State CIOs Speak Out

As 2005 winds down, state CIOs recently gathered in San Diego for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Annual Conference. The event gave CIOs the opportunity to share insights on their successes and challenges, as well as provide an open forum to discuss how the public and private sectors can better work together on technology projects. We sat down with four state CIOs in particular to find out what's on tap for 2006 and how partners can better work with them.

Matt Miszewski, chief information officer of the state of Wisconsin and NASCIO president

What role do integrators, solution providers and software developers play in helping to identify new technologies and build beneficial solutions for government customers?

They play the most important role. In the past 10 years, there has been a concentration on technology for technology's sake, and folks are starting to get that it's not about that. We're meeting up with this great overinvestment that we had in telecom, and swimming in bandwidth actually helps these resellers--in particular, folks developing new applications because they don't have to worry about certain things that developers in the past had to.

Now, resellers have tools at their disposal they've never had before. I think there is a whole value-added layer that sits on top of the commoditized products that are out there to put together into solutions. [Some vendors] have figured out that the future is services, not necessarily the hardware.

What are your top three technology projects for 2006?

First, shared information services, which includes IT-infrastructure consolidation, server consolidation, network consolidation and security consolidation.

Second, an enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) initiative--a key project in terms of delivering information to people where they need it, when they need it and how they need to consume it. The bid went out in October, with responses due in November, [with] the decision to be made in December. The integrator solution bid then will go out in January. We're doing a lot of business-process work up front so we have a good picture of where we are and where we meet up with the solution. The hard work is around what business processes we need to change to be successful.

Third, IT-services management. As we consolidate everything and offer services we've never offered before, decrease cost but increase the level of responsibility, we have to have customers first and foremost in our minds. Service delivery is the most important thing we do. IT-services management is key to sustainable solutions.

Is IT falling off the state-level agenda?

Actually, we had 13 mentions in this year's State of the State [speech] for Wisconsin IT. There was definitely a time when discussions of technology really dropped off, but that's changing. We got obsessed in the '90s with bits and bytes and dots and coms, and it wasn't good for anyone in the industry or in IT in general. I think folks are starting to turn the corner. The key is I don't care about IT per se, what I do care about is supporting my governor's or mayor's or county executive's goals, because those are the goals I can wake up in the morning and be excited about--education, making the streets safer and growing the economy.

Denise Moore, chief information technology officer of the state of Kansas

What is your biggest challenge for 2006?

I think what is going to be the challenge for us in the future is to be able to develop systems across agencies--more line-of-business-type systems. And there are several challenges along with that: one being that a lot of these programs exist in different agencies, but they can be doing similar things. For example, eligibility programscould be in the Department on Aging, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Labor.

So you can have the same customer being served by multiple programs in one agency. I think that's a challenge for us. That involves budgeting and how we do business--trying to do business more from a customer-centric point of view, where we can serve the customer needs as opposed to them having to know where to go to get their needs served.

We have done a bit in the criminal-justice arena, and now we're looking at health and human services. We want to take it from a functional perspective and then target a particular area instead of trying to pull everything under one umbrella. The business programs and systems are pretty unique, and it's hard to take all of that out of the agencies.

What are your main security issues?

Of course, security is always a challenge, and we've done a lot of good in that arena in terms of working with the legislature and the governor's office in implementing a security office. Security had always been more ad hoc before, though, but now we have a Chief Information Security Office, and we can staff that office and really focus. The main issues we face now are intrusions and hacking. What we're doing is focusing on prevention security. Before, we were used to just keeping up and putting out fires, but now the tools and services are much more sophisticated, all the way from penetration-testing to prevention devices. But it's not like you can finish the security job; it's ongoing, and there will always be something else that comes up.

How are you working to improve contracting in your state?

I think the main thing we're working on is being able to develop and manage contracts in order to have successful projects. It's something we need to do a better job of and move to performance-based contracting as opposed to just service-level agreements (SLAs) and things like that--being able to manage and monitor our private-sector partners. Part of it is getting better at writing our requirements and being more knowledgeable so that we can work with partners better. I think, in general, we need to educate ourselves and get more people within IT that are experienced on the contracting side.

Teri Takai, chief information officer of the state of Michigan, NASCIO vice president

What challenges do integrators face when working with state governments and the lengthy project life cycle?

The lengthy sales cycle is a challenge for any integrator. We're obviously looking for an integrator that knows us, understands the politics between us and the agencies, [and] the way that we like to do project management. An integrator that understands the way we work is going to write a bid that is going to be more appealing to us and is going to fit with the way we work. It's just the way that things work. That doesn't necessarily require a local presence, but what I find is that if folks don't understand that dynamic, they have a harder time just writing a bid response that fits.

What exactly makes certain bids more appealing?

One of the things on any of our large projects is that we put in a program-management office as well as put out a bid for the project. Folks who have worked with us understand very well what we're looking for, what we expect the program-management office to do, and they can come back in and bid it with a kind of metric, with a kind of organizational structure that we're looking for without us having to explain it. And then for those who bid on the actual systems project, they can understand the relationship between the implementers and the program-management office. You can imagine if you come in and you've never done business in the state of Michigan, you'd face a big learning curve.

The other thing that I find a lot of companies trip over is that they don't understand my relationship with the agency, and they get confused. They think, well, am I bidding this to the Department of Human Services, or am I bidding this to the Department of Information Technology? And they traditionally want to bid to the Department of Human Services, because that's what they've done in the past. And now, all of a sudden, I'm in the mix. I'm putting a lot more rigor into the way they bid these projects, so I have to get them to understand that they have to keep the agency happy from the standpoint of the technology. The actual project is that they have to keep me happy, and that's not something that's easy for many of them to understand.

Are you consolidating your infrastructure at this point?

Yes, we are continuing to work on our infrastructure consolidation. We are communizing all of our e-mail platforms, standardizing our directory structure and our client platform. At this point, our mainframes have been consolidated, and we're working to consolidate all of our servers into three data centers in the state. Previously, we had close to 20 data centers scattered around the state, some only conference rooms with equipment and some actually typical raised-floor data centers. For security purposes and disaster recovery, we had to get them out of those facilities and into secure facilities. We're also able to run them more efficiently consolidated into the three centers.

Is health care becoming more of a state technology issue?

It's something we're really focused on right now, and specifically what role the state should play. We have to recognize that the hospitals, the providers and everyone involved are moving forward with different technology solutions. So while we're not directly involved with providing the technology, there are things that we could do at the state level around facilitating information exchange. So we're now trying to formulate where exactly the best places are for the state to take a leadership role and promoting the formation of regional health-information exchanges.

We recently conducted a set of six focus groups with the key state stakeholders, and received endorsement from all of them, that they would like to see the state take a role in establishing a vision. We're not focusing on fixing the whole health-care problem, but rather the areas where the state can make a difference.

What about the states working together on health care?

That is definitely one of the areas that NASCIO is intending to look at, to really draw all of us together and start to raise an awareness on the issues and work to establish some commonality on our approach. Some states are much more affected than others--for example, the big manufacturing states--but at the same time, it's a priority in the majority of states.

Mary Carroll, chief information officer of the state of Ohio

What are your three main IT projects for the coming year?

The first is we have a statewide ERP project we've begun, and we are hoping to roll out the first one to go live in the area of financials in July 2006. We've been working on this for several years, from the business case to the cost-benefit analysis. It's definitely a business-transformation project, not so much a technology project. Technology is obviously there, but the bigger issue is the change. The ERP project will ultimately include our financial systems, human-resources systems, asset management, capital improvement and other areas.

It's coming to fruition; we've made our software choice and selected Oracle-PeopleSoft, and then we did a procurement for an integrator. Accenture will be the prime for that, although it will be a team approach.

We are also consolidating our statewide networks into what we call our OH1 project--Ohio 1 Network. And that's looking at all of the networks in the state and at the enterprise to determine if consolidating those networks is the right thing to do--at this point, we believe it is--and then treating the state as a single enterprise. It won't happen overnight; we're looking at a five-year plan for that.

The third major project is an application-portfolio-management project that we're working with the agencies to actually catalog all the applications we have in the state. It will be a tremendously important tool for us in managing technology in the state. It's also going to give the agencies the kind of information for managing their apps within their own agency--something we don't have today that I think is extremely powerful for the state to have.

Are you moving to more of an enterprise view of state IT?

Yes, we're moving in that direction. That's the reason the governor created the Office of Information Technology and elevated the role of the CIO from what had been part of our Department of Administrative services to a cabinet position. We have more enterprise responsibilities than we had before.

But unlike some states, we don't have all the responsibilities--it's more of a shared-services concept. Agencies still have responsibility for their unique applications, but wherever it makes sense for us to share infrastructure, it's my organization's responsibility to do that. We also now have the authority for IT procurements for all of the cabinet agencies--all IT procurement comes through us now.

What do you need from private-sector partners?

I'm looking for someone who understands the public space, because we are different; someone who has spent time learning about Ohio and what we are doing, who understands and spends time doing the research they need to do, and asks the questions they need leading up to a major procurement.

It's important to be engaged [with] and talk to us about contracting problems so that we're aware. It doesn't mean we're always going to be able to accommodate every problem, but if we get the dialogue going and talk about it, we can try to understand it and see if there's a win-win that we can come up with.

Also, if there's something new and different, or if partners see a state or local government or federal government doing something innovative and they bring it to our attention, it's great. I've had partners who work closely with the state and know I'm doing some strategic planning in setting up the Office of Information Technology. [They] send to me strategic plans that they've seen from other entities that have been successful. That shows they're listening and are aware of what we're doing. I appreciate that.