Iowa’s IT reorg delivered ‘enormous efficiencies,’ says CIO

Iowa Chief Information Officer Matt Behrens said the state’s IT department recently finished its reorganization process, which has already created “enormous efficiencies” and cost savings for the state.

The work follows a 2023 law that called for the reorganizing and consolidation of the state’s executive agencies, including Iowa’s technology capabilities. The reorganization combined 20 agency IT shops into one, and Behrens said the state is estimating the effort will deliver “tens of millions annually in cost savings.”

He said the process took about 20 months, beginning with the law’s passage in the spring of 2023. By October of 2023, Behrens said, all IT staff was moved into one office, and the next about nine months were spent building out a new operating model for IT, focusing on governance, performance measurement and organizational structure.

“One of the first things that we did was build a modernization playbook,” Behrens said. “So now, as we’re doing modernizations, we do them the same way every time. We have the same ingredients, every time we bake that cake. And so we’ve got seven or eight modernizations going on right now.”

Behrens said Iowa consolidated three mainframes into one. And the state consolidated seven IT service management systems down to one, providing unified project and portfolio management for the state.

“We’re finding enormous efficiencies through that journey. We’re also giving staff an opportunity to work in functional teams. So we took all the server administrators and put them together, and all the application developers and put them together,” he said. “Just being able to see and catalyze some of those things, we’re very excited. We’re very focused on efficiencies, and we think this is a massive opportunity to find those and also, when you look beyond it, to help agencies also think about efficiencies, enablement of AI, those types of things.”