Ex-CIO Shares His Experiences

Recent accusations that Morgan Stanley executives received sports tickets and other favors from IT vendors with which they did business have revived the debate over where to draw the line in dealing with tech vendors. Peter Quinn, former CIO of the state of Massachusetts, knows what it feels like to be embroiled in vendor controversy. He was falsely accused of unethical behavior on the job. Quinn, who was appointed CIO of the state in 2002, says controversy began about a year after he took the job, once he and his boss, Eric Kriss, then the administration and finance secretary, decided it would be in the state's best interest to embrace open standards, including open source and later the OpenDocument Format. "We were really focused on changing the landscape of technology in the commonwealth," Quinn says.

Is your hand out for favors? Shame on you, Quinn says.

Massachusetts was one of the first states to publicly support open source software and the only state to embrace open standards for its electronic documents, Quinn says. But the move wasn't popular among vendors such as Microsoft or those offering products built on Microsoft's proprietary platforms. "The noise started early, and there was clearly lobbying by opponents to OpenDocument," he says. "In the private sector, vendors who don't like something go to the CFO or president. But in the political sector, they go to the governor's office or reach across the aisle to the legislature," he says. While the controversy heated up, Quinn was invited to participate on panels and in discussions about open standards, open source, and ODF at industry and government events. He traveled to about a dozen out-of-state conferences, including some put on by magazines and other state governments. Quinn unveiled the formal ODF policy in September 2005, which said that by Jan. 1, 2007, all electronic documents in Massachusetts' executive branch would comply with the OpenDocument Format. Soon after that announcement, the Boston Globe reported that there were questions about whether his trips to some conferences had been authorized. In The Clear A state investigation, including a review of two years of expense reports, attendance records, and authorization forms, exonerated the CIO late last year. The trips were paid for by "neutral parties," like an independent publication, not vendors, Quinn says. Trips to speak at government conferences, such as in New Mexico and Canada, were paid by those governments. Quinn says he never extended the trips longer than the speaking engagement required. For a conference in August, he took a late flight from Boston to San Francisco, spoke at the conference the next day, and caught a red-eye flight home, missing only the one day of work and "never taking a dollar of expense reimbursement." The "personal character assassinations " were difficult, says Quinn, who hadn't worked in government before, outside of holding a budget committee seat for a number of years in Lyndeborough, N.H., and serving one year as a selectman there.

Although Quinn was cleared of charges, the allegations had taken "a mental and physical toll," he says. "I clearly wanted to spare my family any more of this baloney. Also, it was difficult to get anything done. I had become a lightning rod." So, in mid-December, he disclosed his resignation and left the post a few weeks later, in January. "We were always very careful who paid for things," he says. Even when he attended Red Sox and Patriot games with Verizon, "I paid for my own tickets," he says. Same holds true when he went golfing with friends who worked at vendors. "I always wrote a check for the green fees," he says. "We wanted to be as vendor neutral as possible; we spent a lot of time thinking about it," he says. "We didn't do everything perfect, but we tried to be as clean as possible." Scrutiny in the government is more intense than in the private sector, where there is generally more leeway with vendor relationships. "It's the nature of the beast--you end up with great friends at vendors. But it's always significant not to solicit" favors, he says. "If your hand is open to solicit for yourself, shame on you." Set The Moral Compass Early Since resigning from his job, he's still on the public speaking circuit, talking about open source and standards-based technologies, including a recent trip to Australia. He also shares his experiences with younger people, including inner-city kids who belong to a Boston program called Year Up, which provides mentoring, internships, and technology training to help young adults land jobs. "I tell these kids that the moral compass starts early," he says. "If you pad your expense reports, then your time sheets, you'll start developing an attitude that 'the company owes me,' and move on to bigger stuff," he says. "You don't want to do that." Later this month, Quinn relocates to Columbus, Ohio, to start a new job as a senior VP of business systems at Bisys Group, a hedge fund firm. There, he'll work with shareholder record-keeping systems, strategy, and operations, and will report to an executive VP on the business side of the company, rather than its CIO. The job takes Quinn back to his roots in IT in the financial services industry. Before taking the CIO post in Massachusetts, he had worked at credit card companies and banks. Quinn is looking forward to getting back into business IT, rather than just speaking about it. Says Quinn, "I want to be a practitioner, not just a talking head."