How Georgia Successfully Overhauled IT
Friday, August 28th, 2015
When Dean Johnson joined the state of Georgia's tech team in 2007, he was embarking on a turnaround mission.
The organization that hired Johnson, the Georgia Technology Authority, had been chartered by a 2000 statute in an effort to streamline the state's IT operations, but inefficiencies, duplication and security risks were rampant.
Johnson, who was brought on as the GTA's infrastructure services director and now serves as the organization's COO, recalls the agency commissioning an outside firm to conduct an assessment of the state's technology shop. That evaluation returned with "some fairly alarming results," he says.
"The independent third party study indicated to us that we had a lot of shortcomings," he says. "We were not able to adhere to what I would refer to as industry best practices due to the fact that we didn't have enough in-source staff to do the work. And the staff we did have weren't able to keep their skillsets up."
