Charting a New Course as a CIO

Paul Williams, Chief Information Officer, Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority

Paul Williams, Chief Information Officer, Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority

Whether in the public or private sector, it is a rare opportunity for any chief information officer to set a completely new course for the technology that serves as the nerve center for all business operations. When I joined the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) in 2015, I quickly realized that a full migration would be necessary.

In 2014, just prior to my arrival at ABC, an independent review of the agency's systems concluded that much of what was in place was not capable of supporting the business operation. Within Virginia’s IT services provider environment, Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA), ABC had allowed the majority of its systems to fall into obsolescence, and a major renewal and re-investment was needed.

Virginia ABC had not successfully implemented a major project for some time; the largest project on deck was an enterprise resource planning (ERP) replacement that had been three years in getting to defined requirements. To facilitate a more nimble and business-focused approach appropriate for a retailer, in 2018, the business operations of ABC needed to be converted from those of a state agency to an authority with greater autonomy and the capability to set its own direction (including technology). The initial proposal was for a clean technology break on becoming an authority – but with $9 million of annual costs flowing through VITA, this had to be modified to more orderly migration.

ABC created its own active directory in 2017 and implemented Oracle Fusion (ERP – Financials) with a planned launch on July 1, 2018. Phase two addressed user management and support; phase three was infrastructure. ABC absorbed identity management, PC management, and support and migrated mail from the State Exchange instance to O365. This included being able to apply multifactor authentication with Microsoft and Duo – and ABC’s own domain (VirginiaABC.com). This facilitated significant security and useability improvements – changing from a State Device centric to a User-centric environment. We could give users new machines, and their data and applications would load as part of their login/profile. The move to O365 was fortuitous – we had teams and near 100 percent remote capability set up just as the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020. During the pandemic, we replaced the entire WAN, moving to a Meraki-centric software-defined network that has proven to be incredibly reliable and resilient over the last four years. Our new POS was deployed into that new network – at about 50 percent of the initial estimated costs – as well as enterprise VOIP through 8x8. Other major projects included moving Virginia ABC’s Headquarters to a new building and renewing the newly constructed distribution center technology with Manhattan open systems.

And we aren’t done yet. We still have three major areas that require work, but we have transformed into a hybrid enterprise over the past seven years. Now, most of our major systems are SaaS-based or cloud-hosted and continuously maintained under vendor support contracts. We minimize investment in hardware, storage, and software purchases other than where absolutely necessary for retail or distribution center support. We have consistently maintained better than 99.9 percent enterprise uptime and are able to keep our systems current.

About the author

Paul Williams serves as Virginia ABC’s chief information officer. Prior to joining ABC in 2015, Williams was an interim CIO for Bowlmor AMF, the largest operator of bowling centers in the world. Before that, he served as CIO or vice president of information technology for several other companies, including children's clothing retailer The Children's Place and Alvarez & Marsal Holdings Inc. Since joining Virginia ABC, Williams has restructured the information technology department into core functions for better efficiency, created a steering committee to manage the authority's portfolio of projects, and created a technology strategy and roadmap for Virginia ABC systems. Williams received a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration and computing from the University of Aston in Birmingham, United Kingdom.