Curt, the grass is not greener on the other side.
Chancellor Davis referring to the Shared Services Initiative, 2010
For the first time in my professional career, I was inheriting a real mess. The previous CIO had been fired. There were more than 40 outstanding audit findings with some of them quite serious and some of them to get the previous CIO fired. There was so little trust in system level IT that the chief financial officer had formed a shared services center without the input of IT and it was failing badly. Central IT had grown a culture of “no” and worked in isolation from the system office. Having watched the CIO be fired, morale was low. The data system was not responsive to the needs of senior leadership and needed attention. The nation was in recession and we would be taking significant budget cuts for the foreseeable future. There was no board policy governing technology at all. The two longstanding systemwide conferences were under threat of closing down. The responsibilities were statewide so I needed to split my time between the system office in Atlanta, the principal data center in Athens, and the 36 universities and colleges where the customers were. It was going to be a very challenging assignment.
Like every other job, you have to work on the hygiene issues first. Seriously, there are things that smell so bad that you can’t really work on anything else until you address those hygiene issues. Some of the audit findings were hygiene issues that required immediate attention. Some of the hygiene issues were personnel or organizational issues for employees who were better suited to employment with another organization. Some of the hygiene issues were cultural. Tackling these issues created quick wins and time for us to work on the first strategic plan for technology in the last several years.
The mess had taken years to make. It would take me years to fix it. After the hygiene issues, I need to fix the non-existent board policy regarding technology. This would require a delicate touch.
If you are reading this sequentially, the next chapter is Board Policy and Foundations.