The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) is the primary state agency responsible for overseeing public K–12 education in Washington. Led by State Superintendent Chris Reykdal, OSPI works with the state’s 295 public school districts and eight state-tribal education compact schools, allocating funding while providing tools, resources and technical assistance to support high-quality public education. OSPI’s vision is for all students to be prepared for post-secondary pathways, careers and civic engagement.
When Ted Loran first joined OSPI in 2008, he expected his stay to be relatively short. The organisation was dealing with failing infrastructure. There were gaps in its technology team. Services that were struggling to meet the needs of school districts across the state.
His intention was to spend around 18 months tackling those problems before moving on. Nearly two decades later, he remains at OSPI. Progressing from Director of Network Operations to CIO he has overseen a significant evolution of its technology environment.
What changed his outlook was understanding the connection between the technology his team managed and the people it ultimately served.
“When my own child started public school and I started sitting in rooms with teachers and principals, it really struck me how much of what they did ran through OSPI and through my shop,” he recalls.
Transformation begins with people
Ted stepped into the CIO position in 2021 following the unexpected departure of his predecessor. It was a difficult moment. The workforce was remote because of the pandemic, while budgets were under pressure and the organisation needed rebuilding.
“I really didn’t inherit a technology problem,” he says. “I inherited a drawn down org chart in the middle of a pandemic with little money. So, my goal was to start with people.”
That philosophy has remained central to his leadership. Rather than attempting to personally direct every part of the technology organisation, Ted has concentrated on finding leaders who share his belief in hiring talented professionals, giving them responsibility and allowing them to do their jobs.
One of those appointments was Curtis Richardson, now Deputy CIO and Director of Operations. Richardson helped move operations away from a waterfall-style approach, introducing agile methods and more mature processes.
“I echoed Ted’s approach to care for people, and that was reflected in how our technical supervisors detailed the process and continued use of agile methods,” says Curtis. “OSPI invested in practical steps, including helping developers and program staff learn and understand the new approach. That support helped build confidence, improve adoption and reinforce the message of delivering value. Because technology changes that have value affect people as much as systems, OSPI also sent technical supervisors to change management training. That training helped our technical leaders better understand, plan for, and communicate changes that affect programme teams and the customers OSPI serves.”
From infrastructure consolidation to enterprise thinking
Ted’s background differs from that of some CIOs because he came through technical infrastructure and operations. That experience has heavily influenced his approach to enterprise technology.
Earlier in his OSPI career, applications tended to operate through a model of one application, one server and one project. Ted helped consolidate that environment into a hyper-converged infrastructure and subsequently migrated the entire data centre to a new location without downtime or disruption being noticed by staff or school districts.
The experience provided a template for his later strategy as CIO. “We took a consolidation and enterprise approach with hardware, and now we want to do the same thing with our compute environment as well, our programming and our data sets.”
That enterprise philosophy is particularly important because of OSPI’s funding structure. Technology is supported through a combination of state and federal funding alongside provisos allocated to specific activities. While that provides resources for mandated programmes, the money cannot necessarily be redirected to areas where technology leaders believe it could provide greater value.
Meanwhile, modern infrastructure does not neatly conform to the traditional model of purchasing a standalone server for a single purpose. “Everything is intertwined in one ecosystem,” Ted explains