|
A New Era for IT
Two years later, diplomat and businessman Jon M. Huntsman Jr. became governor. Huntsman created the Utah Policy Partnership, an advisory committee tasked with helping the state run itself more efficiently, and IT was an obvious target. "The most pressing issue from a management situation was IT," says Managing Director Steve Starks. "We were looking for someone with the IT credibility to earn the respect of the Legislature and the state employees, and strategic and diplomatic enough to make the changes happen and communicate the benefits. It was a tough assignment."
Enter Stephen Fletcher, the CIO at the U.S. Department of Education, who found himself visiting the governor's mansion in Salt Lake City one day early in 2005. Fletcher knew Huntsman from Washington. They shared strong ties to Utah. Both had family there. Fletcher had gone to college in Utah, and the governor was a native son.
Fletcher complimented the governor on signing the Legislature's Information Technology Governance Act, which created a centralized IT agency for the state. The agency would have a year to take control of technology from 24 different state agencies that were operating as independent fiefdoms.
"The bill essentially said, 'Build a new organization, bring everything inside,'" Fletcher explains. "They gave a lot of power and responsibility to the CIO to make that happen. They also made him accountable for all the activities."
The governor told Fletcher that he was having a hard time finding a CIO with both government and corporate experience. Would Fletcher be interested?
There was no question Fletcher had the requisite skills. He had founded an IT consulting firm that provided e-government solutions to federal, state and local authorities. Later, he joined the Department of Education, first as deputy assistant secretary for management, and then as CIO. Some of his biggest accomplishments include re-engineering the office, introducing performance-based services, reducing default rates on student loans by establishing incentives that pay third parties more for good loans than bad ones, creating a loan database to better analyze risk, automating the application process and consolidating its lifecycles.
Fletcher took the job; and in April 2005, Huntsman named Fletcher the state's CIO and executive director of the newly formed Department of Technology Services. "I probably wouldn't have been interested with the old model," Fletcher says. "But this was exciting; it's the opportunity to build a government IT department the proper way." Fletcher began his tenure with visits to all the agencies. His objective was to find opportunities for efficiency. "Consolidation isn't necessarily the best way to go," he says. "Sometimes it's better to optimize."
Other states haven't successfully driven efficiencies, says Fletcher, because they don't have the flexibility to let the business drive the model. His office, however, has more freedom. "That's how business approaches this," Fletcher says. "We don't have to say it's all got to be centralized or decentralized. We don't have to make that determination until we understand what the requirements are."
The low-hanging fruit was obvious. DTS centralized purchasing, buying everything from hardware to bandwidth in bulk, which drove down costs. This helped save $2.5 million in the first six months.
But the next step was harder: how to restructure the organization without disrupting the business. "It's not just organizational structure," says Fletcher. "It's accountability, operational control, service-level management. If we tried to put it all in place now, we'd create havoc and chaos for our agencies. It needs to be a phased-in approach. You'll break stuff if you try to go too fast."
|
