DET leadership presented these goals to DET employees through seven Town Hall meetings and with our stakeholders within the IT Executive Steering Committee, IT Directors Council, and Administrative Officer's Council. View the Presentation here.

Who We Are - Featuring our CIO, David Cagigal

The State of Wisconsin has received an A- in the Center for Digital Government’s Digital States Surveyin 2016 and 2018, along with first place in the Adaptive Leadership category. Adaptive Leadership reflects our ability to align the state’s technology investment strategies with the top policy priorities of the Governor and Legislature. It is truly a barometer of state agencies being able to work together toward common goals. In Wisconsin, we now view enterprise collaboration as our everyday way of doing business – it has guided our data center consolidation efforts, our recent enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, our cybersecurity strategies, and our e-government program, just to cite a few examples. I firmly believe in the potential of enterprise collaboration to keep us moving forward.

The cornerstone of our governance model is the ITESC – the Information Technology Executive Steering Committee. This group approves all enterprise IT initiatives and ensures they match the Governor’s priorities and agency business needs. The ITESC consists of the State CIO and deputy secretaries of the nine largest cabinet agencies. Meanwhile, the Agency CIO Steering Committee (ACSC), which includes CIOs from the same agencies represented on the ITESC, serves to operationalize the strategies approved and sponsored by the ITESC. With advance analysis of enterprise IT issues conducted by the State CIO and ACSC, the ITESC gets to evaluate and decide on clearly articulated and actionable options.

Several other interagency groups conduct important preliminary analyses for the ITESC. Our successful ERP project, STAR, was implemented in just over two years, despite an extensive scope – it replaced 140-plus systems with one comprehensive system. The STAR Decision Council, consisting primarily of agency division administrators, reviewed any customization requests and major configuration decisions prior to them going to the ITESC. Ultimately, the ITESC determined only three customizations to the off-the-shelf software were necessary, thanks to the Decision Council’s earlier research.

Likewise, we have an eGovernment Business Management Team that provides oversight for the state of Wisconsin’s self-funded portal contract and advises the ITESC on the annual e-government business plan. Since the state’s partnership with its self-funded portal vendor began in 2013, the e-government program has generated more than 50 cost-effective, user-friendly applications.

Cybersecurity presents an even greater challenge for productive collaboration, but fortunately, we have colleagues in local government, utilities, and private-sector organizations who were willing to step up. Beginning in mid-2014, representatives from 16 critical infrastructure sector owners in the state (e.g., banking, energy, transportation, food and agriculture, water systems) began meeting to design a Cyber Disruption Response Strategy – a framework to help infrastructure owners and operators function in public/private partnerships to respond to cyber disruption events.

The State of Wisconsin still faces ongoing cyber risks, and the state's infrastructure must be protected from these threats. Wisconsin must prioritize the infrastructure and data that we protect, assess risks and hazards, and make prudent investments in cybersecurity and cyber-defense capabilities to achieve our security goals and objectives. To mitigate risks in cyberspace requires a comprehensive strategy to counter and, if necessary, withstand disruptive and destructive attacks. Due to these risks Wisconsin also developed another cybersecurity strategy document, which  provides a high-level overview of all the major cybersecurity-related efforts being undertaken in the State of Wisconsin through robust security and continuity programs. Ensuring the State of Wisconsin is secure and resilient online is an essential component of building a more competitive and productive economy.

 The past few years have required intensive work and participation from our enterprise partners. But the positive assessment we received from the Digital States Survey was a welcome reminder from an impartial source of all we’ve accomplished recently through a collaborative mindset and effective governance mechanisms. And we have every intention of maintaining that momentum.