Edited By Mary Ellen Bradley

Profile: An Interview with Darrel Riffe
Portfolios: A business-driven model for public sector IT management
Putting some zip in the travel voucher process

Profile: An interview with Darrel Riffe

Darrel has been at the Department of Revenue for 29 years and is currently serving as Assistant Director of Information Systems. Darrel says that he will work until Year 2000 even though he is eligible to retire next year. He wants to be here to see what happens to the computer industry when January 1, 2000 comes around. I met with Darrel recently and asked him some questions.

I was born and grew up in Chehalis. I attended Chehalis High School and following graduation went to Centralia Community College. I received an AA degree in data processing from Centralia in 1968. I got a job with the Department of Revenue to rewrite programs for the new IBM 360. When I started work, Revenue had nine positions in IS — five managers and four programmers.

In high school, math and accounting were my favorite subjects. A high school teacher recommended that I try data processing.

Also, the high school let seniors out of school for one day to visit a college. I, of course, wanted the day off and visited a friend at Centralia College. While there I took a test that indicated I would be good at data processing.

After I graduated, I took the job at Revenue. My original intentions were to stay for two years and then go to the big money. It turns out that I enjoyed the work and loved the area and decided to stay.

I never intended to go into management either. I wanted to be technical. At one point, I had a job where I had to be a manager and after trying it, I discovered I liked it.

I believe that state organizations need to use technology to do "more with less." We are all facing budget cuts. IS needs to provide the right set of solutions.

What are the problems that you see with technology and government?

Technology is becoming increasingly complex and the rate of change makes it difficult to make decisions. Technology just has not stabilized and a choice made today may change tomorrow.

We have to make things work together — LANs, WANs, Internet, Intranet, PCS, mainframes and client/server. We have more vendors involved and they often don’t work well together. The state needs a new acquisition policy that stresses partnerships instead of competition. We may need to establish relationships with fewer vendors.

Also, IS is costing more and more. We need to make sure we are getting return on our dollars.

Really there are three:

1. Recruiting and retaining staff. The state is losing highly trained and skilled people to private industry.
2. The ability to handle user expectations. Users are pushing us to develop more applications, more quickly. They are trying to use technology to their benefit but we do not have the staff to develop everything that everyone wants.
3. Making sure that we are doing the right things. IS is very expensive now and we need to prioritize better.

My work on the UBI (Unified Business Identifier Project). This is a common registration system for businesses. We began work on it in 1986 and put it into production in January 1987. Several agencies (Revenue, Department of Licensing, Employment Security, Secretary of State, Labor and Industry and OFM) all worked together to make this project happen. It is still working today. It is convenient and easy to use. Revenue was responsible for programming the system.

Yes, my wife also works at Revenue. We have two boys age 12 and 9.

Darrel is currently the chair of the Customer Advisory Board (CAB) for the Department of Information Services. He has been on the IPMA board for many years.

His hobbies are motorcycles, cars, hunting and fishing. Darrel also devotes time as the 4th grade coach for baseball and is the director of Timberline Little League Baseball.

—Mary Ellen Bradley

Portfolios: A business-driven model for public sector IT management

By Paul Taylor, DIS Senior Policy Analyst

The Information Services Board (ISB) has adopted a new framework for the stewardship of the state’s information technology (IT) resources. Portfolio-based IT Management and Oversight, as the new model is known, will provide agencies with a comprehensive approach to managing technology assets and improving success rates of individual projects.

The challenge in IT oversight has been to move beyond the default position of crisis management, where extraordinary effort is expended to correct a faltering project, to a process of coordinating new projects as part of a larger IT portfolio. The portfolio model represents the natural evolution of IT management and oversight – and represents the next generation of agency IT planning and performance measures.

While the implementation strategy is still being developed in collaboration with the public sector IT community, there is general agreement on a set of guiding principles. The portfolio approach requires a sound business case to justify the investment of taxpayer funds on any new project, an assessment of the impact of the proposed system on the existing IT infrastructure, the disciplined use of preventative measures to mitigate risk, and the leveraging of private-sector expertise as needed.

Portfolios will be reviewed to identify areas of duplication of effort or infrastructure and inconsistencies with the statewide direction. Portfolio-based oversight would remove much of the burden of a paper-intensive reporting process while placing a premium on activities that help ensure success.

The portfolio approach provides context for decisions about technology made by the ISB, state executives, the public-sector IT community and, by extension, the Legislature, such that:

• Agency heads bring executive focus to IT investments and the Information Services Board (ISB) engages new projects earlier in the development process.
• The development and deployment of IT is driven by the clearly defined business needs of an agency in serving citizens and fulfilling its legislative mandate.
• Large projects are broken into smaller, more easily managed projects with each phase adding value on its own without committing funding authorities to subsequent phases.

The portfolio model was developed through a series of iterations, including extensive work by a subcommittee of the Department of Information Services (DIS) Customer Advisory Board (CAB). Prior to ISB adoption in January 1998, the model was also reviewed by the executive cabinet, independently elected officials, key legislators and their staff. DIS plans to use a similar iterative process as it works through the implementation of the new model in consultation with key stakeholders.

Putting some zip in the travel voucher process

By Meredith Rafferty

Agencies have initiated a fresh look at how travel costs are reimbursed. In the next six months, a multi-agency steering committee and work team will examine travel practices within agencies and recommend how changes in state regulations and automation would improve travel reimbursement.

The goal is to accomplish a more timely, efficient and easily understood process of paying employees for travel and related expenses. Agencies will work with OFM to identify how travel reimbursement works within their agencies, consider how their individual practices might be improved and how they might share automated tools, and identify areas in which OFM could improve state regulations.

Agencies’ involvement will be focused through the Assistant Directors of Management and Administrative Services group. The group initiated the project because the process appears too confusing and time-consuming; "it would just seem," says Jan Jutte of the Office of the State Auditor, "that there has to be a better way." Jutte is a member of the Steering Committee along with Sadie Hawkins, OFM; Susan Hettinger, DIS; Marilyn McNeil, DOP; Bill Brookreson, Agriculture; Kathy Willis, L&I; John Erickson, Ecology; Debra Wilhelmi, IAC; and Marcy Yates, DOT.

OFM Director Dick Thompson is open to changes in OFM regulations. "If the rules translate into cumbersome procedures, then let’s consider changing them. And if the agencies decide they want to share some sort of automation, then OFM Financial Systems will be ready to help."

The project will compile specific information from three partner agencies and share the findings with others through the Assistant Directors group. Regulation changes will involve OFM’s Financial Managers Advisory Committee/Travel Committee. The three partner agencies are the Department of Transportation, Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation and Labor and Industries. The project will reach out to fiscal offices, travel coordinators, managers, travelers and others who authorize, arrange, prepare and process travel vouchers. Information can be obtained from the Project Manager, Meredith Rafferty, OFM, at (360) 664-3353 or via her e-mail meredith.rafferty@ofm.wa.gov.

The project team is researching what other agencies and organizations are doing to improve upon the familiar travel voucher process. Part of the effort will be to share best practices which agencies can implement on their own. "If the goal is improvement," says Sadie Hawkins, "then the Steering Committee wants to see that happen in many ways, all along the way."

IPMA, P.O. Box 1943, Olympia, WA 98507-1943