Wisconsin’s Educational Communications Board Threatened - Lessons from OET in Ohio
The ECB is Wisconsin’s only representative agency; its board members represent the governor, the legislature, private citizens, K-12 schools, the University of Wisconsin and both public and private K-12 colleges. Although its budget is tiny, its successful past management of broadcast systems is envied by State agencies and departments that are not accountable to Wisconsin’s citizens.
These unaccountable agencies have wasted millions of dollars while funding duplicative and mostly unsuccessful network pursuits that primarily benefit major campaign contributors. For instance, DOA’s Badgernet II, which was designed by AT&T, suffers from terminal thrombosis of its video education capacity during the majority of school hours. THe DOA non-network is eclipsed by the ECB’s statewide broadband network, designed by Consultants Evans Associates in 2001. The ECB network carries video, data and voice programming more reliably and at considerably less cost than any other State IT initiative.
ECB’s budget has been cut every biennium for the last 8 years. Its procurement authority has been usurped by the Department of Administration and other agencies, and its programming content development mission has been taken over by DPI.
A similar situation was faced by the Ohio Educational Telecommunications Board, a representative agency with a mission similar to ECB’s (deja vous). The Department of Administrative Services (Ohio’s DOA), along with the programming departments at Ohio State and other Universities, wished to expand their own infrastructure at the expense of OET’s cost-effective shared network. Politics always trumps logic and recently, OET was dissolved. Instantly, procurement requests for video networking escalated, and dense swarms of lobbyists descended upon the Capitol at Columbus. One may fully expect that when ECB is dissolved in Wisconsin, our current multi-billion dollar budget hole will balloon to stratospheric heights as carrier-designed networks replace multi-purpose carrier-agnostic networks such as that presently utilized by ECB, the Department of Revenue and other formerly independent agencies.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Pardon me for saying so, but this would never have happened in the days when Bill Woods was chief engineer, Larry Dickerson was the Deputy Director, and Paul Norton was the Director.
It is clear that strategic technology planning is desperately needed both at ECB and DOA. If not for the “old guard”, the State network would consist entirely of AM radio stations. HELLO: ITFS/EBS is TWO-WAY TELEVISION. One-way broadcast television is going away beginning on February 17 2009 when all over-the-air TV must convert to digital standards. Converters are not going to cut it - viewers will go to cable and satellite, in spite of the fact that we just bought all those new transmitters and antennas.