Texas CIO Todd Kimbriel
Managing a Complex Service Environment in Texas
In recent years, the move toward the CIO as a broker of IT services has been a major topic of conversation among public-sector tech leaders. The government CIO is no longer the person who makes sure the Internet is up and running and the servers are online; they are now an intermediary between government agencies and service providers, negotiating what systems will work for their agencies and what those relationships should look like.At a Tuesday afternoon session at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) annual conference, Texas CIO Todd Kimbriel described how his state’s ongoing work with multi-source integrator Capgemini has worked to improve IT services and empower agencies to look at how they can use tech to achieve their business objectives.
Old-style “monolithic” awards weren’t effective, and as the state entered into multiple smaller contracts for various systems, there was more complexity in how those services were managed. So Texas adopted the multi-source service integration model — DIR now offers five “towers of service” to customer agencies, and rather than those customers having to interact with five different systems, everything comes back to a “single pane of glass,” Kimbriel said. Texas started the contract in its data center and is now expanding enterprise-wide.
Mark Stein, executive vice president with Capgemini, put it this way: You don’t want five vendors each with their own service catalog; you want one catalog that covers those services and offers a “marketplace of capabilities.” Plus, it creates a plug-and-play capability, meaning that if the state opts to change providers for one service or another, the agency customer sees no change in how they interact with the service integrator.
Kimbriel said they have seen 100 percent satisfaction from customers since introducing the model, as well as reduced prices and elimination of technical debt. Other states, including Georgia and Virginia, have pursued similar investments in multi-source integrators.
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Indiana Chief Privacy Officer Ted CotterillIndiana Streamlines Data Sharing
Indiana’s Management Performance Hub (MPH) aims to make state data sharing smart, effective and efficient. Chief Privacy Officer Ted Cotterill described the state’s old, pre-MPH path to data sharing as a maze: the legal and operational navigation necessary to bring agencies together was arduous, and once they made it to the center of the maze to begin a joint project, any new, adjacent initiative would still have to start from the beginning of the process. All those hoops to jump through make it hard to get data into the hands of people who could actually use it, Cotterill said.With the creation of MPH, Indiana was able to “get through the maze once,” said John Roach, practice director of data analytics with KSM Consulting. MPH set up one big agreement that did just that, putting together legal and organizational frameworks that brought together previously siloed data sets and made them available to those who can use them effectively.
Cotterill and Roach used opioid treatment programs as an example of how MPH is positively affecting both state operations and residents. According to Cotterill, Indiana has seen a 570 percent increase in opioid-related deaths since 1999, and treatment centers were primarily located in population centers, which wasn’t necessarily where the most overdose deaths were occurring. When the state authorized the creation of five new treatment centers, it wanted to make sure they were placed where they would have the most impact. MPH brought together four data sets from three state agencies and helped identify where more opioid care was most needed.
In a related example, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, which oversees emergency medical services, worked with MPH to create a heatmap of naloxone deployments to see where the drug used to treat opioid overdoses was being used the most. This information not only helped improve community safety, because EMS and law enforcement could use it to potentially predict where their services were needed, but showed DHS that they could improve the value of their data by increasing the frequency of its reporting.
What is key to MPH’s success, Cotterill said, is that they streamlined the legal process and targeted specific business cases for using unlocked state data. Many government agencies have created open data portals, Roach said, “but often open data is what people think will be valuable to others,” and ultimately no one uses it. The way MPH targets state data use is helping to eliminate that guesswork.
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Idaho Chief Information Officer Greg Zickau
Procurement Pain Points
Governments and the private-sector partners they depend upon to deliver services and run their agencies have often struggled when it comes to purchasing. Poorly defined expectations, cumbersome requirements and scant communication can contribute to an adversarial relationship between chief information officers and technology vendors working on public-sector projects.In 2016, NASCIO embarked upon a campaign to help smooth out some of the points of friction in the procurement process by uniting key stakeholders, including the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO), the National Association of State Chief Administrators (NASCA), as well as industry groups CompTIA and the IT Alliance for Public Sector (ITAPS). At the annual NASCIO conference earlier this week, members shared the fruits of a recent roundtable that brought both sides together.
The resultant report, A View from the Marketplace: What They Say About State IT Procurement, offers insights from participants in the roundtable. The top three reforms that would usher in needed improvements to procurement are: RFI and RFP documents that aren’t overly prescriptive, but rather encourage bidders to offer solutions to the problem at hand; improved flexibility and communication during the process; and the removal of unlimited liability clauses, which are deal-breakers for many potential bidders. According to NASPO, just 12 states still require unlimited liability of vendor partners.
Idaho Chief Information Officer Greg Zickau represented the government point of view on a panel on Tuesday, Oct. 23, and responded to a vendor question as to how to best be a partner with the state.
“Don’t litigate the procurement process and don’t politicize the procurement process,” he said. “A partner is somebody who is vested in your success,” he added. “They’re not just trying to sell me a widget. They want to see me be successful.”
What seems to have universal agreement is the fact that the procurement process needs to be shortened. Especially when it comes to technology, the lag time between when a need is established and when a product is delivered amounts to an end run around innovation.
“The pace of change today is the slowest pace of change we’ll see in our lifetimes,” said Zickau. “This will continue to bite us, especially in cybersecurity."
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Tennessee Chief Information Officer Stephanie Dedmon
Tennessee's Journey to an "App of Apps"
“We were not making it very easy for our citizens to do business with us,” said Tennessee Chief Information Officer Stephanie Dedmon. In a panel focused on citizen experience, Dedmon was joined by Earl Moore, state and local government engagement manager at Adobe. The state is now building a single citizen-facing app that will serve as a central access point, providing a more seamless experience for people seeking state services.The app was built using Adobe Experience Manager, technology the state first selected to help revamp its websites. But the effort evolved beyond just state portals.
“We’re working on a mobile-first strategy and what we call an app of apps that will give our citizens a single place to come to the state for online and mobile services,” Dedmon explained in an interview ahead of the panel. The app features a simple, elegant design, meant to easily guide users toward the services they need.
“We’ve implemented all of the base technology and are now working with a couple of agencies to develop some early apps to include in the mobile app,” Dedmon explained. From there, the state intends to add more functionality from other departments. The idea is to keep citizens from having to know and understand the ins and outs of government in order to get what they need.
“Keep it intuitive, keep it simple, but also build it once and use it for other services,” said Moore.
The app — a voluntary download for interested citizens — verifies the user’s identity upon their initial login, but doesn’t store citizen credit card information used to pay license fees and the like. Internal teams did the development work, Dedmon explained, and she supplemented in-house skills by hiring staff with mobile app development capabilities. The expected go-live date for the app will be in January or February 2019.
