Ron Guerrier, the CIO of the recently created Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) has established five pillars that he believes are required to advance the Illinois Technology Plan, establish a cohesive departmental culture, and understand existing processes.
The five pillars include:
- architecture – which includes an inventory of current systems, both legacy and modern, used statewide;
- service management – to ensure the state has standards to maintain an ideal digital hygiene;
- program management, which has a similar purpose to service management;
- data and analytics – which will focus on how to best leverage information collected by the state to improve services; and,
- information security.
The pillars will be assessed annually, with the goal of assuring that efficiencies and best practices are followed.
“Every pillar is going to actually hold themselves accountable to a self-assessment; however, just to make sure it’s not slanted in any way, we’ve reached out to my alma mater, the University of Illinois, and they’re going to leverage their computer sciences group and their professors and they’re going to also score us on the [Capability Maturity Model Integration],” Guerrier said.
DoIT was created in part to unify the various IT departments spread across the government. Guerrier is working towards a federated model, with a core leadership team and staff establishing best practices and guidelines for department CIOs across the state to follow, but the employees will stay at the agency in which they are currently housed.
“DoIT was put together to consolidate technology into one agency; however, that also has a preconceived notion that the technology teams at each individual agency will have to pack up their bags and their belongings and move into a centralized office to support the agencies from afar or remotely because we’re essentially consolidating the individuals, the headcount,” he said. “That’s a centralized model, but I am not a supporter of a centralized model, in that regard. What we did is we’re focusing on more of a federated model.”