Former Mass. CIO says job became too political

30.01.2006
In his former job as CIO for the state of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn was thrust into the spotlight when he spearheaded an initiative to move state agencies away from proprietary formats for storing documents.

Quinn increasingly found himself defending the plan to adopt the XML-based Open Document Format in the face of opposition from Microsoft Corp. and a collection of legislators, government officials and special interest groups.

Last week, he spoke with Computerworld about his decision to resign as CIO, effective earlier this month.

Quinn cited factors such as the removal of IT projects from a pending bond bill, an amendment to an economic stimulus bill that would shift authority for making major IT policy and procurement decisions from the CIO to a new task force and a review of out-of-state trips he took to speak at technology conferences. (The review, which was launched after The Boston Globe began investigating the trips, showed that Quinn didn't violate any conflict-of-interest standards or other rules.) Excerpts from the interview follow:

What triggered your resignation? The bond bill was going to get reported out of the [state] legislature for highway [projects] and for buildings, but not for IT. This was the last thing that happened just before Christmas. ...So, enough is enough for me.

What was beginning to happen was all the good IT projects were, in fact, either going to be stopped or marginalized because I had become a lightning rod for a great deal of opposition. And these were things that really had no relationship to me.