The thinking for us has been to very much put an emphasis on the business process and business practice first. A lot of these systems are owned by agencies that we oversee. So we encourage them to truly understand their business process, engage the folks who will be running it day-to-day, develop those requirements and then look at technology. Because we see a lot of technology solutions applied with the business following it.
We have to become more business-oriented without losing our technology focus. The people who are providing these solutions need to be better equipped to socialize them and market them. They need to speak in the language that executives and decision-makers understand, and elevate our ability to be a solution broker at the table, as opposed to just a technology component that sometimes gets thought of at the last minute.
A lot of it comes down to the vision — refocusing and rebranding some of our efforts. Some of that is simple things, like stepping back from the acronyms and jargon, and becoming very descriptive with our solutions. That will take some training, especially for our service managers. But a lot of it will be just setting a tone and saying, “Let’s engage our business partners at their level.”
It’s both new jobs and looking at jobs in a different way. We’re probably going to have some dynamic workforce assignments, which state governments typically aren’t very flexible with. That’s been something I’ve tried to do — as much as possible, create more of a matrix management in terms of the way we meet those needs. But certainly, we’ve also changed some job titles to include business analyst, even if it’s IT business analyst, as opposed to some of the more archaic things we’ve had.