Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and CIO Mike Locatis Launch IT Consolidation

When Bill Ritter was elected Colorado's governor in 2006, he arrived at the Capitol in Denver showcasing an ambitious agenda packed with bold ideas that ranged from funding for universal health care and reforming K-12 education to kick starting a "new energy economy" based on sound environmental principles.

But Ritter's carefully laid plans for reform and big ideas faced a significant challenge. The state's IT systems were dysfunctional. In addition to the usual list of decentralized and redundant data centers, phone systems and e-mail programs, the state had a rogues' gallery of failed and failing computer projects. Although the problems were a legacy from the previous administration, Ritter knew the 21st- century state government he envisioned couldn't operate on islands of information running on computers that waste money rather than generate value.

"If you think of all the siloing that goes on - the separate IT functions - it only exacerbates the siloing of departmental functions," he said. "Running government today is in many respects a consumer-oriented business. You need to think about how you do the best work for consumers at lower cost."

Sounding like a Fortune 500 CEO despite his background as a district attorney, Ritter realized the state government lacked access to centralized information for making sound decisions and needed simple enterprise services for taxpayers to use and make government function better. Attention to Colorado's IT problems is now a top priority.

Enter Locatis

Ritter braced for the challenge by doing three things: creating an IT Transition Committee made up of public- and private-sector technology experts; hiring Mike Locatis to be his CIO; and making the CIO a Cabinet-level position.

Public-sector IT leaders rarely follow identical career paths. They can be career public servants, such as Dan Ross in Missouri or David Wennergren in the Department of Defense. Some come directly from the private sector, try to set things right and move on. But increasingly, government CEOs, especially tech-savvy governors and mayors, are choosing CIOs who have a blend of private- and public-sector experience. People like Teri Takai, Steve Fletcher, Vivek Kundra and Paul Cosgrave immediately come to mind.

That's where Locatis comes in. Before his Cabinet appointment in Colorado, he was CIO of Denver, where he showed his centralization skills (and caught Ritter's attention) by consolidating 20 separate municipal and county departments into a single, citywide IT agency. It's also where Locatis learned how fragmented the state's IT systems were.

"It was while I was working in local government that the issues surrounding state IT were immediately apparent because they impacted how services were delivered at the local level," he said.

Before becoming a public-sector CIO, Locatis was the senior director of enterprise technology strategy for Time Warner Cable Inc., part of Time Warner Inc., a Fortune 50 company and the country's largest entertainment firm. Locatis honed his skills at aligning customer-service delivery systems, standardizing desktop capabilities and managing tech and support teams for huge enterprise resource planning applications.

Despite Locatis' knowledge of the state's IT systems' problems, he wasn't expecting the mammoth job he faced. "It was significantly siloed and fragmented IT delivery, which was a root cause of a lot of the issues - including inefficiencies, a lack of leveraging an enterprise approach and just about every [IT] department in the state doing its own thing," he said.

Ritter's IT Transition Committee delivered an even sterner message regarding the state's IT problems. "It was a message about real problems and issues," recalled Locatis. Some challenges were both agency- and project-specific, such as the $223 million Colorado Benefits Management System, which still wasn't functioning properly after four years of work. But the biggest shortcoming was how the state invested its $256 million annual IT budget .

Like the rest of the public sector,