December - 20188GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKIN MYOPINIONRaleigh and The Cloud: Iterative Progressaleigh, North Carolina, is a modern city that sits at a crucial technological crossroads. We anchor the Research Triangle region and are North Carolina's capital. We're booming in many ways; residents from all walks of life readily offer the statistic that roughly 66 people per day move to this area and claim it as their home.As with many local governments, even those larger than Raleigh, we are making huge strides toward moving functions to a cloud environment. But we're not finished yet.Citizens expect the latest technologies and the infrastructure that supports those advancements. In a tech-forward region such as ours, these demands cross boundaries, industries and demographics. And, in this era when new cyberthreats emerge daily, we need to head off vulnerabilities when possible, and address them quickly when it becomes necessary. We also need to be the bedrock for services that our communities demand. This can take the form of sophisticated tech needs, such as an app that makes finding and paying for parking easier, or something as basic as access to the internet from a community center.When I started with the City in 2016, about 27 percent of City business was conducted digitally. We'd thought that 33 percent of our business would be digitized by next year. Instead, we're closer to half of our enterprise-wide business functions modernized right now--47 percent--and we think we can get to 55 percent in 2019. That's well ahead of where we thought we'd be.Putting Our House in OrderWe needed to do some internal work first. We started by assessing and building our own capabilities and boosting efficiency and automation citywide through technology. We made certain that everyone in our shop is ITIL® Foundations certified, to move our whole organization to a customer service mentality and have adopted COBIT for overall IT Governance. We improved engagement by communicating with our end users better, letting them know what changes meant to them and their daily lives at work. We've defined a better process for D. Darnell Smith, CIO, City of Raleigh, North CarolinaByR
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