The Enterprise Mentality

The GTC West "Roundtable Discussion on IT Governance" seminar began with Rick Webb, national director for Accenture's State and Local Government CIO Agenda, setting the tone for collaborative IT governance by outlining the five guiding principles of governance -- leadership, accountability, value, completeness and creativity -- saying that "governance is the model by which government manages its use of IT."

Webb also discussed the three driving forces in government: money, enhancing service delivery and creating a more secure environment.

Titus Toyama, CFO of the California Franchise Tax Board, then gave a brief history of technology at the FTB, saying there are dependencies between IT and finance, and that the state's IT Governance Council dropped the "IT" to reflect this. He also discussed the need for departments within government to be knowledgeable on more than just their own programs. "We all have to be actively engaged and take the time to learn each other's programs," he said, sharing an example of all levels of FTB employees sitting through a seminar on Linux.

California CIO J. Clark Kelso, the panel moderator said that our government structure is not IT centric. "We must make sure that those decisions are informed by IT, but are still business decisions. Now let me tell you how I think we're beginning to move in that direction. A couple of items in the strategic plan are turning out to be fairly critical for moving forward into a collaborative government structure."

The four key domains for architecture, Kelso said, are the business structure, data architecture -- what data is needed to operate your business -- applications domain and looking at the service components necessary to support service needs, and a technical reference working model, which is mostly IT oriented.