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Technology: State CIO's Gain More Clout
As corporate IT is increasingly being managed from a business perspective, rather than a pure technical one, we’ve seen that CIO’s are increasingly being marginalized, with decisions often now being deferred to CFO’s or other executives on the business side.
Somewhat surprisingly, just the opposite trend seems to be occurring in governments. A report from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) finds that as state economies are struggling, it is the CIO that increasingly being turned to to help reduce costs and eliminate inefficiencies.
The report concluded that “as state leaders pursue all avenues to maintain program budgets and service levels, CIOs, consolidations and IT-enabled efficiencies come to the fore as a means to improve performance and control costs.”
The report finds most state CIO’s are currently stymied by both the lack of and the reductions in funding. 71 percent of state CIO’s say that shrinking budgets are their most challenging problem. Other top problems include resistence to change and conflicting priorities.
The top goals of state CIO’s are consolidation, better control of IT costs, and improved IT governance and portfolio management.
The top areas being considered for consolidation are the following:
- Telecom
- Data Centers
- Security
- Backup and Disaster recovery
- Servers
- Storage
Three-quarters of the CIO’s say that cloud computing has changed their role in a positive way, giving CIO’s a higher priority and allowing them more opportunity to architect change rather than to just play a supporting role.
The report concluded that “many services have already been consolidated or are undergoing it. More services will be consolidated soon as states continue their search for increased efficiency and effectiveness. However, even with their increased clout, CIOs must be cautious about the search for the holy grail of cost reduction, remembering that consolidation is not the only solution; innovation can also provide many of these benefits. After service rationalization, CIOs need to focus on service optimization.”
