In December of 2013 I wrote about Oklahoma’s development of a security operations center designed to protect state government’s information technology infrastructure. When Oklahoma’s policy makers approved the consolidation of information technology assets, we did so for two primary reasons: cost savings and security, in that order.
State Rep. Jason Murphey
Recent events have brought the importance of the IT security issue into public purview and demonstrate the need for the state’s IT consolidation and subsequent emphasis upon a unified IT security approach. To that end, Oklahoma’s new consolidated IT entity now mans a 24/7 IT security operations center which consistently defends state networks against attack.
This has provided policy makers with an unexpected new method for gauging state agency efficiency.
For what appears to be the first time, state officials can now achieve a real time, high-level view of the traffic flowing through state internet connections. This purview allows security personnel to guard against those dangerous sites which would harm state systems.
This also provides a fascinating new method for gauging the amount of state employee down time. As state employees are underutilized they will naturally tend to use their computers to browse to non-work-related internet sites. The resulting metric should allow state officials to potentially spot the most inefficient agencies by taking note of which are most likely to engage in non-work-related internet browsing.
During the fall of 2013, I participated in a legislative study which asked state IT officials to provide a listing of the Internet sites most visited from state computers. They provided us with a list of the top ten most visited sites which were visited from July to September of 2013 and are as follows:
#10. The Huffington Post with 180,843 page views;
#9. NewsOk with 218,775 page views;
#8. YouTube – 225,228 page views;
#7. NBC News – with 237,263 page views;
#6. Pubmatic.com Tracking – with 267,141 page views;
#5. Twitter – with 272,661 page views;
#4. MSN – with 720,394 page views;
#3. Bing – with 1,062,467 page views;
#2. Google – with 1,074,686 with page views; and
#1. Facbook or pages with Facebook widgets with 2,008,092 page views in just three months time.
The actionable intelligence represented by this information is just one unexpected by-product of a single consolidation initiative. As the state continues to consolidate the various duplicative and redundant services, state officials will continue to first understand where the inefficiencies lie and then become positioned to respond accordingly on behalf of the taxpayers.
Thank you for reading this article. Your interest and input are much appreciated. Please do not hesitate to email Jason.Murphey@hd31.org with your thoughts and suggestions.
Hopefully this doesn’t get abused to the point that the state starts micromanaging everyone, causing high turnover and ultimately worse services to Oklahomans. I’ve done these reports for a call center before and once the managers started requesting daily reports to try to make things efficient, people quit, new hires didn’t stick around as long, and the company ultimately closed its doors.