How collaboration software unites IT staff across Oklahoma

“Labor omnia vincit” is Oklahoma’s state motto; translated from Latin, it means “Work Conquers All Things.” If there’s any organization that serves as a testament to this motto, it’s Oklahoma’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services.

In 2010, Oklahoma conducted a feasibility study of its IT departments and their subsequent budgets and needs. The study recommended the following action items;

• Integrating Oklahoma’s 1,500 geographically and bureaucratically segregated IT positions;
• Creating a bond of $100 million dollars for a consolidation effort;
• Migrating all existing IT budgets into one single budget (for what would become OMES), equaling about $233 million/year.

Unfortunately, neither the bond money nor the IT budget migration ended up happening. What was called the “unification” became an unfunded mandate. OK House Bill 1304: The Information Technology Consolidation and Coordination Act, passed in 2011, officially formed OMES.

OMES in 2012: “The Rapture”

Once OMES was formed, the office had one arduous task to take on after another. OMES staff refers to this tumultuous period as “The Rapture,” as they were faced with reconciling the following issues:

• Unifying all IT staff from various state agencies under OMES;
• Performing 78 legislatively-mandated mergers and acquisitions by June 30th, 2017;
• Picking up an additional 38 volunteer mergers and acquisitions from companies that wanted organization to take them over—  altogether, that’s a merger every other week!
• Performing 2,000 agency-specific and state-wide system enhancements;
• Completing 1,300 agency-specific and state-wide IT projects.

“The first few years of consolidation and unification were definitely full of lessons for us as a young agency,” said State Chief Information Officer Bo Reese. “I came on as interim CIO after my agency had gone through IT consolidation and I felt coming into the interim CIO position that my perspective, as a former OMES customer, was valuable as I could see both side of the process and try to help employees find the right touch that the effort needed.”

Operations & Intelligence Brief: “The Secret Sauce”

OMES needed a way to bring employees together and build morale quickly. Enter Microsoft’s Skype for Business. The technology provided what they needed to unite their employees from across the state and to solve problems in real time. Via Skype for Business, OMES started holding a daily meeting—the Operations & Intelligence Brief (O&I).

Every day at 10 a.m. sharp, the O&I Skype for Business meeting begins by addressing the most pressing cases of the day. Employees can use the chat bar to solve issues in real time. Attendance isn’t mandatory, but it is open to the entire organization. These meetings also enable employees who feel disjointed to speak candidly with management; the meetings make them feel like they are part of a team. The O&I meetings have been essential to the unification process and directly contributed to the massive successes of OK OMES.

“I’ve seen the difference the O&I meetings have made in terms of the team responding to issues both large and small,” said OMES Director Denise Northrup. “To have a set time for the whole division to air out problems and find possible interconnected issues that they might have missed individually has transformed the way OMES responds to our customers.”

This transformation isn’t just being recognized in Oklahoma. Other states are taking notice too. “I’m actually having this conversation a lot with other states around the Operations & Intelligence Brief. All of them want to know what the secret sauce is…Those are the conversations to get us talking about Skype and O365,” Matt Singleton explains. OMES is getting the word out about their O&I meetings, too, through the follow-up to Team of Teams called One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams by Chris Fussell. There’s an entire case study that features the OK OMES and their O&I meetings in Chapter 4: Interconnection.

Why Microsoft? What the OK OMES was looking for after “The Rapture”

After the “Rapture” and the implementation of the O&I meetings, OMES still had a long way to go in uniting its offices. Across all locations, issues related to outdated technology, security compliances, and incongruences in tech-knowledge still needed to be addressed.
Ashton Carmichael, Strategic Initiative Specialist at OMES, says, “The key word is stabilization.” To stabilize their offices, they turned to Microsoft yet again, this time leveraging Azure and Office 365.

With an infrastructure in Azure and an Office 365 rollout across offices, OMES is limiting hardware, driving down costs, and meeting security and compliance requirements. “We’ll pass the 50% mark of all of our state agencies on 365 by mid-summer [2018],” says Carmichael. “No doubt, if anyone is having trouble with their O365, they can bring it up at the next O&I meeting.”

The OMES mission is to support its partners through unified business services and a highly-qualified workforce that is committed to making government run in the most efficient, innovative manner possible. Partnership with Microsoft has helped fulfill this mission by pairing forward-thinking professionals with technology solutions that fit the present and future needs of the State of Oklahoma.

In not quite 7 years, OMES has unified 1,200 employees with Skype, built an infrastructure on Azure, and started rolling out Office 365. “I’m incredibly proud of what this team has done over the last six years,” Singleton says. “When you look at the totality of the work that was being done, this organization was bringing home a major milestone every 13 hours. Not business hours. Every 13 calendar hours this organization brought home a major deliverable.”

But as Singleton explains, “I left out the biggest metric. We did all of this work; got a whole bunch of stuff done with no money; and actually saved the state of Oklahoma $372 million through the course of this.” It’s no wonder other states, authors, booksellers, etc. are starting to take notice—OMES is the definition of an underdog who continues to conquer obstacles through hard work, and everyone loves a good underdog story.