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Introduction | Full table of contents BOOK EXCERPT: POWERING UP: How Public Managers Can Take Control of Technology
By KATHERINE BARRETT and RICHARD GREENE
Who’s in Charge?
For years, no large city or state would consider functioning without a chief financial officer and someone to head up the personnel department. Yet, until very recently, many local governments pushed relentlessly forward purchasing and implementing technology without an equivalent position. Luckily, this situation is changing. A number of cities and states have appointed their first chief information officers (CIOs) in just the past few years. Although not every government entity calls this new position a CIO, the concept is the same: one person who oversees policy-making, standardization, and oversight for the organization.
Among those that have recently taken this step are the states of Alabama, Kentucky, Nebraska, and New Jersey and the cities of Dallas, Milwaukee, and San Diego. According to Richard Wilken, information technology and communications director in San Diego, “The impact of technology and what it can offer us is much more significant now than it was ten years ago, and it’s time to elevate the management.”
Some entities continue to argue that they do not need a formal CIO position, but the Government Performance Project found a powerful correlation between the presence of that job and good management of IT otherwise. Among the management efforts that most clearly benefited from the existence of a CIO were strategic planning; efforts toward building a coherent standardized architecture; and the capacity to evaluate the extent to which benefits of an information technology system justified investment.
A few years ago, Baltimore’s mayor determined that there were many shortcomings in his city’s information technology management. He set up an information technology board, which was made up of his chief of staff and four key agency heads in the city, and charged them with coordinating technology needs. Among the board’s first steps was to appoint a CIO. Elliot Schlanger, who was given that post, noted that before he came, there was a central MIS operation, but that without a leadership position with power and authority in the government at large, it was not managed well.
Of course, many CIOs have come up through the technological ranks, and that will continue to be the case. And a basic understanding of technology — what it can and cannot do and where the potential trouble spots lie — is important. But even more important are the managerial/political skills required to manage a large cadre of workers and to relate effectively with governors, mayors, legislators, citizens, and all the other stakeholders who play a role in this field.
The heart of this notion was well articulated by Governing’s publisher and editor, Peter Harkness, in the June 1999 issue: “Technology management has moved from the computer room to the board room.”
One trap some localities fall into is assuming that their new CIO can do two jobs at once. “I’ve seen a lot of cities who have taken their IT director and just renamed it a CIO,” said Virginia Beach CIO David Sullivan. “The IT director already had sixty hours a week of work to do. I realized if that were the case here, I couldn’t get at the strategic issues. It would do no good to call me the CIO and expect me to deal with those issues and others. So, we brought in a new IT director to handle the department. It’s worked out very well.”
Another large city just hired its second CIO. The person who took the job — who for obvious reasons won’t be named here — was startled to discover that in his first week, he was getting all manner of phone calls related to problems with specific pieces of equipment in city agencies. One of his first steps in the new job will be going to the city and asking for money to simulate the kind of arrangement Sullivan has.
Among cities and states in which the CIO reports directly to the top are: Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Honolulu, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Nashville, Richmond, San Diego, and San Jose.
In some others the CIO may not report directly to the top, but is a cabinet position, which is sensible enough. In Kentucky’s organizational charts, in fact, the CIO position actually falls above cabinet level.
But the one rule for government management that is inviolate is that any general rule has a number of exceptions. Cities and states, with widely varying needs and structures, have to take those factors into account. In New York City, for instance, the CIO reports to a deputy mayor. When New York’s CIO was asked if he felt slighted by being a step away from the pinnacle of power in the nation’s largest city he chortled, “I couldn’t think of anything that would make me less efficient than that. The mayor has a thousand things to do. The deputy mayor has the time. Every week I have a meeting with him. And every other week, I have an extra meeting. There’s no way our mayor could do that.”
In other places, there’s concern that reporting to the governor could politicize the position. Thomas Towle, director of the Division of Information Technology Management in New Hampshire, explained the political drawbacks of high placement: “One of the difficulties when the CIO reports to the governor’s office is it becomes a political position. We have a governor’s election every two years. [Being placed in the department of administrative services] brings it back to continuity and consistency.”
In one southern state, the IT department reports to the Department of Commerce. At first blush this seems foolish (and, in fact, there may be a better place for it). But the logic behind the decision makes sense. The director of that department is considered a very good manager and wasn’t overloaded, as were other directors in the government. As for the governor, one insider reported, “He’s interested in welfare reform or increasing teacher pay. A lot of things he’s interested in aren’t at the level of IT. If you have a governor who is interested in IT, and that’s important, then it may work well; if it doesn’t, you may get lost quick in the shuffle.”
It would certainly appear that a reasonably powerful CIO is important. None of the states with strong CIOs have plans to weaken the position. Yet a number of states with somewhat weak CIOs (who report to someone other than the governor, have little control over budgeting decisions, or are seriously understaffed) are talking about elevating the position.
But although there can be rational logic to the CIO not reporting directly to the top, the overwhelming evidence — if only anecdotally — from the GPP is that the higher the placement of the job, the better the results. In fact, while some entities made arguments, as illustrated above, that their top technology officer was able to do his or her job well without reporting to the mayor or governor, not one individual complained that his or her job should be shoved lower down the management chart.
One warning: while the CIO’s position is crucial, there’s a real danger in equating a powerful, smart chief information officer with a technologically well-run state or city. One private sector vendor recently argued vociferously that focusing too much on the CIO is “missing the boat.” He continued, “I sell millions of dollars worth of equipment to governments, and I couldn’t care less about the CIOs. They may be setting policy, but it’s down at the agency level that the real important stuff is happening.”
Tony Herbert, administrator of the Information Services Division in Montana, explained, “It might be a lot easier with a benevolent dictator type-model. But we’ve painfully learned that involving your users pays extraordinary dividends. You don’t have to go back on decisions and make them right [after you’ve run into resistance]. We used a benevolent dictator model prior to 1990. And in 1990, our Information Technology Advisory Council emerged as a more willing and more powerful entity.”
Not that such committees don’t have their downside: “It slows the process a good deal,” said Herbert. “There are issues you have to stop and walk through with these people. It’s frustrating for me and my people. We are often on the right track, but it might take a month or two or more to work through issues with them, to make sure we have that full-fledged support. But as much frustration as that presents for a guy like me and my key managers, I think we’re ending up with much better results.”
Baltimore also employs its so-called information technology board as a “voice of consensus for the city,” said its CIO, Elliott Schlanger. A second benefit, he said, is that “The ITB members have somewhat of a vested interest in the success of implementing IT. These department heads are the men and women who need to get things done. So, they provide active direction, as well as the strategic direction.”
Maryland, Kansas, North Carolina, and other states have sensibly enough included private sector members — many of whom are corporate CIOs — on their advisory boards. The benefits here are pretty obvious: for one thing, it brings in a knowledge base that may be different from that of public servants. In addition, when it comes time for public-private partnerships — commonplace on such projects as fiber-optic networks — there’s a greater ease in getting support for the effort from men and women who don’t spend their lives in city hall or the statehouse.
In fact, some places maintain a board that goes beyond simple consultative authority; it’s actually the final arbiter of IT decisions, with the CIO reporting to it. In Indianapolis, for example, the CIO reports to a city/county information technology board. This board is made up of mayoral appointees, county elected officials, county officials, and a judicial representative. While the mayor doesn’t have the majority, his three appointees give him a fair amount of control.
This board actually approves all contracts of more than $25,000 (a crucial piece of power in a city that has outsourced many of its IT services). It approves the city’s wide area network strategies as well. Boards such as the one in Indianapolis may not add value to the technical decisions. But they ensure the decisions appear fair and equitable.
Such an assumption of equity is of particular importance when it comes to questions of standards. If a city’s health department is deeply invested in one kind of data collection software, and its corrections department has another, both have to feel they’re being treated fairly when the central office makes a final decision as to which shall be the prevailing standard.
For far more about efforts to standardize technology, just move onto the next chapter.
Copyright 2001 Congressional Quarterly Inc.
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