Missouri Digital Government Summit

Attended the Missouri Digital Government Summit today. The Governor made some opening remarks to get the summit started, followed by some words by the State's CIO.

The general session featured Teri Takai, the Chief Information Officer for the State of Michigan followed.


Teri Takai

The main subject during her session was IT Consolidation. Something the State of Missouri is going through. As part of that consolidation I, along with the IT Staff from our Department will be employees of the consolidated IT, which fall under the Office of Administration.

Teri is a good speaker.

The only thing I heard some in the crowd take issue with after her session was the fact that it was mentioned that the IT staff had been reduced by about 15% through consolidation, this supposedly done through attrition (this being spurred by an early retirement program). This left a consolidated staff 1,600, which has stayed consistent since consolidation. It was later asked how many were previously in the IT Department. It appeared that she was taking into account IT throughout all of the agencies and stated around 2,100 (or 2,200). The commentator stated that he meant the count under the CIO's office alone before consolidation. That count was around 400.

The part that got to those in attendance is going from 2,100 to 1,600 is closer to 24%. Hmm.

The keynote was given by Astronaut Rick Searfoss, Colonel, USAF Retired. I think space flight would be interesting. Rick has more recently flown the EZ-Rocket.


EZ-Rocket

There were many vendors on hand and as you can see via the schedule, there were several breakout sessions.

I hope we see a lot of results come from the ideas expressed in the Sharing Data session.