How Wisconsin’s CIO handles data, security, workforce

When David Cagigal became Wisconsins chief information officer, he hit the ground running.

Shortly after he came on board in 2013, the state completed a more than 15-year data center consolidation effort that took all of the states data centers and brought them into a single facility. But Cagigal didnt stop there.

We got that done, and then immediately after that, we created the disaster recovery site, Cagigal told StateScoop TV at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers Midyear Conference in April. After you put all the data centers together, its important that you have that kind of security.

With security, Cagigal said the state then moved to hire a chief information security officer who quickly designed a program to focus on making sure that the state was taking all of the necessary precautions to protect valuable data sets.

The CISO “quickly put together a program of projects to ensure that we had the proper defenses in securing all of our data, Cagigal said. The state of Wisconsin has an enormous amount of data on each one of our citizens.

But with great expectations of security, Cagigal said having the right people who are motivated for the job at hand is an essential part of being successful.

Getting [the staff] energized, encouraged, empowered, passionate about their role in IT, Cagigal said. Making sure that every one of them has an understanding of their purpose and can contribute to state government.

From there, Cagigal said, dedicated employees can help the state to move into new areas, while ensuring that they accomplish what they need to move the state forward.

[We need] to be able to innovate and empower these employees to continually improve our service delivery, and then execute flawlessly, Cagigal said. Making sure that everything that we do, every second of the day, is either protecting the data, creating the data, or answering many of the questions that state government should.