Illinois has doesn't have a centralized information technology infrastructure. It's a patchwork of old systems.
Gov. Bruce Rauner announced the creation of a new state agency to deal with information technology.The new agency, the Department of Innovation and Technology, aims to centralize the state's data management.
Hardik Bhatt is the state's top IT manager and will head the new department.He said the state's IT system is inefficient and redundant.
"We have thousands of applications," he said. "For example, we have 420 different systems that manage our finance, HR, grants, procurement, all the basic business needs."
Bhatt said that also means cyber-security is scattershot, which leads to unnecessary risk.A 2011 audit found that the state had hundreds of accounting systems and more than half of those don't link together, so state employees to have to manually input data from one system to another.
Rauner said merging all of these systems under a centralized agency will save the state money and increase productivity.
"This is purely changing the reporting relationships, the management structure so we're communicating, we're coordinating, and decisions are not being made in a one-off basis, agency by agency," he said.
But Rauner didn't detail how much it'll save and he won't direct any additional money to pay for technology upgrades.
