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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 05/2/05 issue

Course Correction

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

Tony Cicco tuned his management style and helped turn around GAO’s IT shop

Everything Anthony Cicco Jr. needed to know about managing people he learned from cleaning the computer room.

When the Government Accountability Office CIO first joined the Air Force in the early 1970s, he and his fellow cadets wanted to impress his officer in charge by “GI-ing the computer room.”

“We would scrub and wax the floors over the weekend so when our officer came in Monday, he would see it done and be proud of us for not having to ask us,” Cicco said. “That officer and several others instilled the value of motivation into us. We wanted to come to work and clean the computer room because we cared about our jobs.”

Those youthful lessons help Cicco manage the technology infrastructure used by 3,200 employees in offices from Washington to Huntsville, Ala., to Denver to Seattle.

Cicco is responsible for a network used to analyze data on nearly every subject imaginable, support reviews of large procurements such as weapons systems and manage the risks of GAO auditors working remotely.

All of this is done with a staff of 87 full-time GAO IT employees and about 200 contractor staff members, most of them from Lockheed Martin Corp. and SRA International Inc. of Arlington, Va. And on an IT budget of $46 million in fiscal 2005.

“We put in a lot of hours so there is minimal disruption to our customers,” he said. “At GAO, I realized people get the job done, and sometimes we don’t necessarily put time and resources into the people like we should. I’ve found that motivating the staff to get on board with the values of the organization has drastically improved our support.”

Cicco had a lot of improvement to take on when he became CIO in 1999. GAO employees consistently rated the IT shop’s customer service as poor—between 40 percent and 50 percent of those surveyed said IT was the agency’s most significant support problem. The network infrastructure also was fraught with problems such as disparate computing platforms, unreliable Internet connections and firewall protection and old e-mail programs.

“We were everyone’s big problem and we got in the way of everyone doing work,” said John Regan, GAO’s chief architect. “Tony came down on us like a ton of bricks. He didn’t trust the staff to do it right the first time.”

New direction

But as the customer support improved and the network evolved, Cicco changed his management style. He stopped berating people in public and micromanaging every project. Cicco developed a management style that focuses on listening, communicating and giving employees the freedom to come up with ways to solve their problems.

More news on related topics: Great Managers, IT Infrastructure, IT Management



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