The project, conducted by the Center for Technology in Government in partnership with the New York State (NYS) Office of the Chief Information Officer and Office for Technology (CIO/OFT) and the NYS Chief Information Officer Council,⁴ generated a set of recommendations for improving enterprise IT governance for NYS government. The resulting recommendations focused on outlining a new enterprise IT governance structure for NYS. While the recommendations were developed specifically for New York State, the overall findings drew not only on insights gained in NYS, but also from public and private sector IT governance experiences nationwide and around the world and from previously published research in this area. In the NYS project, one of the early and repeated engagements with enterprise IT stakeholders focused on answering the question, What value must be delivered in order to make enhancements to IT governance in New York State worthwhile? Stakeholders identified four primary value propositions for enhanced enterprise IT governance:

Reduce redundancy and establish prioritization mechanisms. Value is created by complementing and not usurping the missions and goals of individual agencies. Prioritization is a difficult, but potentially powerful process. Where prioritization occurs—at the agency, domain, or national level—is an important consideration for any IT governance structure.

Reduce political directions and swings. A well-designed governance structure cannot eradicate political swings, nor should it. What a governance framework can do is provide a continuity plan for when political leadership changes. It can serve to support a consistency of vision for IT projects, especially for large infrastructure initiatives which are often multi-year endeavors that span more than one political administration.

Establish standards. Through common technological standards, collaboration and interoperability become achievable goals for the state’s many departments and units. A governance framework for New York State should set out clear rules for developing statewide standards, including capability for ongoing review and refinement of those standards to respond to new and emerging needs, technologies, and priorities.

Foster sharing of services and information through agency collaboration. Effective enterprise IT governance should provide a space for greater coordination and collaboration among agencies, authorities, and local governments. Although government is diverse, there are many shared goals and constituents, which make cross-boundary collaboration a worthwhile and necessary goal.

Align IT with business of the state. Aligning IT with business needs is a commonly accepted goal of IT governance, yet it is universally difficult to achieve. Programmatic needs are what drive government organizations and IT governance should strive to provide avenues for the alignment between IT investments and programmatic priorities. This alignment has potential value at the agency level as well as the state level.

These value statements provide both a justification for pursuing enhanced IT governance in New York State and a framework for evaluating any IT governance strategy pursued by the state. In terms of developing governance capabilities for improving interoperability, we propose a similar approach: a focus on identifying the public value of investments in interoperability and the threshold capability of IT governance.