IT leaders go public

Seeking challenge, some go to government work from private sector.

Art Stephens began his career as a programmer at Accenture and worked his way up the ranks, eventually heading Deloitte Consulting's office in Harrisburg, Pa. But when an opportunity arose to stray from his successful, private-sector career path and move into the commonwealth of Pennsylvania's CIO position, Stephens jumped at the chance.

Part of the reason, Stephens felt, was that as he climbed the corporate ladder, he had been dragged increasingly away from the IT consulting work he loved into an administrative role where he dealt with sales and personnel management more than with networks and servers. He welcomed the chance to take on a more technology-focused responsibility.

In addition, Stephens had a growing desire to serve his community.

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Art Stephens began his career as a programmer at Accenture and worked his way up the ranks, eventually heading Deloitte Consulting's office in Harrisburg, Pa. But when an opportunity arose to stray from his successful, private-sector career path and move into the commonwealth of Pennsylvania's CIO position, Stephens jumped at the chance.

Part of the reason, Stephens felt, was that as he climbed the corporate ladder, he had been dragged increasingly away from the IT consulting work he loved into an administrative role where he dealt with sales and personnel management more than with networks and servers. He welcomed the chance to take on a more technology-focused responsibility.

In addition, Stephens had a growing desire to serve his community.

"I took a very significant pay cut to make this change," says Stephens, who was appointed deputy secretary of IT by Pennsylvania's Gov. Edward Rendell in 2003 and accepted an appointment as one of the governor's deputy chiefs of staff last June. Stephens' duties in his new position include the general oversight of IT.

Although one usually thinks of people moving from the public sector into better-paying corporate jobs, there also is significant movement in the other direction. Pennsylvania is just one of a handful of states - the others are Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland and Massachusetts - that have private-sector-professionals-turned-public-servants leading their IT divisions, according to the National Association of State CIOs.

"It feels good to give back ... to know that you're making a difference," Stephens says.

It's that type of altruism that is the primary motivator for many IT professionals who have given up lucrative private-sector positions for public-sector responsibilities. Robert McFarland, who heads up IT in the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C., for example, had spent his entire career in the private sector, including a long stint at Dell. He came out of retirement last year to accept his appointment by President George Bush as the VA's assistant secretary for IT.

"There are a couple stimulators that get people talking about working for ... government. One is a sense of public service, not unlike a calling to be a priest," says Peter Metzger, vice chairman of executive search firm Christian & Timbers in Washington, D.C. "The other piece, which is of equal importance, is the enormous responsibility that one gets."

McFarland, for example, notes that there are 230,000 people working for the VA, with more than 6,000 IT employees and a $2 billion IT budget.

"No matter what I did in the private sector, there are very few places I could have been that would have been as large and as complex as this one," he says.

Peter Quinn, CIO of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, agrees, saying that IT professionals likely will find more diversity in the types of projects they lead in the public sector, simply because of government's broader focus.

"You deal with everything from state police to jails to collecting taxes to welfare, the whole gamut of services," says Quinn, who had been CIO of Boston Financial Services before accepting the Massachusetts CIO position in 2002. "You get to work at the courts, Legislature - the variety of the job becomes very compelling."