The Billion-Dollar Client That Was Too Small

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The December 2004 Baseline features a column by Rock Regan, who was CIO of the state of Connecticut when it was working on a $1.4 billion, seven-year contract to contract the state's IT operations.

"Turn a Negative into a Positive" shares a telling story in which Mr. Regan was in an office with John Rowland, then governor of the state, talking on the phone with Dick Brown, the chairman of EDS, the top contender for the contract. Mr. Brown offered up a bit of confusing data, then after the call, called back to say he'd gotten the information mixed up with a project they were working on with New Zealand.

"This was a billion-dollar-plus deal; they had confused us with another customer," bemoans Mr. Regan.

The state eventually used the data they'd derived during their RFP process to turn around IT. But in the process Mr. Regan and his ideas faced opposition from unionized IT workers and department managers fighting to preserve the status quo. Good, short read.