Rising to a New Level

By William Bott, deputy for operations to Missouri's CIO.

If the cleaning crew had not entered the conference room, I am not sure any of us would have known how late it actually was.

The meeting had started at lunch with a casual discussion about how, as a soon-to-be-consolidated IT division, the CIO of Missouri could offer 14 executive branch departments any level of confidence that the service they were accustomed to would not suffer under the impending changes. Nine hours later, we had flip chart pages and Post-It notes littering the room, but no clear direction.

Four weeks earlier, Gov. Matt Blunt had tasked our state CIO with combining 1,200 staff members from 14 departments as part of his technology efficiency initiative. The governor's assignment to us was to maximize investments, reduce duplicative efforts and keep the departments happy. With a short timeline and a need for success, our new CIO's executive team began researching the national consolidation trend. With no two efforts alike, there was nothing out there that fit our situation. So without a playbook to steal, we began to write our own.

Consolidation is the next logical step in moving technology services to more of a utility role than a business function. Technology is the modern means to a business outcome, not an outcome in itself. A state's department of education should not have an efficient, reliable and available server environment as one of its outcomes. Instead, it needs an efficient, reliable and available server environment to provide the business outcome of educating children.

In the same way, CEOs of major manufacturing sectors don't spend time looking at how the electric company gets power to the building, they just want to know how they're going to get the power they need to run the factory and how much it costs.

CIOs provide the utility for organizations to accomplish their business functions. At some point, we need to be considered as reliable and trustworthy as the electrical companies, and I would argue we can accelerate how we get there through simple, measurement-based service-level agreements (SLAs).

Historically the standard SLA used in our state has been the best tool for defining expectations. They have also been the most frequently used weapons for beating the tar out of one another. Made up of a series of Boolean statements, they tend to be too detailed, difficult to decipher and the bane of most customer relationships.

In addition to the "wrapped up in minutia" mindset of these documents, they are usually managed by operational staff or low-level managers instead of business leaders. These positions, typically more ingrained in operations than outcomes, used the rigid structure of these agreements to make life difficult for process changes, even when those changes benefited everyone involved. Quite simply SLAs can be the documents that bog down the wheels of public service.

But as trouble-plagued as they were, SLAs were the leading candidate for how we would manage our IT consolidation initiative. After studying what most other states had in place, we were in familiar but unfriendly territory.