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Fletcher lured Petersen to Utah as the department's COO, hoping to tap his change management expertise (and in this case, the COO actually reports to the CIO). "Here we're doing the same things as we did at Eckerd," Petersen says. "We're changing culture and methods, introducing metrics and governance."
The department, which runs under a chargeback model serving the agencies, began calculating its own overhead for the first time and managing with revenue projections and expenses -- all new ideas. Internal billing rates dropped by $2.5 million a year and billing costs fell by half. "We define the services, the needs of the business units, then an acceptable rate," Petersen says. "It's all based on cost recovery. Then we negotiate with the units on service-levels based on cost. We're defining the product catalog and the cost for service. We're working with the agency to define the SLA [service-level agreement]."
Also, Fletcher is bringing in contractors to tutor his staff on governance and methodology, as well as introducing concepts that are standard in the private sector, such as metrics and service-level agreements. "We can train these guys," Fletcher says. "We're going to shape our workforce. That's exciting. It doesn't make any sense to put good technology on a bad business process. I can hit a ball 200 yards out of bounds with new golf clubs, but it's still out of bounds."
A Work in Progress
In his office, Fletcher gazes out his window at the construction rigging hiding the State Capitol, then turns around to assess his own progress halfway into his three-year time table. "I'm trying to put in the framework so we have the structure to optimize as we need to," Fletcher says. "We may not get to our end game in the first year and a half, but we'll get there."
Already, Fletcher says, Utah is seeing the fruits of the new model. In 2006, DTS launched a new Utah.gov Web site, which was soon ranked as the third best government site in the country by the Center for Digital Government, a national research and advisory institute. And DTS also recently began to roll out a five-year, $70-million project to overhaul the way various agencies share information for federal and state aid programs. Called eREP (or the Electronic Resource and Eligibility Product), the new solution replaces the state's cumbersome Public Assistance Case Management Information System. Fletcher inherited the project but re-engineered the deployment to save money by having the state take over the integration process from outside consultants.
Continual improvement, Fletcher says, is the target.
"The goal I hope to accomplish is that we have an organization with defined processes and methodology and output no matter who the governor or CIO is," Fletcher says, "so you don't have to turn everything upside, inside out every time someone new comes in."
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. Write to him at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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