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Video - State Chief Information Officer Teri Takai discusses IT consolidation and Governor's Executive Order
MS. TAKAI: My name is Teri Takai and I am the State Chief Information Officer and it’s great to have an opportunity to talk to you about something that’s really important that’s happening in IT in the State of California. The governor’s recent executive order really puts in place a number of very, very important areas for all of us in the IT community to be working on going forward to really improve the way that information technology serves the citizens and businesses of California.
The executive order puts in place many things that are very important including the working relationship between the agency CIOs, departmental CIOs, Chief Information Security Officers, and also sets in place a way for us to understand how we’re spending key information technology dollars.
But a big part of the actions and the activities that we’re going to be working on is really around how we can work together more effectively and how we can set standards and how we can consolidate many of our IT assets to be sure that we’re cost effective, but also that we’re more reliable and we’re more secure, and as important, that we’re more green in the way that we deploy the technology.
So we have laid out goals including reducing energy, reducing our data center square footage, moving mission-critical applications into key data centers, moving to a single California government network, consolidating our e-mail, our e-mail security and encryption. And we are working together with many individuals across the state to really accomplish that.
We have formed seven working groups and over 136 team members that are actually working to define how we’re going to do this, because there’s no one single good idea, it’s really a set of ideas that if we can bring them together we can get really the best solution for California. I’m really confident that the working groups that are being lead by our agency CIOs are going to be able to define where we want to go over the next five years in terms of the way that we all use technology.
You know, change is hard and sometimes there is the fear that as we move into more standardization, as we move into different ways of doing business that it’s going to impact our jobs and it’s going to impact the way that we do our jobs. Well, that’s really not the objective of these changes at all. The objective is to be able to provide more services for the dollars that we are spending on IT, and more importantly, to change the way we’re delivering services, as I said, to be sure that they are more secure, to make sure that they’re more reliable.
The other thing is that we want to reduce our dependence on outside support and outside help that we use today.
And lastly, we want to make it possible by using standard technologies that it’s easier for all of us to understand what are the career opportunities in the different technology areas, in project management, and how can we continue to grow and prosper as employees of the State of California.
So there’s a lot to think about, a lot of reasons for the actions that were taken, but all of those actions are really going to mean that for all of us, not only as state employees, but also as taxpayers in the State of California, that we’re going to be able to deliver the best service and make sure that IT remains a critical part of state government.
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