At the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Midyear Conference this week, Behrens detailed for Government Technology the scope of the effort, mandated by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in the summer of 2023. In all, about 750 people — state staff and contractors — from 20 different IT offices were affected.
Video transcript available below.
With that foundation in place, Iowa will now be able to make IT operations more efficient across the state. An enterprise architecture team is looking at the hundreds of business systems used by agencies to identify opportunities for consolidation, either now or down the road.
“The IT reorganization set us up for a number of different exciting things on infrastructure rationalization,” Behrens said. “We're starting to look at data centers and networks as we begin to build out and map all of the things that were done in a federated environment and then our opportunities to bring those together into shared services.”
Video transcript: In the summer of '23, Gov. Reynolds instructed all IT staff to be centralized into a new department for information technology. So we took somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 different IT shops and combined them into one, about 750 staff and contractors in total, and then we worked for the next seven or eight months on a functional realignment. So we looked at those staff, their responsibilities and their duties, and built a new org structure to coordinate the delivery of IT for the future. It's really preparing the state to keep up with the pace of change. We think about how we can leverage people's skills and expertise together. We can share ideas in a way we never could before and have visibility into the state's technology platform in ways we never could before. So it's very exciting.
So right now, we're really moving into the system rationalization phase. So we still have a lot of work to do in terms of using shared services, combining systems wherever we can. We still have over 30 case management systems. We have dozens of data centers. And so we're working through that process of bringing those together. And at the same time, to manage IT, you need some things. You need a single ITSM solution. You need a single project and portfolio management solution. And I'm proud to say this summer we'll have those things for the first time ever so you can see the flow of work throughout state government on one pane of glass.
