A new state review shows the wheels of Colorado government turn slowly even on the information superhighway.

Ten years ago, the legislature passed a law to combine state’s technology under one entity, the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT), to make it safer, cheaper and more efficient. And most of the state’s operations have been moved onto the internet cloud, allowed the state to reduce its 40 data centers to three.

That’s the good news.

The state office, however, still isn’t fully consolidated, and savings that the consolidation was supposed to produce are hard to find, according to the evaluation released Wednesday by the firm BerryDunn for the Office of the State Auditor.

The review found assets, information and spending in departments that could have been part of the consolidation into the broader, more efficient office.

“OIT was also unable to demonstrate savings through billing consolidation, and the evaluation questioned whether this would be an effective measure to assess efficiencies at all,” the state auditor’s office said in its announcement.

Moreover, people who have used the consolidated system across the board gave it low marks for customer satisfaction for management of services, infrastructure, procurement and work provided by vendors.

Read the full report by clicking here.

Senate Bill 155 passed both chambers during the 2008 session with only two no votes. The legislation called on state agencies to consolidate data centers, servers, mainframes, storage, operating systems, as well as voice and data networks, according to the evaluation.

About one in seven members on the IT staff from the respective agencies aren’t consolidated yet, “partly because their job classifications are unclear,” auditors said.

The report made 11 recommendations, including a standard method of classifying employees whose job involves technology services and should be part of the consolidation.

The audit “looked at five major IT consolidation areas: Human Resources, Asset and Infrastructure, Savings and Efficiencies, Billing, and Consumer Satisfaction and found room for improvement in all areas,” the state auditor’s office said.

While the law didn’t carry a specific timeline for completion, it required regular updates to the legislature and directed the state’s chief information officer to monitor the “status and timeliness” of it.