Hard lessons: A CIO’s playbook for consolidation

COMMENTARY | Agencies are under increasing pressure to reorganize their operations. But done well, consolidation can bring economies of scale, better alignment and more agility.

• IT Modernization

When the Department of Agriculture launched its consolidation of back‑office operations from 2017 to 2018 among the Farm Service Agency, Rural Development and Natural Resources Conservation Service into a unified Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC) Business Center, I was serving as FSA’s chief information officer (CIO). I saw firsthand how good intentions collided with organizational reality. As government again looks to reorganize agencies and merge corporate functions at scale, here are lessons I learned from being on the front lines.

Communication, collaboration and change management: non-negotiables.

Reorganizations fail — or simply don’t achieve the full scope of expected outcomes — not because the structural design is flawed, but because people don’t adapt fast enough. From the start, leaders needed to engage staff at every level. Don’t just hold “town halls,” but embed meaningful feedback loops across all levels of the organization to detect confusion or resistance early. Communication must regularly flow both downward and upward; midlevel managers are the shock absorbers, and if they are left out, misalignment or dissent festers.

Similarly, cross‑agency collaboration is essential, especially when merging systems, processes and cultures. In FPAC, we often discovered that two units had parallel functions under different names, or conflicting business practices. Those conflicts had to be surfaced early and resolved through joint working groups, not after the fact.

Expect mistakes. Build governance before you need it.

No reorganization proceeds without missteps. Expect them. What separates successful efforts from disasters is having pre‑established governance and correction mechanisms in place so mistakes can be caught and reversed quickly. In FPAC’s case, proposals to shift process ownership or reassign systems sometimes created bottlenecks or overloading of particular units. Because we had oversight committees and exception processes already in place, we could pause, reassess and recalibrate, rather than let errors cascade, slowing down the entire operation. Too many reorganizations wait to create governance until after implementation starts, at which point inertia and fear make remediation politically and technically difficult.

Don’t ignore culture. Three agencies, three worlds.

Under the FPAC umbrella, FSA, RD and NRCS each brought distinct cultures, histories, priorities, practices and professional norms. The “right” way of doing things in one bureau was a foreign language in the next. Post‑consolidation, staff often felt the merging agency was trying to make them all adopt “my way.” Without intention, socialization and mutual adaptation, cultures clash and that can frustrate staff and customers, or worse, sink the reorganization.

Leaders need to invest in culture integration: joint training sessions, rotational assignments and forums in which staff can tell war stories. Define what new norms you want and then surface tensions and tradeoffs openly. Too many reorganizations assume culture will magically align after structure is in place. I can tell you it doesn’t.

Define success metrics up front.

If you don’t know what success looks like, you can’t tell whether you’ve hit it or whether your effort is spinning off the rails. In FPAC, we established performance metrics tied to operational efficiency (e.g., transaction throughput, system uptime, service catalog adoption) and client satisfaction (e.g., including both agency side, field offices). Those figures gave us a north star, and a way to highlight early gains and sustain momentum.

Metrics should not all be financial or “efficiency only.” You should include staff morale, continuity of mission delivery, risk mitigation and adaptability measures. And revisit them periodically. Some initial metrics may need recalibration. To that point, I credit FPAC for later engaging the National Academy of Public Administration from 2022 to 2023 to help develop an enterprise-wide Service Level Agreement (SLA) framework for FPAC Business Center Divisions and Customer Agencies and address concerns raised by the customer organizations. 

Learn from predecessors. Don’t reinvent badly.

If all this sounds familiar, that’s because the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Key Questions to Assess Agency Reform Efforts (GAO-18-427) remains a gold standard.

GAO organizes its guidance for assessing reorganizations into four broad categories: (1) goals and outcomes, (2) process for developing reforms, (3) implementing reforms (including resource and change-management capacity) and (4) strategically managing the workforce. For example, one of GAO’s core questions asks: “How and to what extent has the agency consulted with key stakeholders in developing its reform proposals?”

In FPAC, we looked back at similar reorganizations and consulted published studies of past changes. Build that institutional memory into your approach; don’t start from scratch.

Why this matters for today’s reorganizations.

Across government today, agencies are under pressure, both from OMB and Congress, to restructure, consolidate, or centralize corporate functions (e.g., finance, human resources, information technology, procurement). The politics and risk calculus are challenging: each reorganization draws skepticism from staff, customers and oversight entities alike. But done well, consolidation can bring economies of scale, better alignment and more agility.

My experience offers these kinds of guardrails:

• Begin early with listening and planning, not structural announcements
• Don’t pretend you won’t stumble or make mistakes—governance should be agile by design
• Culture is as important a factor as any other that you ignore at your peril
• Metrics must be baked in from Day 1, but adjusted as the organization learns 
• Lean on reports from GAO, the National Academy of Public Administration and past federal agency reorganizations; you don’t need to re‑discover everything

If we ignore these lessons, we risk repeating the same failures: disillusioned staff, frustrated customers, underutilized systems and reorganizations that linger for years without delivering promised efficiency gains. For leaders across government today: your toughest critics won’t be in Congress. They’ll be in your front lines and in the field, where the daily work happens.

The consolidation of FPAC was not perfect, but it’s a case study that still holds valuable lessons for today’s reformers. I hope what we learned almost 10 years ago can help today’s reformers avoid missteps, hit their goals and prove that structural change can be both bold and sustainable.

Darren Ash was formerly the chief information officer at the Department of the Interior, assistant chief information officer for the FPAC Mission Area and chief information officer at the Farm Service Agency. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior or the U.S. government.