After months of waging a spirited, public war on this blog and a more private one in the Legislature against the Washington State “Wheeler” Data Center project–a $300 million decision that I believe with conviction taxpayers will regret for decades–I am today formally ending my vigorous opposition.

It is time to accept that construction is well underway, the cranes tower over the Olympia skyline, and my post-2009 legislative efforts to stop the data center piece of the massive building project will not see victory.

I accept the reality that my opposition was too little too late. I gave it everything I had and, as a freshman lawmaker new to state bond issues, learned a great deal personally, politically and professionally.

On a personal level, I do believe that had I been in office longer than just a few short months when it all hit, I could have helped bring about a different conclusion. My thanks to the many legislators and others who offered insight, counsel and perspective and to those who stood against what I believe is a $300 million mistake. My deep and sincere apologies to those who may have felt my public opposition was disrespectful to their role and opinion or was simply technically wrong. It was not my intention to criticize any person, only the troubling lack of transparency, openness and access to critical public information that led to this unfortunate decision.

I remain deeply distressed that neither the Information Services Board–the legislative-driven panel charged with strategic oversight of our state’s technology–nor any other public entity conducted an independent analysis of the state data center project. There was no independent, second opinion of the technical and financial plan to the one provided by the state agency that stood to benefit from the expansive project. This was a profoundly serious mistake that we must not repeat.

To give you context to my decision to stop fighting the state data center, recently the Legislature’s non partisan, professional staff using independent bond counsel concluded that the state’s hands are effectively constrained due to the unique type of ’63-20 bonds’ that have been used in this transaction. These bonds effectively hand control over the project to a non profit entity and the state has limited ability to make changes during the construction process. In a cruel twist of fate, after the project is complete–and the full building is constructed–the state has great flexibility to modify the use of the facility as desired for its own interests. Thus, we could construct the $300 million facility in full and then change the use of the building without ramifications. And we may ultimately do just that. But for now, the massive data center hole in the Olympia ground marches on. I hope this is a teachable moment that there is a dark side to 63-20 bonds and the financing tool should be used with great care.

My opposition to the state data center has never been about anything other than a deep seeded belief that the technology decision around the 110,000 square foot data center is a vestige of 1980s and 1990s thinking. It is, in my view, inconsistent with the view of a vast majority of other states and the Obama Administration that are aggressively decommissioning large scale, publicly-owned, proprietary, hardware-centric data centers.

Cloud computing–in highly energy and cost efficient private data centers where virtualization and other approaches are built in from the outset–may not win in the marketplace of ideas today but it will ultimately be the standard worldwide in both public and private sectors. What we are paying for as a value-added infrastructure today will ultimately be a commodity where price and quality features are easily measured. I do not believe the public sector can successfully compete on price and quality with the private sector in this area, nor should they. I want state employees adding value by overseeing the safety and wellness of foster youth, nursing homes, schools and other uses of public dollars–not watching lights blink on clunky old 1980s databases.

In my view, the Wheeler state data center is on the wrong side of the technology history of tomorrow. The project still does not have a true ‘total cost of ownership’ from which we can judge apples to apples cost models for the state’s data. We are, in effect, building a $300 million solution before we truly understand the scope and scale of the problem.

The consultant Unisys will provide a comprehensive analysis of how to effectively implement state agency data into the Wheeler data center, and until that review is complete it’s hard to know how best to make this implementation efficient. My intuition is that the state data center is dramatically overbuilt with excess capacity for the state’s needs. But that conclusion must wait until the report is available in the coming months.

We will have a modern, 110,000 square foot state data center in Olympia blocks from the State Capitol building.

Now our challenge is to embrace the opportunity of this investment. To make bold, courageous, forceful, non political and technically-independent decisions as a state to aggressively consolidate our technology approach and spending.

I have an excel spread sheet in front of me with $54,166,000 in new requests for technology in the state’s supplemental budget, on top of the $170,230,000 we funded in the 2009-2011 two year biennial budget. And that is only what staff can find. There are clearly more dollars hidden inside various agency budgets. The effort to bring transparency to this journey is underway.

The ‘systems issue’ is that through this state data center strategy, the State of Washington has chosen to go down the path of complete and total internal consolidation of infrastructure, systems, networks, applications and services.

If we’re going to do it in this fashion, then let’s do it right. The new battle is to ensure that we embrace an enterprise-wide strategy. That is not the same thing as consolidation, although that will occur in some fashion, but it does mean we design a strategic statewide strategy together.

The Department of Information Services is our state’s IT department despite the fact that we have decentralized CIOs in each agency with their own budgets, staff and service delivery models. This model has done well on some projects, poorly on others. Like all agencies DIS has challenges internally with employees and externally with customers. Now, the people of DIS–who I believe want to be successful and are committed to doing their very best–are charged with leading our technology strategy into the 21st Century. We must support their efforts on all fronts. Their success belongs to us all.

The old model of widely divergent strategies, vendors, standards and systems is inconsistent with our new strategy of a strong, coordinated IT strategy. Agencies can no longer go it alone.

We need fundamental structural and systems reform of how we spend our $1.2 billion technology dollars a year in Washington. We need transparency and openness and courageous honesty–and vigorous public debate instead of private deals–about the best technology strategy going forward. We need a new look and a new outlook to how we embrace technology as a tool to serve citizens, not as an end itself.

A vigorous dialogue and debate is essential.

I did not run for the state Legislature to work on IT issues. But I cannot sit idly by as we spend billions without proper oversight or accountability while we eliminate modest scholarship programs for foster youth.

Technology is the largest category in the state budget that has yet to experience ruthlessly honest and independent oversight and analysis. It is time for radical systems change to unleash the potential that technology holds for the people of our state.

I am, of course, but one voice and many really great people in Olympia are working to profoundly transform our approach to technology in state government.

Join us in this new chapter. If you ideas, suggestions, concerns or insight, or if you believe I am on the wrong path, please share it with me publicly or privately.

None of us want technology to be a department down the hall.

The question today is not bigger government or smaller government but better government.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.