Big job, short timeframe: Missouri's IT consolidation.

• Author: Bott, Bill

With information technology (IT), consolidation can mean anything from forming a committee that oversees IT projects to centralizing hardware and application development. Some people use the word to describe efforts at improving collaboration, and in some cases, it is a euphemism for outsourcing. In 2005, when the newly elected governor of Missouri wanted to consolidate the IT workforce for the executive branch of state government, the first task was to decide what consolidation was going to mean.

Dan Ross, the state's chief information officer (CIO), was asked to create one entity that would take care of the state government's technology needs, providing data across departments and finding ways to provide more services at the same or lower spending levels. This meant bringing together 1,100 information technology professionals and nearly $300 million in IT spending into a single division that answered to the office of the CIO, the Information Technology Services Division (ITSD). Ross felt that a smaller-scale effort would lack the decision-making authority needed to drive change.

The governor agreed, and the budget for the next fiscal year transferred the IT employees and funding to the CIO. Panic filled the halls of the Capitol as rumors flew and executive-branch departments worried that losing their IT staff would lead to service degradation, that their individual projects would now have to compete for support and funding through another level of bureaucracy, and that the loss of budget control would wreak havoc with funding streams, federal requirements, and auditors. Technology employees worried that there would be massive layoffs, or that they would be forced to leave the departments to which they had dedicated years of service. Existing IT directors and technology stakeholders decided on three informal goals for the rest of the year: develop a strategic plan, establish the proper organizational structure and budget procedures, and put service-level agreements into place with each of the consolidated departments.

STEP 1: THE STRATEGIC PLAN

IT directors from the 14 soon-to-be-consolidated departments were invited to take part in a planning session to set the mission of the new IT department: providing efficient and effective technology solutions to state agencies so they could better serve the citizens of Missouri. This simple statement set the tone. State agencies would be the IT department's customers, not its coworkers. The new department's job would be to provide its customers with great technical support so they could provide their services to citizens. Defining the IT department's customers helped everyone involved discuss outcomes of the consolidation.

Based on the mission, the group developed three desired outcomes against which future projects and decisions would be weighed:

* Efficient services, encompassing the way contracts and licenses are managed, how infrastructure decisions are made, and how budget dollars...