"I've really tried to change," Sabety said. "I see technology and the deployment of tools on our ERP [enterprise resource planning] system as a way to begin to accomplish that and help us better manage our state finances."
The solution was the Ohio Administrative Knowledge System (OAKS), which Sabety calls the largest and broadest ERP system in state government. OAKS will replace numerous fragmented systems and is being used for financial processing across state government. The system will see its first wave of agencies move to shared services in summer 2009.
"My goals for the future are: How do I continue to leverage the investment we've made in this significant ERP system, so that I'm continuously moving state government onto higher levels of productivity and more efficiency?" Sabety said.
Before her current position, Sabety was a fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of its Urban Markets Initiative. She's a certified public accountant with a background in economic development. She was also an economic policy adviser for former Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste.
Sabety founded the Technology Policy Group at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. The group performed trendsetting work in enterprise architecture for state government, e-government initiatives and Internet privacy. She also helped create the CIO Solutions Gallery discussion series through Ohio State University, which lets CIOs in Ohio come together to talk. "It has been very useful as I've tried to think through the approaches to try to use technology to solve some of the problems we have in the public sector," Sabety said.
