Building Foundation For IT Excellence In Governance

Ronald Baldwin, CIO, State Of Montana

How are you using data to identify and reduce duplication in service?

Providing Montanans with a more effective government is at the heart of everything we are doing.

When I was serving as a department CIO for DPHHS, we set about creating an enterprise architecture with common service layers that would serve multiple large systems.

This enabled us to reduce duplication and was instrumental in coordinating services between multiple programs and multiple systems to the benefit of citizens. Moving forward, other agencies are using enterprise architecture principles to share information across agency lines. In addition, we are focusing on national standards for information exchange. Whenever possible we are using standard transaction formats to facilitate the sharing of information between systems and organizations.

"Interesting things that you have done or trying to do as a CIO to transform the relationship of IT with business"

In my current role as State CIO, we are working on an initiative for the governor’s office to develop a unified business portal that will pull information from various agencies and their programs into one place which can be accessed and utilized by existing and prospective Montana business owners.This data portal will be a one stop shop for planning and creating business in Montana, eliminating the need to navigate multiple agencies’ programs and systems.

How have you used social media and cloud to your advantage?

Last year, a change in policy was implemented to open social media including Facebook and YouTube to state agencies as a tool for more effectively communicating with citizens. Since then several agencies have implemented Facebook sites and have leveraged YouTube for both employee development and citizen outreach.

From a cloud perceptive,we are considering hybrid approaches for utilization of the cloud.We are looking at how we can utilize our existing platforms in conjunction with cloud computing and are carefully accessing it from a business and architectural standpoint.

The State of Montana, along with Utah, Oregon and Colorado,executed Western States Contracting Alliance (WSCA) contracts with four vendors to facilitate the procurement of cloud services. Separately, the governor’s office was recently one of the first to make use of a cloud-based application.