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Build a foundation, then reorganize
Not everyone was pleased. "You had the optimistic types, the young aggressive employees, who were jumping for joy," explains Kellen. "Then you had the skeptical crowd, saying uh-huh, where have we heard this before?"
The organizational and architecture design was done by the true believers; the skeptics critiqued and honed the plans. "The goal," Kellen says, "was to give everyone a voice."
It was a tortuous process, largely because Kellen eschewed cookie-cutter solutions in favour of a more agile organizational design built around idiosyncrasies. "It drove HR nuts," he says. "But we worked through it."
Four years in, IT has shifted. "Now we're very focused on the future," he says.
Behen of Washtenaw County took an even more drastic approach. When he became IT director, he fired everyone on his staff of 45. Half left for good; the rest applied for 34 jobs with new descriptions.
The idea was to get the most qualified, enthusiastic people on board. Behen attracted outside talent by offering salaries comparable to private-sector ones and selling the value of public service.
By 2004, "it really started clicking. We started expanding services to local units of government," says Behen. "Because we had a top-notch IT department, I could go out as CIO and start working on big, innovative projects."
3. Then, look outside
Like most transformative innovation, the idea came from outside. In fact, Washtenaw's wireless initiative came over a cup of coffee that Behen had with a local software entrepreneur.
Roughly two-thirds of the county did not have broadband access, and telecom companies weren't likely to cover much more of its 720 square miles. The Ann Arbor area had value for vendors, but there was no ROI for them in the more rural, western area. Behen left convinced the county should offer wireless to all.
He began talking to stakeholders in and outside of government. Within 18 months, he had worked a deal with a local contractor to trade free wireless connectivity for access to municipal and county assets on which to place their broadcast equipment. The county board of commissioners gave its blessing, and the project was under way.
Kellen's idea to move DePaul to a Web-services environment also came from looking outside; in this case, to vendors.
"Distributed computing historically has been difficult," Kellen says. "Web services promised to make it much simpler, which would mean IT agility and nimbleness."
In 2003, there was little movement toward SOA in university environments. But Kellen, a former Internet consultant, knew software vendors were investing in the technology. "If that's what they're spending R&D on, that's what the future is going to look like," he says. "It was a no-brainer."
DePaul is now one of the leaders in the use of Web services in higher education. "We're insisting on it for everything," says Kellen. SOA itself is opaque to university leaders, but they like the results, he adds. "They want us to get their work done, and we're doing that faster."
Looking outside his enterprise also worked for Scott Sullivan, vice-president of information technology and services for Pitt Ohio Express. Sullivan's boss wanted him to explore mobile computing and figure out how it would fit into Pitt Ohio's business.
Sullivan looked outside trucking to what was going on in the parcel delivery space. "FedEx and UPS give their customers real-time status of their deliveries," he says. "We wanted to apply that to our industry."
The PeopleNet effort, begun within Pitt Ohio's IT business systems group, didn't stay there for long. Now, Sullivan says, "We're breaking down paradigms. We're one of the few in this industry able to track where a shipment is at any given time within the supply chain."
4. Finally, share the risk
Innovation carries risk. The bigger the change, the bigger the risk. For Behen, the biggest risk with Washtenaw's wireless initiative was the very scary one that it just wouldn't work. The county wanted to lead the effort, but just because it was out front didn't mean it had to go it alone.
The key was getting others involved, including the University of Michigan, which put its own people on the project. "If you're going to do something this extensive, with multiple stakeholders, you not only need to get buy-in, you need to get them to put forward some kind of resources," says Behen.
Washtenaw is on track to cover the county by early 2008. It will help bridge the digital divide that separates big government and small towns in the area, and will result in further business innovation. "We've talked to top-seven automakers, hospitals, software companies," says Behen. "They've all got plans spinning off of this."
Pitt Ohio's Sullivan is always concerned about the risk of IT-driven initiatives. "I'm leery of innovating from the IT side," he says. "You have to bring the business along."
His mobile computing project started out with plans to pilot the systems in the company's Pittsburgh terminal. Sullivan built a cross-functional business team to get to proof of concept and worked with terminal employees to refine the system.
Within the first year, drivers and dispatchers were so happy with the system that they asked to keep it even if it didn't go enterprise-wide.
Meanwhile, project leaders discovered that customers wanted the new capabilities ... yesterday. And not just in Pittsburgh. Other departments, from safety to vehicle maintenance to finance, indicated more could be gained if the PeopleNet application were integrated with other core systems.
What began as an exploration into how one off-the-shelf product could be applied to existing business processes turned into a transformational integration project. And the timeframe for the mobile implementation shrank from 18 months to less than six.
"There was tremendous risk in that," says Sullivan. "Logistically, it seemed impossible." But the project had morphed from IT R&D to business necessity.
"It was more than IT with skin in the game," says Sullivan. "The business units wanted to make it successful. That's the key to innovation."
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