Since Bob Osmond took on leadership of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) three years ago, he’s made the most of it.
“That creates a strong motivation … to hit the ground running,” Osmond said. “And so we plan it out very, very carefully to see what we can accomplish in that four years.”
Under his leadership, VITA has made progress on its four mission areas: infrastructure, cybersecurity, procurement and IT governance. The agency has increased enterprise network capacity 1,500 percent; migrated and modernized the primary data center; saved money with a category management model of procurement; and created an innovative new leadership position: the chief experience officer (CXO).
The CXO role recognizes that, as Osmond put it, Virginia state government “doesn’t sell sneakers.” Every agency is different, and relationships are vital to ensuring that VITA can work effectively across the enterprise.
“[Agencies] will probably hire a vendor to do some of the work, they would use in-house resources to do some of the work, they’re going to put in tickets and requests to my organization to provide services and components to help build it out,” Osmond said. “All that has to come together, and that CXO, chief experience officer, is the architect of ‘how do we manage relationships with the 67 different agencies that [we] serve?’”
Osmond also has his eye on the future. AI, he believes, will have a transformative impact on technology, similar to how smartphones and the cloud have.
“I’m very excited about the opportunity for us, because the work’s not going away,” he said. “I think we’re all finding ourselves underwater every day; we’re being asked to do more and more. And I think the opportunity of having AI to help us is something that is very positive, and I think we should look at ways of doing it safely, effectively and with all the right protocols of protecting our data and in our decision-making process.”
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Government Technology magazine. Click here to view the full digital edition online.
