Aligning IT and Business Is Priority for Public CIOs

As Delaware begins work this year on a $70 million upgrade to its statewide financial system, state CIO Tom Jarrett is confident changes he made to address troubled projects of long ago will pay off and keep IT in better alignment with internal customers.

Jarrett, who became CIO in 2001, said the Department of Technology and Information (DTI) was created seven years ago "because of the failures of the previous organization, which had a poor reputation for completing projects."

One example is an 800 MHz first-responder radio network project. Jarrett believes the previous IT organization began the deployment without clearly understanding who their customers were. "They didn't include any first responders in the development process. The attitude was, ‘We're technologists - we know what's best.'"

After deployment, the first responders were unhappy that the radios didn't work everywhere they should have, as well as other unsatisfactory features, he said. Poor communication with the Delaware Legislature contributed to the problem because it was more difficult to get additional funding.

Jarrett made two structural alterations he considers significant. First he established a customer care center staffed with seven people assigned to develop expertise on the business process needs of specific agencies. "I don't know all the nuances of what the Department of Youth and Families needs," he said, "but this customer relationship specialist is charged with doing just that. Then that person is a champion for that customer when we look at what types of solutions might address their business problems, instead of us trying to push some technology on them that might in no way address their issues."

Second, he created a change management team to help agencies cope with the disruptions new technologies can cause. "You have to take the time to help employees through that change," Jarrett said. "Otherwise you get naysayers who start complaining that the system doesn't work. The technology gets a bad rap. If we don't help them learn how to use it, we're swimming upstream."

The Delaware DTI took a different approach when it upgraded the radio system to add in-street and in-building coverage. "We established a project team that brought in the users from day one," Jarrett said, adding that they played a significant role in reviewing the technology, vendors and costs. Jarrett said the state budget office and Legislature were kept in the loop.

Path to Alignment
For years, CIOs have sought to closely coordinate IT projects and overall strategy with business processes, yet progress toward that overarching goal has been slow. In a recent Public CIO survey, executives still list IT-business alignment as their No. 1 IT management concern.

Alignment may boil down to a few basic problems: poor nuts-and-bolts project management, a weak governance structure or a more serious and systemic disconnect in long-term strategic planning. The CIOs and analysts interviewed for this article described formalizing project management, developing IT strategic plans that match their agencies' goals, and beefing up governance structures and metrics to ensure their projects meet or exceed business users' expectations.

Projects rarely fail because the technology doesn't work. One common pitfall, however, is the translation of user requirements into system features.

"Getting true integration of business domain knowledge into IT systems is the toughest nut to crack," said Robin Portman, a vice president with consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) who works with federal health agencies. Some business users come up with requirement definitions and throw them over the wall to IT, she said, but business owners must learn to make their needs comprehensible. "For instance, I work with clinicians, doctors and nurses. They know their craft inside and out. But when they start listing requirements, they can get into so much detail that it makes it more difficult for IT to