Three years ago, the city of Charlotte, N.C., operated with two fragmented IT divisions that were siloed, uncoordinated, and unproductive, according to CIO Jeffrey Stovall. To improve teamwork and accountability — and to become the first-choice technology collaborator for the departments they served — Stovall spearheaded a major consolidation effort, merging the two teams into one.
As a result, the city has realized a 90 percent reduction in outages since 2015 and reduced concurrent work in progress by 77 percent to streamline project delivery. It’s also been recognized twice as a Top Ten Digital City by the Center for Digital Government in the past two years.
Stovall recently won the Nonprofit CIO of the Year award from the Charlotte CIO Leadership Association. We spoke with him about the consolidation, lessons learned, the department’s ongoing goals, and more.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): What has been the most challenging part of coordinating 14 separate SMB-type departments to operate like a multi-billion-dollar enterprise?
Jeffrey Stovall: The two divisions we merged were the Office of the CIO, which resided in the city manager’s office, and the technology management division within our shared services department; that group was largely operational.
The Office of the CIO was operating more like a chief digital office than a traditional CIO’s office and was more involved in setting the overall strategy for the city and taking on some of the large projects that were necessary for modernization. The technology management division was largely doing operational support, including infrastructure and operations support that’s necessary to keep things running. The two groups had very different concepts of what their roles were, what they considered to be a good outcome, and different management structures.
It became necessary to tightly merge the strategy side of our IT organization with the on-the-ground, everyday operation side. It’s easy to implement projects that don’t have robust operational support and toss a project over the wall, expecting that the folks on the other side are going to catch it. But if you’re not tightly integrated and aligned in goals and methodologies, those approaches rarely work.
The biggest challenge we had to address wasn’t process-related, but a people issue: We had to build trust that this merger was necessary to do in order to form a really effective organization. We had to get people to work together as a team, trust one another when they didn’t always trust each other as separate organizations, and foster a real esprit de corps for the new organization that was greater than the sum of the two parts.
The people aspect of mergers and consolidations is always the most challenging thing to deal with – it’s about keeping people engaged, on board, and making sure they feel like they’re valuable contributors, even as some of their identity changes during the course of it.
TEP: What advice do you have for IT leaders going through a similar process?
Stovall: Keep people the priority. There’s always the temptation to drive synergies first and wanting to see the dollar value of a consolidation materialize as the first major result. Generally, though, those types of results are illusory if you don’t have people who are committed to carrying forth the work and the agency of the organization once you’ve finished.
It’s easy to create a broken organization that has a candy-coated shell of synergies. On the inside, you’ll find that the organization has actually rotted away because they don’t have the right level of trust. Those things ultimately deteriorate over time, even if you’re able to achieve some of the near-term goals. I think it’s always most important to pay attention to the people who are going through this process and help them make the adjustments as smoothly and as quickly as possible.
TEP: Since the consolidation, the City of Charlotte has been ranked a Top Ten Digital City in 2015 and 2016 by the Center for Digital Government. Do you think that would have been possible without the consolidation?
Stovall: The short answer is no. I don’t think these digital city awards would have been achievable because our strategy and our execution would not have been aligned for the long term. We would have had one organization that was more focused on short-term goals and achievement, and another that had a longer-term view of how to keep stuff running. We needed much more alignment between that strategy and execution for the long term in order to make the types of changes necessary to better support our business.
TEP: What are you doing internally to raise awareness about IT’s successes, and how are you working to make your organization the first choice for technology collaboration?
Stovall: Being the first-choice partner is a continuing goal for us; I don’t think we’ve fully achieved that yet. When we created our strategic plan for the city, the very first pillar was outstanding customer experience. For us, that customer experience was for the internal client, and we wanted them to be thinking about us as the first choice.
There was very little trust in the IT operations side of the business. We were experiencing frequent and sometimes severe outages, and the department was not well-known for being responsive. In some cases, the IT department was seen as presuming that we knew better than the internal clients and would disregard their feedback. We needed to reverse that and build trust that we were working in their interest.
When we start talking about our successes, they’re not measured at the end of the year – they’re day-by-day and week-by-week. We actively survey our internal client base to assess what we’re good at and what we need to improve upon. Our departments are seeing a difference in us, but we haven’t achieved all the goals we want to be their first choice every time.
To work toward that, we’re adding new services that take the burden off our departments, and are improving the reliability of services that we already have to make sure that we’re seen as a reliable partner in anything we undertake.
TEP: Talent development has been a key part of your strategy. What is one way that someone early in their IT career can stand out to management?
Stovall: The biggest thing you can do early in your career to stand out is to be seen as an exceptional team player. There’s very little that loners can accomplish in the IT field now. Being an exceptional team player brings you the reputation of being able to contribute individually, contributing to the talents of the team, and making sure the team’s goals and the team’s mission come before individual aspiration. We’re looking to succeed as an organization, as a team. Those people who are exceptional team players stand out as the ones who can serve as leaders and role models for the rest of the enterprise.
