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Controlling Chaos
When Brigham Young and his 147 Mormon pioneers (including only three women) founded Salt Lake City in 1847, they laid out the town on a neat, 10-block grid centered on Temple Square. Since then, the state, though still one of the least populated in the union, has grown dramatically, attaining more than 2 million residents. Today the state government is the second largest employer in Utah, giving jobs to about 20,000 people, including 1,000 IT workers.
When Fletcher became Utah's CIO, he found himself nominally in charge of a large department -- although he had no authority to fire civil service workers. The new legislation gave the CIO the ability to fire new hires, but most of the department was grandfathered in under the old rules.
Finding a way to change that was crucial. What if an IT employee resisted change or lacked certain skills for his new role? Perhaps he would fit in another part of the department. "The civil service system restrained you from a lot of flexibility," Fletcher says. And so he dangled bonuses in front of his staff as an incentive for them to give up their civil service status. Nine out of 10 took the offer.
At the same time, Fletcher had to tear down departmental walls, redrawing the organizational chart so that IT employees no longer reported to departmental bosses but to the CIO's office. "The agencies are giving up their IT employees," Fletcher says. "You can see where there would be some resistance. They said, 'If I'm responsible, I want those guys reporting to me.' I said, 'I understand that. I'm here to do those same types of things, take that headache [of managing IT staff] away so you can focus on your business.'" Fletcher also took away the flexibility and budgetary autonomy that departmental IT directors were used to, instead offering them expanded roles as business partners with agency heads who determine priorities.
Many embraced the changes. Consider Phil Bates, the IT director at the Department of Public Safety, which includes the state highway patrol, issues driver's licenses and runs crime labs. Bates went from reporting to the commissioner of public safety to the CIO, with whom he meets for 20 minutes every week, while all the departmental IT directors get together every other week. "It's been a real positive experience," Bates says. "In an agency, you're confined in a box. Now we have access to utilize a lot of resources throughout the state. For the employees at the agency, not a lot has changed. Now we answer directly to the CIO's office. Instead of me creating rules for my agency, we get a broader view and better standards."
The Department of Public Safety, for example, moved its legacy systems from its own data center to the state's main facility, greatly increasing disaster recovery capability. "That's a huge step," Bates says. "We're the front-line agency for homeland security. Those systems are critical to first responders. If we had an earthquake that took down the old facility, we could have been down for a long time. Now we can switch traffic in 30 seconds."
Restructuring the department was one thing; getting employees to do things differently was another. Fletcher wanted to install performance metrics, for instance, but he discovered that few staffers had experience with performance-based management. "I didn't have a pool of management familiar with those tools," he says. And so Fletcher hired Kenneth G. Petersen out of retirement to fill the void. Petersen had spent 31 years with J.C. Penney Co. Inc., most recently as the CIO of the company's drugstore division Eckerd Corp. (which was later sold). At Eckerd, Petersen took back IT operations in-house from IBM, building a tech organization from scratch and cutting expenses 50% in one year.
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