Taken with permission from former Utah CIO Phillip J. Windley's blog:

Newly elected Utah Governor, Jon Huntsman recently announced sweeping changes to Utah state government including a plan to consolidate all 1000 IT workers in the state into a single department. (see stories in the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune). I've heard rumblings of this for the past few weeks and there are more than a few nervous people in the state IT ranks.

"Huntsman also plans to shake up the information technology operations in state government that are now strewn across all programs and agencies without a centralized line of control. The state's chief information officer, for example, only technically has two employees, while the state employs about 1,000 information technology workers."
-- Salt Lake Tribune

While I think there's some merit to reorganizing state IT functions, there is much that could go wrong here. There are a 1000 ways to do this wrong and only a few that will ultimately work. There are plenty of smart people advising the Governor on this -- I'll offer a few suggestions in public:

Don't Overcentralize

State agencies can't be left without an IT function. In an era where IT is at the core of almost every business function, state agencies need IT advice and leadership that is steeped in domain knowledge. As I argued in my whitepaper on modular IT organizations, there are three primary functions that IT organizations perform: service provisioning (making the infrastructure work), solutions delivery (developing or buying IT solutions for business problems) and value innovation (figuring out how to derive business value from IT and meet business needs).

Of the three, service provisioning is easily consolidated and there are big benefits to doing so. The state's done that already with its network. The next logical place to do this is with desktop computers. Other possibilities include servers and data centers.

Value innovation has to remain in the agency. They're the only ones with enough domain knowledge to do it. This means that each agency ought to have a CIO and an IT staff sized according to the size of the agency's IT needs that is responsible for the agencies IT decisions and works closely with the business to drive innovation.

Solutions delivery is already largely done somewhere other than the agencies since almost all solutions delivery is already outsourced. Solutions delivery must remain under the control of the agencies. Agency IT staff should act as the "customer," who is determining what they need and, most importantly, controlling the money. This is one of the primary responsibility of the IT personnel who remain in the agency. There will always be some development in any IT organization and these people probably ought to be part of the central IT shop and hired as "consultants" as needed by the agency IT staff.

Give the CIO Authority

This plan will be a huge blow-up if the CIO doesn't have the right authorities. The primary goal of those authorizations will be to ensure the CIO can create policies that result in interoperability. Regardless of any other consolidation, agencies will always be in the business of buying and putting IT in place. Restrictions that disallow agency involvement in IT will prove to be too inflexible. To make this infrastructure interoperable,