May 25
2011
US State Governments Changing IT
The NASCIO Midyear conference was this month in Washington DC. The conference allows state government and corporate NASCIO members to discuss issues facing the information technology field.
Sponsors of this conference ranged from Salesforce.com, Cisco, EMC, ESRI to Accenture. White papers by the sponsors are available on the website here.
I read an interesting white paper by Accenture – Emerging Stronger: The relevance of the CIO in challenging times: A look at the evolving role of the CIO and four areas where CIOs must focus to make IT an integral part of a high-performance government.
In Accenture’s white paper they list out these drivers of change:
- citizens’ increasing demands for services
- new technology trends
- demographic shifts
- political change
- unfunded federal programs
Governments are responding to these pressures in many ways and one that is very smart is “collaborating across jurisdictional boundaries”. We, BasicGov, see this at the state and local level of governments.
In Accenture’s white paper they describe this as:
Local-to-state, state-to-federal and intra-agency collaboration opportunities abound for governments to take advantage of synergies, reduce duplication and create economies of scale in delivering services. Cross-jurisdictional collaboration requires CIOs to enter the dialogue and help adopt more synergistic approaches to break down the barriers of government culture and decision making. But the payoff can be significant. States can achieve tremendous savings when they find opportunities to leverage synergies and economies of scale in delivering IT across jurisdictional boundaries.
There is also a useful checklist for statewide IT governance in the white paper:
- Are you aligning enterprise IT initiatives with agency strategies and business goals?
- Are you selecting the right enterprise IT initiatives?
- Are you preparing realistic business cases for major IT investments?
- Are you enforcing accountability and transparency for performance?
- Are you defining IT and business governance structures, and are the associated processes working?
- Are you controlling costs and maximizing revenue opportunities?
- Are you promoting a citizen-centric service mentality?
- Are you managing IT projects well and holding them accountable?
- Are you identifying and rectifying problem, at-risk applications and infrastructures?
- Are you investigating and investing in new and emerging technologies?
- Are you seizing standardization, shared services and other cost-efficiency opportunities
Download Accenture’s white paper here http://www.nascio.org/events/sponsors/vrc/Role_of_CIO_FinalAugust2010.pdf
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