licensure (DPL).  These recommendations include eliminating certain boards that are no longer necessary like the Radio and Television Technician Board, consolidating boards that regulate similar activities like the consolidation of the Electrology and Barbers Board into the Cosmetology Board, and adopting a set of best practices to apply to all of the licensing boards, such as eliminating the distribution of hard copy rosters of licensed individuals in lieu of online information, and removing high reinstatement fees that pose a barrier to re-entry of qualified individuals into licensed professions.

Leveraging Information Technology to Improve Services at Lower Costs

Public Records Retention and Electronic Discovery

The Commonwealth is statutorily required to satisfy public records requests within 10 days.  This presents a challenge as many public records – emails, word documents, and spreadsheets – are created and stored digitally without the production of paper copies.  There exists no central approach to storing and searching these documents across the 36,000 state employees currently using the Commonwealth’s MassMail email system.

Public Records Retention and Electronic Discovery
Current System
New e-Discovery Solution
Digital records are stored in a collection of decentralized locations including thumb drives, .pst files, shared network drives, CD-ROMS, and PC hard drives. ITD will implement a cloud-based e-Discovery tool to hold all state electronic files in a central, searchable location by July 2014.
The Commonwealth is unacceptably non-transparent in our attempts to respond to public records requests due to years of isolated electronic storage solutions. This cloud-based system will allow for more transparent government ready for a 21st Century Commonwealth.
Manual search for public records requires expensive outside vendors and often forces the stateinto avoidable and costly legal settlements. State cost savings will likely be larger than the cost of installing the new system.

 

The Information Technology Division (ITD) is collaborating with a vendor to implement cloud-based archive and e-Discovery tools to remedy the current data climate.  This system will:

  • Eliminate the ad hoc procurement of individual e-discovery solutions by individual agencies for specific litigation purposes, likely saving more than the cost of operating the new tool;
  • Allow for more transparent government through timely and complete access to public records;
  • Allow agencies to meet their legal obligations by investigating apparent incidents of crime, fraud, workplace misconduct or discrimination;
  • Streamline exploration techniques to eliminate manual searches, saving significant time;
  • Eliminate the necessity of employees to periodically archive emails to clear inbox space; and
  • Secure, organize and store records in a central repository, rather than through local email archives at each secretariat.

 

ITD will implement a full archiving, retention and e-discovery service for email and substantially complete data migration to these services by July 2014.

Electronic Procurement Solution

Title: Administrative Fee Revenue - Description: This is a bar chart showing revenue projections from FY14 to FY18.  Revenue will grow by over $5 million during this time.The contract for the Commonwealth’s current web-based procurement application, Comm-PASS, is set to expire in December of 2013.  As a primary point of contact between the state and the business community, ensuring that a well-designed replacement is secured is critical.  The new e-Procurement solution is expected to have increased functionality: a seamless purchase-to-pay process with live integration to the state’s accounting system; an electronic catalog of goods and services; reporting analytics that will examine what products are being purchased by state procurement officers and how often; and added opportunities for municipalities to utilize state contracts.  These features will lead to an increase in revenue for the Commonwealth by elevating the use of statewide contracts and thus collecting additional dollars from the 1% administrative fee applied to all statewide contract purchases, which will cover the operating cost increases for the new system.

 

Return on Investment Initiative

Via a joint effort, the Executive Office for Administration and Finance (EOAF) and the Information Technology Division (ITD) are currently engaged in a process to work with third parties outside of state government on an approach to measure, monitor, and realize the return on investment across the Commonwealth’s IT capital portfolio.  A rigorous methodology will be developed throughout the spring of 2013, and mechanisms to capture savings, cost avoidances, and other efficiencies from self-financing projects will be implemented in FY 2014.

Integrated Facilities Management

IFM Regional Structure

Title: Map of IFM Regions - Description: This map shows the five regions of the Integrated Facilities Management Initiative: Western, Central, Northeast, Southeast, and Metro Boston.As the largest property owner in New England, the Commonwealth owns over 80 million square feet of space and leases roughly 7 million square feet.  Buildings and property have often been the responsibility of host agencies whose area of expertise is not facilities management.  This isolated approach has led to inconsistencies in maintenance and investment of capital resources, ineffective space utilization, energy consumption and leasing practices, and the inability to gain cost and staffing efficiencies through a shared services model.  Integrated Facilities Management (IFM) will continue to resolve these issues by consolidating oversight of state facilities into a regional framework under the charge of the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM).  An average annual savings target of 6-10% has been identified based on industry standards and previous facility integrations. 

Major IFM milestones in FY 2014 will include the implementation of best practices and industry standards at the Taunton State Hospital and developing a right-sizing pilot program at the Charles F. Hurley Building in Boston in anticipation of wider implementation in FY 2015. 

Gainsharing in Government

Gainsharing arrangements are common in the private sector but remain scarce in government.  These arrangements are implemented by organizations to encourage innovation amongst its employees and subdivisions through an incentive of sharing and reinvesting the savings generated from successful reforms.  Success stories from state and local governments around the country are becoming increasingly frequent and indicate that these reforms are capable of self-financing and result in swift success.

On behalf of the Commonwealth, the EOAF is developing a gainsharing program that will reinvest a portion of monetary savings generated through Secretariat and agency level reforms back into that agency.  Authorizing legislation has been included in the Governor’s FY 2014 budget recommendation.  Interested agencies will be invited to present new current year budget savings proposals to their Secretariat CFO and to EOAF subsequent to Secretariat approval.  Proposed savings cannot be achieved simply through the natural updating of caseload or spending needs.  Over the course of the fiscal year, EOAF will continue to work closely with agencies to monitor the year-to-date savings of approved efforts and to update projections for total year-end savings. 


Prepared by the Executive Office for Administration and Finance ·
www.mass.gov/budget/governor
For more information email: contactanf@massmail.state.ma.us (617) 727-2040



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