Cybersecurity, big data top priorities for state’s IT chief

Dewand Neely is the chief information officer for the state of Indiana, overseeing a 300-plus employee operation that is the sole provider of IT services to about 100 state agencies. He’s been at the Indiana Office of Technology since its inception in 2005 (agencies previously had their own IT teams and resources), and he assumed the helm in October 2015 after Paul Baltzell stepped down.

Neely, 38, recently spoke with IBJ about cybersecurity, the innovation his office is driving, and being one of only a few African-American state government CIOs in the country. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.

IBJ: You’ve been in your job for a little over a year now. How have you made your mark on this office?

NEELY: I came in [in 2005] as an infrastructure guy a few years out of school and was lucky enough to be one of the first folks to work with the newly created Office of Technology. One of the things I remember early on is the struggle we had with changing the culture when we started doing consolidated IT—how much we had to bend over backward to make sure we were being customer-service focused and delivering value to win over people who were against consolidation.

One of the things I did right away after [becoming CIO] was to really put another focus on that. We were doing some really cool things, but sometimes that work can get in the way of the customer service. For the full article click here 

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