Reduce costs, increase transparency and improve service quality -- these goals are on the minds of CIOs across the country. Consolidation, centralization and integration are recognized strategies for achieving these goals, but as CIOs are learning, these strategies require coordinated action across organizations' boundaries. Making IT decisions in this way, through coordinated action, often requires new IT governance capability.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers characterizes state IT governance as "all about ensuring that state government is effectively using information technology in all lines of business and leveraging capabilities across state government appropriately, to not only avoid unnecessary or redundant investments, but to enhance appropriate cross-boundary interoperability. The term ‘appropriate' is used because, in many cases, state government has existing statutory constraints and bounding that can often limit, as well as empower, proper governance."

In general, a governance structure answers the following questions: What decisions must be made? Who should make these decisions? How will decisions be made? How do you monitor results to ensure that you are achieving your goals?

While these questions seem relatively straightforward, determining what's appropriate -- in terms of ensuring effective use of technology across the board, within a given context of state government -- has proven to be a formidable challenge for most states. Advice is abundant, but like in the world of fashion design, finding the right fit takes time and often requires a custom approach.

As priorities shift toward goals that require new capability for coordination, New York state, like others, has begun looking for a better fit for state IT governance. These efforts have started to produce insights about the right approach for New York State legislator RoAnn M. Destito , who chairs New York's Standing Committee on Governmental Operations, characterizes the learning in terms of leadership roles and stakeholders: "In New York, we have learned how critical both executive and legislative leadership are to this process," she said. "In partnership with these leaders, and by maintaining an ongoing dialogue with all stakeholders, we expect to create a long-term and ongoing commitment which has tremendous potential to transform how the state does business."

With that backing from a key elected official, a project is under way in New York, conducted by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG), to answer a question: What state IT governance design makes sense for New York?

The project involves background research on IT governance and interviews with state CIOs. Within New York, the CTG is holding an extensive set of workshops and meetings with state agency CIOs and key stakeholders. The project is generating new understanding about why creating state IT governance is so hard. Here are a few lessons learned about creating capability for new levels of coordinated action through state IT governance structures.

Designing and Implementing Effective State IT Governance Is Hard

In public managers' efforts to design appropriate IT governance, many of them have drawn on well known governance frameworks and the experiences of other public- and private-sector organizations. Through this process, many states have discovered that private-sector IT governance practices and frameworks don't directly apply to the context of state government. These frameworks, according to a number of CIOs, emphasize functions, such as what structures should be in place. What they don't do is indicate how to make them functional or offer a how-to guide for building an effective IT governance structure.

Michigan CIO Ken Theis said that although his department used Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) as starting points, "[the frameworks] are typically very big and complex. We started out with more basic models, and we are growing and maturing