Last week I had the genuine and meaningful honor of delivering the keynote address at the IPMA, the Information Processing Management Association, the volunteer association of state IT workers.

I deeply appreciated the invitation and hope our discussion was useful and productive. I gained a great deal, and really appreciated the deep sense of engagement that people brought to the table.

It was not surprising, of course, that many people came up to me after my remarks (about an enterprise wide strategy, data center, spending, consolidation, coordination, etc.) and fired off a series of ideas for higher quality services at lower costs. Like any and all large organizations, people struggle with the business process rules, governance guidelines and financial controls that run IT. State government is no difference than any big company in this regard.

On the drive home, I thought about how to unleash that entrepreneurial spirit that is being crushed by the institutional bureaucracy’s lack of risk taking. I asked myself the time honored management question: How can we better learn from people on the front line and hold management to a higher standard of effectiveness?

The people who work in Olympia in state IT are engaged, thoughtful, passionate, smart and insightful. They KNOW what needs to be done to seize the opportunity of this crisis. For some reason, the institutional infrastructure of government instills too much anxiety in people. We don’t celebrate risk or new ideas. We pretend that every agency is unique and no one can share technologies. It’s an old fashioned approach and most people seem to want to break out.

Here’s a small, symbolic but hopefully fun way to help unleash people’s energies:

I am today introducing and proposing a real contest for the most innovative, productive and valuable idea for improving quality of services AND/OR lowering costs for IT in Washington state government.

Here are the rules: 1) Only state IT people, or retired state IT folks are eligible; 2) Ideas must be submitted to me, on the record, at: carlyle.reuven@leg.wa.gov by June 28, 2010; 3) Ideas must be written in a standard memo format, no greater than 3 pages of text, although additional documentation and graphics, etc. are acceptable; 4) Ideas may include technical, policy, governance, financial or other high level considerations as appropriate to determine feasibility; 5) Ideas may be considered that require legislative, gubernatorial, DIS, agency, ISB or other policy changes; 6) Idea(s) must save at least $1 million in costs and/or show a measurable improvement in quality; 7) Rep. Carlyle is the sole decision maker of any and all rules and decisions, that can’t be appealed to his wife, and will award a free iPad, at his sole discretion, for the winning entry, if the quality of the entries warrant the award.

(DISCLOSURE: I’m paying for this out of my own pocket and not using public, campaign or other dollars–anyone know if there’s some silly law or rule against this idea and if I’m going to get in trouble?)

Ideas?

How to truly execute upon an enterprise wide strategy? How to share services without it being a bunch of rhetoric? How to reform governance so there is high accountability and high authority? How to save on software licensing? How to consolidate back end servers more effectively or use the cloud? How to maximize the value and ROI of the state data center? How to improve service level agreement quality? How to reduce costs among small agencies? And so much more.

Washington state IT employees: Won’t you join me in having a little fun and experimenting with some new ideas?

Your partner in service,

Reuven.