Organizational Change

By Dick Thompson, CIO

In March, What’s New featured an article addressing organizational change. In an effort to continually communicate to OIT staff, I would like to share with you recent changes as a result of legislation, budget adjustments, and other changes to improve OIT as an organization.

First and foremost, let me address those issues that are affected due to budget considerations. Overall, OIT worked with agencies to achieve the funding for the upcoming biennium. We were very successful but some reductions were necessary overall. To that end the following items reduced each fiscal year amount as shown;

  • PC replacement was extended to an average of 60 months. Beginning July 01, 2007, all Executive Branch personal computing devices will be provided to agencies as a service from OIT. The average lifespan has now been increased to 60 months. OIT is responsible for, and committed to provision of a working device sufficient to meet the end users needs, fully operational, and with proper security protections to maintain data assets and protect infrastructure. A savings of $690,890 was created, taken from OIT’s general fund appropriations.
    • FY 08 - $690,890
    • FY 09 - $690,890
  • Strategic Planning and Policies reduction. This reduction eliminates the formal strategic planning management effort as recommended by OPEGA and committed to by OIT. Two positions and associated costs were eliminated from the OIT general fund request. The head count was not taken and can be used to provide additional data base analyst support, reducing reliance on contracted temporary staff.
    • FY 08 - $215,894
    • FY 09 - $215,894

Additional reductions were achieved by lease purchasing new development and system modifications. This is very important in order to keep systems up to date with the myriad of changes necessary on key systems.

One of the reductions listed above decreases the management staff level. The duties of the Policy and Strategic Planning (PS&P) group are being redistributed. Portfolio Management function will move to the Project Management Office under Mary Silva. Greg McNeal will facilitate the Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture planning. Strategic planning and Enterprise Systems Architecture function will be the responsibility of the Office of the CIO under Associate CIO Kathy Record, along with the remaining functions of legislative liaison, policy development, new technologies facilitation, vendor partnerships, inter-governmental partnerships, contract review and special projects.

Of note, Dan Walters, Director of the Application Services group has accepted a job with the federal government within the GIS field. The State of Maine and the citizens have benefited from his extensive championing of GIS. Thank you Dan for your years of service!

The final area of focus is in staff reassignments. In order to facilitate the growth of the “Shared Services Pool” the ADAM (Application Development and Management) group will be managed by Art Henry, reporting to Steve Campana. They currently manage developers who work across agency lines on shared projects.

I extend my thanks, admiration, and appreciation to the people who make OIT.