After three-plus years as Indiana's CIO, Gerry Weaver is going back to school.
Gov. Mitch Daniels announced late last week that Weaver has accepted an offer to become the CIO of the state's community college system.
Moving into academia will likely be as big a challenge as working for the state. As CIO of the Ivy Tech Community College, Weaver will be in charge of the technology needs of 120,000 students across 24 campuses -- constituting the state's largest higher-education system.
Weaver became state CIO in December 2006, leading the Indiana Office of Technology as it consolidated IT infrastructure, including data centers, network, e-mail, purchasing, payroll and help desk for 70 state agencies. The state realized $14 million in annual savings through the initiative.
Weaver will be replaced by Brian Arrowood, the state CTO, effective June 7. Weaver and Arrowood worked together by consolidating six data centers into a single statewide entity, which saved $7 million annually, according to the governor's office.
Weaver and the Indiana Office of Technology were unavailable for comment Monday.
Indiana's IT consolidation has won praise. In 2005, Daniels gave the Office of Technology the task of fixing the state's fragmented IT services and management.
"When the governor started this, he gave us the authority -- you might say dictatorial powers -- to drive cost savings and improve performance," Weaver said in a past interview with Government Technology.
Before the consolidation, a section of the Indiana Department of Administration was charged with approving technology purchases, but lacked standards. That section also managed IT for 900 of the 28,000 PCs statewide. But participation was optional, and most agencies chose to their IT operations in-house.
In order to fix this, Weaver modeled the consolidation on the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, one of the few agencies with consistent IT practices and metrics. Weaver transplanted several managers from that agency and brought them into the Indiana Office of Technology, and also recruited from the private sector to build a new management team.
Among several accomplishments, the Office of Technology standardized agencies on Microsoft Outlook and put all 28,000 users on a single network, implemented a technology refresh every four years, negotiated a statewide cell phone contract, and consolidated the state's five data centers into one, while cutting the number of servers by a third.
With reporting from Features Editor Andy Opsahl.
