One-on-one: New Mexico CIO Darryl Ackley
Darryl Ackley, the chief information officer of New Mexico, sat down with StateScoopTV to discuss mobility, mobile security, transparency and cost cutting.
Below is an edited transcript.
It’s something we have to embrace. You talk about mobility being an expectation of the constituents as computing platforms have really become people’s phones for the most part. In the government, we have to look at that model and embrace it, but it’s not without its challenges in terms of security and also the data we make available through the mobile platform is accurate and reliable. I think agencies are encouraged to develop apps or have application development in mind. We have a few successful application deployments, our transportation department most notably that hooked a transportation information system with cameras around the state.
What we’ve worked to do is bring in all of the different agencies – everybody has very different needs, public safety officials, for example, that are doing investigations or case management and have different expectations because of the sensitivity of the data. What we’ve tried to do is establish a core foundation where we brought in the different stakeholders from the agencies and made sure we could define the lowest common denominator with respect to security, privacy, encryption and password policies that everyone could agree to and we could endorse.
The state has a transparency portal where we are posting budgetary salary information, purchase order, contracting, that kind of data. Over the past two years we’ve expanded that considerably in terms of the granularity of the information available. We’re also making it available in an electronic formats so that folks can take the data and analyze it. We’ve expanded it to public education data so people can search the different school districts, which is pretty important, and that’s evolving constantly. We’re looking at giving people the ability for analytics, so for those interested in doing an aggregate analysis of the budget they can.
One of the things we are looking to establish is a better understanding of is some of the cost avoidances we are leveraging by being an enterprise state agency Everyone can kind of agree there has not been the rigor in documenting those cost avoidances, so that’s one step. We’re working to modernize in some ways some of the central accounting functions that we have like billing and management expenditures. The charge back model has been done well, but a lot of it is not automated in any fashion. We are really looking to overhaul that and put some automation into that.
