This past week, Luis Arocho, Puerto Rico’s Chief Information Officer announced his resignation. He will be replaced by the current Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), Glorimar Ripoll, who will fill both positions.

In firms included in ‘Fortune 500’ these positions are very different jobs. In addition to a CIO and a CINO, there is a Chief Security Officer, Chief Development Officer and Chief Data Officer. Each of these positions requires a different set of experiences, skills, and personnel. It is unlikely that a candidate has all five qualities, although it is possible to have some of them.

The issue in Puerto Rico is that much of this responsibility falls on the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) who then delegates responsibility to the Associate Director of Government Information Technology (TIG) through the Electronic Government Act of 2004. Neither the OMB director nor TIG Director respond to either the CIO or the CINO, yet they are mostly responsible for negotiating multi-year contracts with Microsoft, Oracle and the like, where the CIO can be completely marginalized without any authority to question or renegotiate the terms.

The recruitment of technical personnel in OMB has been in decline since mid-2014. The heads of infrastructure, cybersecurity, database (budget management) and programming (the only one that OMB had), among many others, have left. To counteract the loss of personnel, they have outsourced critical skills by delegating to consultants and suppliers. As OMB bleeds from institutional knowledge, it becomes progressively less informed about the services it purchases from those suppliers. In a short time, the officials with little experience in the specialty that they are buying, resort to the continuous agreements with the suppliers that seemed to work well enough the last time. This is how the contracts of 4 years and 9 figures are born, increasing more than 20% while the internal capacity vanishes.

Luis Arocho knew how delicate the situation was with the OMB technology team. He had requested to meet after my departure in May 2015 to better understand the situation and structure a working group. Among my recommendations, I told him that the challenge of digital transformation was to overcome inertia. First off, you need a political leader to support you (Luis had Rosselló), budget to recruit a good team and a clear mission. It is essential to put these conditions before committing. You need a team to execute on quick initial goals to generate momentum for what is a very ambitious long-term mission.

Seeking to solidify the work team, Arocho recommended Vivian Graubard, who worked at the US Digital Service, as director of PRITS. Graubard came to meet with Rosselló in Puerto Rico, who extended the offer. She offered to take the role underder the condition that she could start in March but the governor and Luis both said that was not possible.

As other people joined the team, it was right at the beginning Rosselló’s term that external pressures began to be felt, leading to the resignation of the Treasury CIO at that time, Jose Luis de Jesús. I will never forget the words of Luis Arocho, when he told me in less than 100 days of the new administration; ‘I have to throw Treasury at a loss and focus on other agencies.’

This brings us to Glorimar, who is now; Director of PRITS, CIO and CINO, without any type of authority in Law. She will seek to do the best job possible within the straitjacket she is wearing. For now, the similarities between PRITS and the US Digital Service only begin and end in the organization’s logo.

*The author was Chief Information Officer during the García Padilla Administration. Taken from his blog.