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NASCIO Conference Day 1

Here are some of my highlights from the first day at the NASCIO Conference in San Diego

I am at the National Association of State CIOs Annual Conference in San Diego, and here are some of the first day highlights.

 The roundtable sessions over breakfast covered over a dozen topics, and I attended a session on BYOD led by the CIO from Delaware. The session was excellent with comparsions between public and private sector organizations on the use of different mobile devices. All of the topical discussion sessions seemed well attended, and it was a great way to engage professionals from around the country with different approaches to this cutting-edge issue.

 The opening keynote was called: Overhauling the Ship: Extreme Government Makeover - led by Ken Miller who is the Founder of the Change and Innovation Agency. He used a lot of analogies and his basic message was that "the house of government doesn't need another layer of paint or new carpets, but an extreme makeover." His points on process improvement were very well made.

The next session covered multi-jurisdictional collaboration with panelists from Michigan, North Carolina, Montana and Cook County, Illinois. The examples and stories made it clear that more sharing of services is coming nationwide - both within states and across state lines. Great session that was lively with a good Q/A session afterwards.

After lunch, there was a general session which covered the results of a State CIO survey by TechAmerica and NASCIO. Priorities discussed included: moble devices and applications, social media, cloud computing, big data and the public safety broadband network. The examples and overall discussion were excellent.

I also attended a breakout session called "Batten Down the Hatches on Health Data Exchange" which was a great look at the latest security and privacy actions being taken in California, Arkansas and around the country.  It is clear that progress is being made on health data, but many hurdles remain. The panelists were not as optimistic on this topic as they were a year ago, and many questions from the audience seemed to have "we'll see" answer to them.

Tonight, the NASCIO best-practice awards to states are given out at dinner.

More after Day 2.

Are you at the NASCIO conference? Any comments to share?

Daniel J. Lohrmann is an internationally recognized cybersecurity leader, technologist, keynote speaker and author.