During more than four years as CIO, Bill Kehoe has seen King County transform. And whether it’s moving applications to the cloud, modernizing legacy software, consolidating executive leadership or changing institutional mindsets, Kehoe has tended to the long view.
Most recently, King County’s transformation has manifested itself in the form of a migration to Microsoft Office 365 and a unified communications project using Skype for Business that supports nearly 8,000 users.
The county’s success in technology is nothing new. It’s been recognized in e.Republic’s Digital Counties Survey regularly for the past 10 years. The county also took third place in Government Technology’s Best of the Web survey last year. But for Kehoe, successful innovation goes beyond technology.
The Metropolitan King County Council has created an innovation team — comprising the county’s IT governance committees, business management council and technology management board that will organize new, countywide projects around e-government, mobility and open data, Kehoe said. It’s not just an IT project, he explained, but also a cultural shift.
Kehoe added that innovation is about getting the county’s business customers to think beyond short-term tactics and to build a strategic plan for long-term success.
“My mantra here,” he said, “has been to put together an organization under a service model and to create these platforms that are sustainable for the future, and I think we’ve made a lot of great progress in both of those areas.”
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