“We’re undoing 60 years of process,” said Adam Dondro, agency chief information officer for the sprawling California Health and Human Services Agency, which comprises a host of departments and sub-departments.
“We’re getting more people to ask the question: ‘Why do we do it like that?’ This isn’t about IT at all. This is about transparency.”
A similar shake-it-up mindset is shared by Subbarao Mupparaju, CIO for the Financial Information System of California (FI$Cal). Speaking alongside Dondro this week at Government Technology's California Public Sector CIO Academy, Mupparaju said it’s vital for leaders to learn to let go of control.
“The hardest thing about learning management is to let others make the decisions you used to make,” Mupparaju told attendees at the session, titled “Enterprise Governance in a Digital World – A Strategic Imperative.” The hourlong session offered lessons for those in state IT leadership and those who aspire to be.
The state Franchise Tax Board’s director and chief technologist over Operations and Infrastructure Services, Kem Musgrove, noted that accountability and communication can make or break a project. His department’s leaders routinely use a risk matrix — a spreadsheet that color-codes various project components to streamline decision-making.
The takeaways from the session:
— Get executive-level buy-in early in a project or proposal.
— Be flexible to changing needs.
— Identify clearly where a project can have the most impact, and then show that value to stakeholders from both the business side and the IT side.
— Use governance not for oversight and compliance, but for coordination and innovation.
— Empower front-line team members to ask why governance — project approval — takes so long.
— And finally, it’s crucial for AIOs and CIOs to remind their teams of their department’s mission.
“You may be coding this one piece,” said Dondro of CHHS, “but we’re focusing on not only do people have food when they get home, but do they have a home to cook it in?”
