Task force: State needs an IT head

Aug. 28--The state needs a top IT official with enough authority and accountability to turn around a highly publicized series of wasteful and failed projects, a committee of lawmakers and private sector computer experts agreed Monday.

The 16-member Task Force on Information Technology Failures was called by Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, in March only days after the Wisconsin State Journal reported that the state of Wisconsin had spent more than $170 million in state and federal money on dubious projects.

Echoing the comments of nearly all of the task force members, private member Steve Haroldson said that the state needed someone who could be held accountable for mistakes. That meant a top computer official -- a chief information officer -- with the authority and resources needed to provide effective oversight of the state 's vast spending on computer projects and resources, said Haroldson, a former CIO at the Madison financial firm CUNA Mutual Group.

"We need a state CIO. It needs to be at the level of someone reporting to the governor, " he said.

Rep. Phil Montgomery, R-Ashwaubenon, the chairman of the task force, said the issue was at the top of what the committee had found in its review of IT failures over the summer. Rep. Sue Jeskewitz, R-Menomonee Falls, said no one was held responsible for the mistakes that occurred across different state agencies, boards and gubernatorial administrations.

"Nobody seems to have been accountable for all of our mishaps, " said Jeskewitz, who helped preside over a blistering state audit last spring that identified widespread problems with the state computer systems.

In the past, the state arguably had such a CIO in the top official of the state Department of Electronic Governance, a cabinet-level IT agency which was begun by Gov. Scott McCallum in 2001. But that agency was downsized and made a part of the state Department of Administration in 2003 by Gov. Jim Doyle during the severe budget crunch then.

Oskar Anderson, the current head of the Division of Enterprise Technology who is often identified as the state 's CIO, said Monday it was up to the Legislature and Doyle to decide whether his position needs more power.

Doyle spokesman Matt Canter said that Anderson didn 't need more power and noted that some of the state 's failed projects began during the time of the now eliminated Department of Electronic Government. What is needed is more expertise on computer contracting and more uniform procedures across state government, he said.

"You don 't need to create a new department and bureaucracy, " Canter said.

Anderson, who was appointed this year by Doyle, and task force members agreed the state must do a better job of setting up uniform charter documents for large IT projects that would clearly identify the official in charge who would be responsible if it fails.

Tom Andreoli, CIO of Schreiber Foods in Green Bay, said the state also needed a mechanism for more regular reporting on projects to catch problems in a more timely way.

Anderson said that he will be reporting by October to the Legislature 's audit committee on his team 's plan to fix those problems.

One difficulty in creating an empowered state CIO is that some state agencies or boards have some level of independence from Doyle, making it more difficult for a CIO or other Doyle appointee to exercise control over them, task force members noted.

Jim King, the chief executive officer of the company Skyward in Stevens Point, said the state sometimes did a poor job of describing to private contractors what it wanted in a given system, setting the stage for failure.

King, an industry veteran whose company develops software for school districts, pointed to two costly systems for handling unemployment insurance claims and taxes that the state had attempted to develop at a cost approaching $60 million. One of those projects is some four years behind schedule and work was halted on the other earlier this year.

"It was hard to get a handle on what those projects were trying to do, " King said, adding he also showed documents on the two systems to other professionals who reached similar conclusions. "I tried to read through that stuff I don 't know how many times. "

Montgomery said the committee 's eight lawmakers would now work on trying to translate the recommendations into legislation.

To see more of The Wisconsin State Journal, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.wisconsinstatejournal.com. Copyright (c) 2007, The Wisconsin State Journal Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.