How Iowa Centralized IT and Massively Overhauled State Systems

It was raining at the Iowa State Fair when we met with Gov. Kim Reynolds to discuss her vision for the future of technology in Iowa government. She had personally witnessed the inefficiencies, sprawl and duplication of technology solutions across the executive branch and had significant concerns about the sustainability and wisdom of continuing Iowa’s current decentralized approach to IT. But amid those challenges, she also saw an opportunity: the chance to reimagine how Iowa managed technology for the future — to find efficiencies, but also to improve the services we provide to Iowans every day.

The governor’s direction in our meeting was clear: centralize and standardize Iowa’s information technology portfolio and move with urgency. As director of Iowa’s Department of Management, Kraig Paulsen understood the challenges of orchestrating large-scale transformations in government. As Iowa’s state CIO, I understood the technology complexities and that the barriers to centralization would be significant. We both left the meeting with a clear understanding of our mandate and the outline of a plan that would take nearly two years to achieve the desired outcome.

THE LIMITS OF A FEDERATED IT MODEL

Like any large organization, state governments are complex entities. They comprise many independent agencies and departments, each supporting a unique mission. Sometimes these missions require collaboration, at which point two or more agencies may work together to solve a specific problem. Otherwise, state agencies primarily attend to their own portfolios of responsibility, operating separately, but making up the whole of state government.

As computers became necessary to support agency missions, wave after wave of digital capabilities were adopted by all governments to improve efficiency, responsiveness and citizen experience. In states with a “federated IT model,” these capabilities were often acquired individually by each agency, meaning that IT workers, applications, data centers, servers and networks were their responsibility to acquire, deploy and manage. The result was a collection of systems that were incompatible, redundant and expensive — all in different states of maturity with little oversight.

Such was the case in Iowa, where independent technology operations were spread across over 20 different agencies. As Iowa CIO, I was often asked to give a report on the conditions of IT in our state from an enterprise perspective, including each of these separate and distinct agency IT operations. Under our federated IT model, even the simplest questions were difficult to answer: How much were we spending on IT? Were our cybersecurity protections strong enough? Why couldn’t we share data among multiple systems? How many usernames and passwords were required by an Iowa employer to interact with state government?

The answers were elusive because of the way IT had evolved over decades. Consider the consequences of operating a federated IT model like Iowa’s for 30 or 40 years. We hadn’t managed just one data center project — we had managed dozens. We hadn’t just implemented one case management system, but over 30. Each time, we were buying the same technology capabilities over and over again, often without even knowing it.

Understanding the scale of Iowa’s technology footprint required a fresh approach. And so in 2023, we conducted our first comprehensive statewide IT inventory to provide visibility and shed light on why these simple questions were so difficult to answer. Among our findings, we observed:

• 31 case management systems
• 25 data centers
• 10 enterprise data warehouse solutions
• 7 email platforms

In total, we found nearly 1,700 IT products from over 670 manufacturers across the executive branch. And we suspect these figures are understated. These were the consequences of a federated IT model in Iowa and the reason Gov. Reynolds was, correctly, concerned about the future of technology in the state government.

A GENERATIONAL IT REORGANIZATION

With these results, and Gov. Reynolds’ mandate, my team began to develop a comprehensive four-phased approach to centralizing IT in the executive branch that we called “strategic IT consolidation.” Each phase was designed to focus on a specific dimension of our technology operations: personnel, systems, budgets and procurement.

Our work began with a reorganization of the entire executive branch IT workforce, the first phase of our strategic IT consolidation. In October 2023, 45 days after the “fair meeting,” nearly 500 full-time employees and over 250 contractors were reassigned from 21 state agencies into our new IT organization: the Department of Management Division of IT. In the following months, we worked to build a new operating model to support this workforce, with an emphasis on organizational structure, governance and performance management. In July 2024, our IT workers were functionally aligned, moving server administrators, application developers, cybersecurity engineers and other disciplines into functional teams, supporting internal and agency initiatives in a product-based delivery model.

We then developed a new statewide governance structure, composed of all state agencies, to support our second phase of the strategic IT consolidation: the analysis of IT systems. Review panels were formed to evaluate new IT acquisitions and legacy systems. Iowa’s first statewide enterprise architecture practice was created. And in April 2025, we released a statewide enterprise IT plan to establish guidelines that can be applied throughout the governance process: prioritizing commercial-off-the-shelf software, cloud-based services and the reuse of shared systems.

We also prepared Iowa for a new IT financial model — the third phase of strategic IT consolidation — supporting greater predictability and visibility into agency IT expenditures. Time reporting, resource planning and improved forecasting capabilities will be deployed in the summer of 2025 so that we can begin evaluating the cost of IT and how to best deploy our collective resources for the future. A new rate structure for IT services has also been established, which will support our centralized model into the future.

And finally, under the fourth phase of strategic IT consolidation, we established a new IT procurement practice, supported by changes in Iowa law, to centralize the coordination of all IT acquisitions in the executive branch into our agency. We developed standard IT contract terms, templates for solicitations and new master contracts that prioritize the use of fixed-price, deliverables-based engagements. We implemented a new IT contract management system to track our portfolio of contracts. And in the summer of 2025, we will release comprehensive IT vendor scorecards to closely monitor our suppliers' performance.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Our plans for the next two years include the unification of seven IT ticketing systems, the release of a new IT project and portfolio management system, the acceleration of a product-based delivery model for IT services, the unification of legacy agency IT operating practices, and the support of cloud-based modernizations for some of Iowa’s largest business systems.

To date, we have already achieved financial savings and operational efficiencies estimated to exceed tens of millions annually. As we use our new capabilities to drive improvements, standardize and reduce duplication within Iowa’s technology portfolio, we look forward to Iowa’s centralized model generating even greater efficiencies. But more importantly, we view our model as a way to support new technology trends that can better serve Iowans in the future.

Briefly, the story is not complete without mentioning the enormous organizational change management component. From the initial announcement of strategic IT consolidation in a governor’s cabinet meeting to today, approximately 800 project activities were monitored and completed by the implementation team — an effort that required an enterprise-level commitment. Our next phase of work includes an additional 350 project activities to advance IT consolidation and unification efforts. Beyond the previously mentioned accomplishments, major statewide initiatives include:

• Implemented a new cloud-based financial ERP system
• Began the consolidation of 346 professional licenses across 11 different on-premises systems into one cloud-based system
• Mobilized enterprise response team following the global CrowdStrike outage, restoring all business systems in less than 12 hours
• Initiated the transition from custom to commercial-off-the-shelf/software-as-a-service applications
• Initiated the transition from time and materials contracts to deliverables-based
• Initiated the transition from on-premise storage to processing in the cloud

The journey is not yet complete, but the progress we have witnessed since our meeting with Gov. Reynolds at the Iowa State Fair has been remarkable. To leaders looking to replicate Iowa’s model, my best advice is that there is almost nothing more impactful — and more challenging — than a comprehensive IT reorganization. The opportunities unleashed could not have been replicated in Iowa by any other means. And these successes could not have been possible without strong leadership and support from Gov. Reynolds, a committed and talented leadership team, and a community of technology experts throughout state government who support our state agencies every day. While we have much work ahead, our journey shows what organizations can achieve with determination, planning and a strong focus on improved outcomes for the future — all by transitioning from a federated to centralized IT model.

Matt Behrens is the chief information officer of Iowa. He also talked to Government Technology about the state's IT centralization work at the NASCIO Midyear Conference in Philadelphia.