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San Diego County Shift to New Master Contract Continues Apace

San Diego County continues to roll its technology stacks from its previous master agreement contract to the new one, finalized in November. The first stack moved over was the service desk. More than 450 business applications will be moved over to a new data center in Tulsa, Okla.

The county of San Diego continues to roll its technology stacks from its previous master agreement contract to the new one, finalized in November with DXC.

The transition is anticipated to take 18 months, according to Mikel Haas, CIO of San Diego County. Each stack — a combination of software and programming used to create an app for Web or mobile — slides from one contract to another until the old contract no longer contains any services.

“We are fully outsourced and have been since 1999. Our spend with our single prime outsourcer is approximately $140 million a year,” Haas told Techwire.

The first stack moved over was the service desk. More than 450 business applications will be moved over to a new data center in Tulsa, Okla.

“We only have one rule in transition; that’s 'Don’t break anything. Don’t let a schedule force you to break anything,'” Haas said.

While all services are handled by one vendor, the contract does allow for subcontractors.

Most procurement and service needs are handled through the departments, which can request specific things from the contract servicer.

“We buy services. We don’t own a data center, we don’t own the networks, we don’t even own the laptops that people have. Everything is a resource unit. Everything gets refreshed on very specific refresh cycles,” Haas said.

Other takeaways from the contract:

  • Departments have flexibility as long as they stay within the contract architecture
  • The contract is seven to 12 years long, with the last five pre-priced
  • Cloud integration makes the system challenging
  • It reduces the county IT office to eight people
  • Integrating innovation is also challenging, but $1 million has been set aside for it
Kayla Nick-Kearney was a staff writer for Techwire from March 2017 through January 2019.