Petty’s first post was chief procurement officer. His purchasing achievements included meeting with other leaders to rewrite state procurement laws before he became interim state CIO in October 2006. He became permanent six months later.
“I had a lot of background in procurement and some of that is giving me more of a strategic view of the organization,” Petty said.
Oregon was undergoing a data center consolidation when Petty started his new role. He met with other state leaders to rewrite the data center charter to incorporate reporting and accountability. Oregon also developed GovSpace, an Internet-based social networking tool available to state agencies, boards, commissions and their business partners. The platform launched in 2009 with 200 users and now has about 4,300 users.
“You create a community on this social network, and then you can jointly develop documents, you can crowdsource information, [and] you can have chat rooms and blogs,” Petty said.
Other projects include: the Oregon Stimulus Transparency and Accountability Tracking System, a stimulus fund tracking and mapping tool; the data.oregon.gov public data sharing repository; and an e-government project to help agencies move information and payment processes onto the Web.
Many Oregon agencies have a lot of autonomy, so pushing broad projects along can take work.
“I think they all build on one another,” Petty said of his projects. “Sometimes things that seem like they should be relatively easy to do can be very difficult because the business environment we operate in has a lot of idiosyncrasies to it.”
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