Reorganization of IT Services

By Dick Thompson, CIO

Since October, the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and Bureau of Information Services (BIS) have been in the process of combining functions and reorganizing.   Legislation will be submitted in January to formally merge these two offices, and the resulting organization will be entirely re-engineered.  Why make these dramatic changes?  Our goal is to align our structure to better provide high quality services to state agencies and the public, in the best and most cost-effective manner possible.

Following action by the Legislature, the Office of Information Technology (OIT), under the direction of the Chief Information Officer, will be composed of four functional areas as follows.

OCIO Policy Office: Dick Thompson This area will be responsible for policy and standards development, legislative relationships, statewide issues and projects such as, but not limited to, laptops in education, broadband, last mile.  Staff assigned include: Dick Hinkley, Kathy Record, and Ellen Lee.

Performance Management Division (PMD): Mary Silva The focus and highest priority of this area is customer satisfaction. The PMD will lead all other areas in achieving the highest standards of a customer centric culture. Initially, this area includes the following existing functions:  Customer Service Center (Dale Blake), Billing and Purchasing (Howard Clary), Desktop (Alana Buck), Administrative Services (Brenda McCamish) and Special Projects (Don Loud).

The PMD will serve as the organization’s first point of contact for customers, and will oversee customer relationships.  In so doing, it will develop Service Level Agreement metrics with customers and the OPS group, and monitor and report on performance metrics.

Strategic Management Division (SMD): Kevin Jones This area is strategic in nature, and will plan, design, and test computing systems and technology that impact the State’s network and computer systems at the enterprise level. The SMD is responsible for IT planning (building IT plans based upon business needs) which includes portfolio management, a project office, and information security/business continuity planning. To date personnel have been assigned in the following areas:

• Project Management Office: Val Wood
• Information Security/Business Continuity: Mark Kemmerle
• Portfolio Management: Stephanie Parker and Mary Cloutier
• Enterprise Architecture.

Operations and Production Services Division (OPS): Tom Howker This division is responsible for four key functions: Voice Services (David Rodrigue), Network and Directory Services (Bob Corum), Geographic Information Services (Dan Walters), and Applications, Servers and Production Support (Jim Lopatosky).   The Applications, Servers and Production Support group is composed of four components:

Server Support[1], Enterprise Operations and Monitoring Support (Marion Bowman), Data Center Management (Terry Burton), and Applications[2].

The organization is still evolving, and will not be finalized until action by the Legislature.  I welcome any comments you may have, and will ask Kevin Jones, Mary Silva and Tom Howker to present more details regarding their responsibilities at upcoming Information Services Managers Group meetings.