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.
I might have set the priorities, but these [projects that were to be funded through the bond bill] were for other agencies and for things that are really needed in the commonwealth, like a new taxpayer system and a new Registry of Motor Vehicles system.
I always had a couple of goals. One was that I wanted IT to be apolitical, and it was now becoming a huge political football.
And, two, the kind of things that I took the job to do in the state were not things I was spending my time on anymore. I was spending my time on political stuff, and it's not really where I wanted to devote all my energies. It wasn't going to really advance the agenda of the good IT work that was being done.
So I thought, at the end of the day, I was becoming too much of an impediment to things, and I wasn't enjoying it anymore.
And then the whole investigation and that type of stuff -- it definitely took its toll on me from a personal standpoint and a family standpoint, and I just didn't want to continue to do that.
Did you feel that the opposition to you was spreading? It was spreading to people that aren't fluent in the IT area and, for the most part, don't know me from a hole in the wall.
What do you think is going to happen to the Open Document initiative? You're not there anymore. Your former boss, who also championed the project, is gone as well. Gov. Mitt Romney has pledged to move forward, but he isn't running for re-election. The opposition could just stall and throw it all out, couldn't they? You know, it could happen.
But on the other side, we asked for something very simple. We asked to have formats that were unimpeded by proprietary restrictions and licenses, and we asked people to adhere to recognized standards bodies. It's not something that's totally unreasonable at all.