Four former state of California civil servants with long careers in the technology industry have joined forces in an unusual consulting arrangement that utilizes their combined expertise.
Paul Benedetto, Ron Hughes, Joe Panora and Jeff Uyeda formed their new venture, Sacramento Association of Consultants (SAC), this fall after a series of phone conversations and lunches with one another.
“Because we’ve known each other for years and worked together on numerous types of efforts, we just kept the friendship and communication open. We all realized, ‘You know, sometimes there are opportunities that exist where maybe I could really leverage you, but how can we do that?” said Panora, the former CIO of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
They ultimately landed on the concept of an association. Each member of the quartet is keeping his individual consulting business intact, but through the association a client can choose to utilize any combination of them — two, three or four — as long as each consultant doesn’t have a conflict of interest. If there is a conflict, the affected consultant doesn’t participate in the project.
“We just saw that we have a lot of expertise that could potentially be of value to our clients,” said Hughes, former chief deputy state CIO of California. “So we talked about it and thought, ‘Let’s form an association and see how it goes.’” We’ve gotten a terrific response, and we all have existing customers — plus customers that want multiple partners to be involved in their efforts. Our customers can pick and choose.”
Together they’ve been involved in many of the state’s largest IT projects of recent years. Panora retired one year ago as CIO of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Uyeda recently left as CEO of the state’s FI$Cal project and in previous roles was an assistant secretary of state overseeing voting modernization and was in charge of IT consolidation at the Office of Technology Services.
Benedetto was undersecretary of the California Technology Agency beginning in 2011. He previously was director of the Office of Systems Integration and agency information officer of the Health and Human Services Agency. Hughes, meanwhile, returned to the private sector in August 2014 after serving as director of the Office of Technology Services and then as chief deputy state CIO, during which he was instrumental in launching the state’s private cloud.
Panora said the association’s aim is to identify and give the best option to the client after asking some basic questions: What are you trying to achieve, and what are you focusing on in the next 24 months? What type of assistance do you need? And then, finally, what’s the right combination of consultants to do that?
As former state employees, Panora said he and his colleagues still have a vested interest in helping California implement solutions effectively.
“From our standpoint, we thought [the association] would be the best way to make sure we’re still giving back to our IT community but also advising the vendor community on the right areas where to focus,” said Panora.
Avoiding a conflict of interest is rule No. 1, Panora added. There already have been instances where the consultants work for competing companies and therefore using the association doesn’t make sense. There also are long-term unknowns, such as whether or not there are enough combinations among the four of them that can sustain the association. And will there end up being enough business? The association charges higher rates, obviously, than each consultant does when working independently and separately.
But so far, they’re bullish about their prospects. Hughes said every project they’ve engaged on so far has leveraged multiple partners. And with California’s forays into new project management processes and methodologies, big projects in the pipeline, along with increasing interest in cloud computing and Software as a Service, the consultants believe they’re well positioned to serve with their deep knowledge of state government’s inner workings.
“Nobody has expertise in every area of the state. But between the four of us we really do. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a single consulting firm that has the breadth of experience and expertise we do,” Hughes said.
