Raleigh, N.C. -- Governor Bev Perdue is exploring options to privatize the state's information technology to cuts costs.
The Governor's senior advisor Al Delia said the savings estimates run anywhere from $20 million to $200 million.
"IT services is not a core service of state government," said Delia. "It's not protecting the public from crime, not providing disaster assistance. It is in support of those kinds of services."
TPI out of Houston is evaluating the state's hardware; 3 data centers along with thousands of servers and laptops.
Recommendations on outsourcing or how to proceed with a public-private partnership should be released by April.
Across the executive branch, Delia estimates there are 16-hundred IT workers.
Lynn McGarrah is one of the IT workers concerned about wholesaling IT services to an outside vendor.
"IT is invisible when it's working well. IT becomes very, ery visible when its not working," said McGarrah.
She points to pitfalls in other states.
Virginia state agencies suffered an outage where workers had to manually enter data, in some cases for nearly one week.
"Texas didn't have back-ups in the system and they lost three years of tax data, that's pretty bad," said McGarrah.
Indiana is in the middle of a lawsuit with its vendor concerning the IT contract with the state's Family and Social Services.
She wants lawmakers to learn from problems in other states.
Delia was aware of those mistakes and pointed to Michigan and Utah as good examples of state's outsourcing IT work.
