No. What Rachel had was the ability to get in there and understand the problem. And the problem was that ETS had a reputation for saying yes to everything and trying to do everything with no vision of what's really a priority. People couldn't account for their time. I don't mean to say that people in ETS were slacking off, but they were just whirling around without any priorities. I know what that feels like, and my greatest desire was to bring stability to them. They knew when they came in for the day what their priorities where for that day. We always have emergencies; that's the nature of computers. But outside of emergencies, you shouldn't always be in a reactive mode, and that's what ETS had been in for a couple of years.

The challenges that we face now get to the, "I can wait you out" problem. I take the role of chief information officer very seriously. I understand my statutory responsibilities. As the chief information officer and commissioner of the Department of Administration, part of my charge from the governor is to keep costs down. I am very familiar with her philosophy of smaller government. I don't have to be told something twice. So I have to work with other commissioners to help them understand why they should support what I want when their team doesn't want what I want, but their way would cost the state more money. I think it would be very easy to marginalize a chief information officer in government, even at a cabinet level, because there are so many other issues the commissioners are dealing with. But I believe the governor has my back. It comes down to prioritizing and focusing on what's the most important thing we need to accomplish. If you don't have that, you can't move forward in good times and efficiently use all your resources.

When I hired nurse practitioners for the clinics out on the Aleutian Islands, I tried to be very truthful about the work environment: You can only get to the Alaska peninsula by boat or by plane and the wind blows all the time and it rains a lot. I almost tried to talk them out of the job. My approach then was to have them tell me they wanted the job.