Clark Kelso, California's CIO

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Kelso and other state IT leaders are hoping to change that by persuading the Legislature to approve a massive state technology overhaul next year. The proposed new enterprise resource planning system, called FI$Cal, will integrate budgeting, accounting, procurement and human resources into a single system, giving state employees greater understanding of — and control over — the budgeting process and other governmental operations.

FI$Cal will take almost $1.4 billion to install and implement in phases over the next decade, involving roughly 100 state entities and 691 staff positions, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Much of the work, Kelso says, will lie not just in making sure the software and hardware work properly but in teaching longtime state bureaucrats to change how they do their jobs on a daily basis. Institutional change, he says, is often harder than technological change.

The state, he says, learned this the hard way in the 1990s with a series of well-publicized technology project failures, linked at least in part to a failure by state agencies to adapt their processes. “You can have a perfectly good technology system, but if you haven’t taken care of the people, the system won’t work for you,” he says. “It was a hard set of lessons the state learned.”

Kelso’s job is not necessarily to directly oversee the implementation of this project and others but rather to help guide them by fostering coordination between state agencies and providing a strategic vision to the governor’s office. He has no staff and no agency to oversee.

No Staff, No Problem

The position of state CIO is probably one of the more unusual leadership postings in state government because there simply is no such thing as the state Department of Information Technology for him to run anymore.

When the Oracle scandal broke in 2002, the department, known as DOIT, was nearing the end of a sunset period spelled out in the legislation creating the agency in 1995. And a series of project failures in the 1990s, topped by the Oracle debacle, left the Legislature in no mood to continue its existence.

So Kelso’s first task in office was to essentially disband his agency and try to help its 70 to 80 employees land jobs elsewhere in state government. Now, IT functions are handled internally within every major state agency, meaning there are dozens of individual CIOs who run their own systems, many of which don’t work with each other.

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