The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) is holding it's annual meeting this week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am blogging some of the highlights (from my perspective) each day.
This morning's keynote address featured the Honorable Tom Ridge, former Governor, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and first Secretary, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Governor Ridge congratulated NASCIO on their bipartisan approach to dealing with state government technology problems in a world where everyone has "special interests." His main themes included:
- A need to elevate the message and add a sense of urgency to pressing IT issues in government.
- CIOs need to develop advocates or champions to sell their messages.
- Security of cyberspace is a "national priority."
- CIOs have one of the toughest jobs in government, because they get all the blame but little of the credit for successes. Citizens expect nothing bad to happen - just like with Homeland Security.
- Not much trust in government. We need to work on developing more
In the Q/A session, Governor Ridge said we need to consolidate IT more and eliminate silos in a new adminstration, as we address IT and cyberspace in the future. When asked what he would have done differently if he had the chance, he joked that he should have finished his term. He closed with a reiteration of the importance of IT and expressed his willingness to advocate for NASCIO at the National Governor's Association.
A later session focused on consolidation efforts in IT by many states. Stories were told about Tenn, Texas, and Indiana. The numbers were impressing, with savings quoted by Tennesee in the range of $34 million.
In Indiana, 800 servers were decomissioned, a new state portal was built, IT contracts were combined (with savings over $20 million), and TPI benchmarked their improvements and showed results as being top in service and lowest in cost. Indiana also added disaster recovery services.
Overall, it is clear that consolidation is happening all over the USA and in greater numbers than I ever thought possible. The benefits are ranging from improved security to lower cost and better service.
An afternoon session on Green IT presented the economic case for going green. Virginia talked about telework programs and Michiagn layed out aggressive green IT programs. Google also discussed their approaches to Green IT.
Overall, the first day was well-attended, with about 500 attendees, including CIOs, their staff, and vendors. More to come tomorrow.
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