Role
Information Technology Director
Defined
The Information Technology (IT) Director, also sometimes referred to as the Chief Information Officer (CIO), serves as the enterprise information systems and technology lead for the State DOT.
Challenges and Opportunities
In your role, what are the most critical challenges and opportunities? Looking across the agency, what capabilities are required to successfully take them on? How can you help build the necessary capabilities? The first step is to understand these challenges and opportunities in terms of the major change forces that are driving them.
Change ForcesChallenge/OpportunityYour Responsibility
Technology AdvancementRapid changes in available technology creates opportunities for enhancing agency efficiency and effectiveness.

At the same time, technology advancement creates challenges for keeping pace with new hardware and software versions and addressing customer expectations given budgetary constraints, established IT governance processes and increasing cybersecurity concerns. 		Technology Adoption. Establish a strategic plan for technology adoption that is aligned with the agency’s future priorities and takes advantage of emerging technologies. Work in partnership with agency leadership to establish/strengthen technology project selection and life cycle management processes.

Aligning Skills to Needs. Build a strong team of IT project managers, business analysts, data scientists, database administrators, application development leads and security specialists, tapping into external resources as needed.

Attracting and Retaining. Create an attractive work environment, emphasizing opportunities for learning, making a positive impact, and work/life balance. Recognize high performing staff.

Agility and Resilience. Integrate change management processes within IT project development to ensure successful integration of new technology into business processes.
Shift in Role and FocusIncreased focus on operations and multimodal solutions will impact technology requirements and priorities.Operations Focus. Work with business units responsible for system maintenance and operations to understand emerging requirements and track available solutions. Pursue data standardization to facilitate data exchange with external partners.

Aligning Skills to Needs. Identify staff and consultants with in-depth knowledge of emerging transportation technologies. Engage these individuals to provide input into both strategical and tactical decisions.
Legislation, Regulation, and FundingIncreased focus on operations and multimodal solutions will impact technology requirements and priorities.
New reporting requirements may create the need to integrate information currently managed in separate systems.		Technology Adoption. Establish a data integration and reporting strategy that can be used to meet changing reporting requirements and business needs.
Public ExpectationsIncreased public expectations for online transactions, data access and information about agency operations and decisions.Transparency. Identify and advance solutions for automating transactions. Establish clear guidelines on providing external data access to protect private and sensitive information. Make use of available open data portals to provide self-service access to agency information.
Strategies and Resources

Information and Data Management
  • IT Strategic Planning – to identify priorities and resource needs for meeting new types of requirements and capitalizing on new technologies.
  • Services – to curate, clean, integrate and deliver data to meet changing business needs.
  • Technologies – to move to a more flexible technology architecture that is less costly to manage and update.
  • Governance – to provide clarity about roles and decision making processes for prioritizing and implementing new technology projects.
Organizational Management
  • Organizational Structure – to strengthen the ability of the IT organization to partner with business units on selecting and implementing new technologies.
  • Change Management - to ensure the agency is able to adapt to changes in business processes and effectively use new technologies.
Workforce Management
  • Recruiting and Retention – to improve the agency’s ability to attract and retain IT staff
  • Professional Development – to build skills needed for effective implementation and management of new systems and technologies
Knowledge Management
  • Mentoring – to ensure that newer staff learn from more experienced staff about effective IT management practices, especially those that aren’t written down
  • Knowledge dissemination – to ensure consistent understanding of agency IT policies and procedures, and the status of efforts to investigate new technologies.
Partnerships
  • Stakeholder Engagement – to ensure buy-in for strategic activities and pave the way for new collaboration opportunities

Where to Begin

  • Track emerging technologies and work closely with business functional leads to identify an implementation strategy and roadmap.
  • Explore techniques to increase speed of technology deployment (such as agile development or software as a service)
  • Work with the HR Lead to update position descriptions to reflect current needs, and brainstorm new strategies to recruit, retain and develop IT professionals.
  • Pursue partnerships with academic institutions and contract arrangements with private firms to supplement existing agency staff expertise.
  • Stay in touch with CIOs in other DOTs to learn about noteworthy practices and lessons learned.

Strategies

Strategies for today

  • Links to resources that can help the agency start to understand all the issues related to CAV and other technologies
  • Resources to help the agency understand the current state of its data needs and ways it can plan to close any gaps in technology today and in the future

Strategies for the near-term

  • Communities of interest with noteworthy practices in using strategic information technology Links to communities of practice in policy and planning disciplines
  • Guidance for the agency to plan for using data to inform decision-making
  • Links to Business Intelligence and Data Science position descriptions

Strategies for a five-year horizon

  • Resources to help the agency leverage the pow- er of information technology to become more efficient and effective in its decision making, and to improve its predictive ability
  • Resources to help the agency understand the cutting edge human resource competencies it will need in the future
  • Links to help the agency explore potential partnership opportunities in the use and funding of next generation technologies

Resources

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