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By Lisa Yoon
In a recent interview, iRobot CIO Jay Leader noted that IT is "a pure service organization" whose customers are every other function in the company, from manufacturing to marketing. It's a truism that as leaders of IT, a support function, CIOs serve everyone.
Interview: Questions for iRobot's Jay Leader
Another CIO also recently referred to IT as a "service organization." As chief information officer of the State of Utah, Stephen Fletcher knows something about serving everyone-and meaning of service takes on an entirely different scale from what most private-sector CIOs must grapple with. Indeed CIOs in the public sector see marks of their work almost everywhere. Even on garbage day, the Department of Public Works sanitation engineers use the government's employee intranet site that the IT department built.
"The special challenge of the public-sector CIO is that they deal with a much more complicated range of constituents," says Chris O'Brien, a consultant at IT advisory firm Diamond Consultants. O'Brien knows this from personal experience; before joining Diamond, he was the CIO of the City of Chicago under Mayor Daly. "Getting things done is more complicated because of politics, the organizational structure [of government]," O'Brien explains. "For example, just building the Website for the City, there's so much more data involved because you're covering everything from parking tickets to building airports." That introduces the challenge of prioritizing, says O'Brien. "As much as you want to fix everything, it's literally not possible. You have to choose to focus on specific things and do them well."
And that's just for running a city. At the state and federal levels, the complexity of the customers IT serves extends to the those the CIO answer to, says Fletcher of Utah. While at a company or a nonprofit, the CIO reports to one executive, public-sector CIOs have a cadre of bosses-heads of the executive and legislative branches of the government, as well as various advisory boards and committees. "It's a balancing act," says Fletcher, "because the requests of all these different entities may conflict or are not necessarily in line with [IT's] objectives." Take the IT budget, for instance. Allocating funds is less complex at a company or at a nonprofit. In the public sector, however, "there are the orders from the guy at the top but also from other officials, and they may contradict." He continues: "Meanwhile, from the CIO perspective, you have to make a choice: Do you want to provide the cheapest possible service or the best customer service?"
Nevertheless Fletcher's current stint as a state CIO is relatively straightforward compared to his last job as CIO of the federal Department of Education appointed by former President George W. Bush. At the federal level, notes Fletcher, the status of CIOs is inconsistent: about half are political appointments, like Fletcher, while the other half are civil servants.
The role of the CIO is clearly considered essential: In 1996, Congress passed the Clinger-Cohen Act, which requires all government agencies to have a CIO. It seems government agencies understand the value of applying business best practices to public service. Indeed, both O'Brien and Fletcher arrived at their CIO posts not from technology backgrounds but from business backgrounds. Both were consultants whose respective clients (the city and federal governments) eventually took them on as CIOs. Fletcher, for example, had his own consulting firm, which of the Department of Education hired to sort out some 963 management deficiencies. (For starters, the department had never had a proper audit-ever.) The Deputy Secretary of the DoE asked Fletcher to join as Deputy Secretary for management, in which role he reorganized the department's IT organization before being appointed CIO.
Anyone who's had to wait in line for a driver's license knows government can't be the hippest place to work. As a CIO, why do it? For O'Brien, knowing IT had a hand in nearly every part of city operations and seeing the fruits of IT labor all around him was rewarding. As for Fletcher, becoming CIO of Utah was a chance to build a new organization of state IT services, which he continues to expand. As a service provider, a CIO's work is never done.
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