Pennsylvania’s new CTO focused on standardizing IT
Pennsylvania has promoted Jason Hebbe, from within the state’s Office of Administration, to the position of chief technology officer, following the departure of former CTO Sean Crager.
Hebbe, who has been with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania since 2012 in various IT roles, was most recently the chief operating officer. He began in the CTO role this month. As COO, Hebbe worked under Crager, who left in late May to become a vice president at a software company in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Hebbe said his priority is to continue the work Crager performed to promote digital services throughout the state.
Jason Hebbe (LinkedIn)
“I think, primarily, to just continue the track we’re on, to support the administration and all of the strategic and visionary initiatives they’re trying to accomplish,” Hebbe said when asked of his priorities as CTO.
Hebbe said that the state is in the middle of a “customer service transformation initiative” to standardize the state’s digital presence, with the goal of making it easy for residents to access state services quickly without needing different websites or phone numbers. Ideally, he said, that can be accomplished without purchasing dozens of different products.
The state recently had to cut ties with one of its contact-tracing vendors, Insight Global, after the company compromised the data of more than 70,000 Pennsylvanians.
“When you’ve got as many agencies as we’re supporting, there’s a lot of different products and a lot of them do the same thing, so we’re trying to generate efficiencies. Hopefully some cost savings come along with that if we can narrow that product landscape down to a few. Maybe not one, but less than 20,” Hebbe said.
Hebbe said his team is also expanding the state’s single-sign-on platform so that residents don’t have to keep track of different logins for only slightly different government services, like purchasing a hunting license and a fishing license.
