Despite employing 225 full-time workers, the District’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer has laid out more than $4 million so far this fiscal year outsourcing support for its wireless and broadband systems.
The office, known by its acronym OCTO, “has some of the work force required to perform long-term IT maintenance and services,” said Christina Fleps, the agency’s general counsel. But it generally looks to short-term outside help “to build infrastructure, programs and applications,” what Fleps called a “best practice.”
The office has a troubled past. In multiple reports released in 2005, the D.C. Inspector General found damning evidence that OCTO was awarding contracts without competition, failing to monitor its contractors, modifying deals without reopening them for bid and paying “unusually high labor rates” to sole-source contractors.
The agency today is under new management. But the need to outsource significant amount of technical support business continues because the city has never developed enough of its own technicians officials said.
For example: Laurie Collins of LC Systems, a nine-year D.C. contractor and Mayor Adrian Fenty’s campaign and transition Web site developer, is the District’s $130,000 “senior messaging technologist.”
Collins is tasked with the enormous responsibility of a multiyear effort to essentially redesign the District’s entire e-mail system, she said.
“There are far more peoplein the private sector with the certification and the technology to come in and help the District government do the job,” Collins said. “The talent in-house is not always talented.”
Newly appointed Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra told the D.C. Council in mid-July, “We need to develop a pipeline of technologists within the District.”
Among contractors, D.C.-based Telecommunications Development Corp. leads the way in fiscal 2007, earning $1.78 million through four deals. Other companies providing assistance to OCTO include Columbia Telecommunications Corp., CNA Corp., Signal Solutions Inc., DBTS and Young Enterprise Systems.
D.C. lawyer Kenneth Boley will be paid $268,800 as the District’s Legislative, Regulatory and Digital Inclusion Project Manager, with a focus on expanding Internet access to underserved residents, Fleps said.
