Duane Schell

Unifying IT services “isn’t the sexiest thing,” says North Dakota CTO Duane Schell, but it is yielding “massive efficiencies” across the enterprise. Schell, who’s worked for the North Dakota government for more than 20 years, says the state’s unification of its tech services has allowed the Information Technology Department to take on dozens of new projects without hiring additional employees. “We’ve turned down a dozen service desks into a single service desk with all the efficiencies and automations,” he says. “We’re measuring about 28 [full-time employees’] worth of effort that we’ve been able to automate and just take on a ton of new capacity.”