Several Greater Des Moines chief information officers from different sectors agreed that 2017 will keep them busy as they beef up cybersecurity, react to big data opportunities, ramp up the fight for talent, and strive to put as much information in people’s mobile apps as possible.

We checked in with Chris Gill of Drake University, Cathy Ross of Iowa Workforce Development and Brian Barry of Telligen, which offers population health management solutions. All are in CIO work. And even though they represent higher education, state government and a private firm, their plans for next year hit similar issues.

Here’s a look: 

The fight for talent

Barry, Telligen’s vice president of information management, said talent acquisition will continue to be a top issue. “It is important to come up with strategies to attract talent here. That is a topic anytime (CIOs) get together.

“We are working with colleges and universities. What we are looking at here is we are acknowledging the next generation millennial inflow of talent and how we work with them. What is our flexibility on work schedules? What is our flexibility on technology (such as flexibility to work without a set workstation)? What is our flexibility on work schedules? It is a very different expectation. That is one thing we are looking at. How do we create a culture that is more accommodating? We are assessing a number of things: facilities, benefits and work schedules.”

Barry sees a tough fight to find workers with an unusually specific combination of skills. Often, that means the company has to train the workers on health matters once they are in the fold.

“The interesting thing in IT with traditional developers is what we are seeing is the progression of technology is happening so rapidly that finding workers with Java basic skills but also competency in social technology and mobile is critical,” Barry said. “Things are going to change tremendously. It’s all moving to handhelds and being readily accessible.

“The other thing we are seeing is a huge need of a blended role as a technology analyst and  strong project management and the ability to understand programs,” Barry said. “They are helping us implement the federal health government landscape. That is not your typical combination. They are customer-facing, but can dive deep in data aspects. 

“It has been a challenge to find that combination,” he said. “Our preference would be to find someone with some level of health care domain. There isn’t a tremendous availability of that. We have to internally figure out how to better train and educate people on that aspect. We built a nice breadth of that knowledge. We have senior people who understand that. We have a mentor system.”

Gill, Drake’s CIO, said the university pays a bit less than some private companies, so he has to sell the perks of being on the academic calendar, the quality of campus life, and work-life balance to compete for talent.  

“It’s a tough, tough market to compete in,” Gill said. “It’s a constant challenge. It’s my biggest source of frustration and challenge.” 

The state is trying to help.

Ross, CIO-service delivery director at Iowa Workforce Development, said her agency’s  tech team is supporting both Home Base Iowa — an effort to encourage veterans to work in Iowa — and Future Ready Iowa, which is focused on strategies to improve the education and training of Iowans in a way to meet employers’ needs. “We will provide the web support. We will set the infrastructure from a technical standpoint,” she said.

A new Future Ready Iowa web portal is on the way but unfinished as of late November. 

“There is a renaissance in state government,” Ross said. “We are trying to meet the skills gaps.”

Three words: Mobile, mobile, mobile

Ross said Workforce Development is looking to make it easier for job-seekers, employers and state staffers to get the information they need on a variety of devices. 

“Obviously we are not in a position to be able to leverage current technology in our current infrastructure in a way that we want to to better serve Iowa taxpayers, “Ross said. “This is an initiative that many states are enduring and going through. It’s an initiative directed by U.S. Department of Labor to make sure we are kept current.”

Said Telligen’s Barry: “Things are going to change tremendously. It’s all moving to handhelds and being readily accessible.”

The cloud

Ross said the state is working to move from a mainframe system to storing information on the cloud. That in turn is part of the effort to make things more flexible and available on multiple devices. 

“One of the biggest things (planned for 2017) is to take our existing technology that’s on mainframe and move it to more modernized technology,” Ross said. “We want to move those to cloud-based technology.”

“Our key unemployment insurance application still sits on mainframe. In the next 24 to 36 months we will move that to a Java-based or .NET application.

“We are working on unemployment insurance to move to the cloud with a consortium of two other states, Vermont and Idaho. Idaho has a solution already, and we are jumping on board to make it Iowa-specific. Vermont is doing the same thing.”

“We want security and redundancy and to have access anytime, anywhere for the public and staff,” she added.

To that end, the department also is shifting from Outlook email to Google’s system to improve remote access, Ross said. 

Cybersecurity

It’s a huge concern, still. “Cybersecurity continues to be a top priority for us,” Barry said. “You see ransomware and data security issues. We need the right set of tools to manage it and respond. Our customers demand it. 

“The sophistication of how data is accessed is continuing to increase,” Barry said. “It is a constant focus for us. It’s not something you put in place and walk away from.” 

Ross said the Iowa state government has a huge cybersecurity program that will continue. 

“We have done very well on making sure our current infrastructure is where it needs to be,” Ross said. But the job is never done, and “it will take homegrown solutions,” she added. 

The pace of technological changes

Gill said the meteoric rise in technologies will continue in 2017. “There is another whole side to this — the pace of change. Things are changing so rapidly in higher education in general and in technology specifically. The cloud is completely changing our thinking on how we acquire and make available new services.”

That in turn raises security questions, Gill said. “More and more important is effective vendor controls. How do I make sure we protect the university? How do we get our data back if we separate from a vendor? How do I position the (information technology) organization to play the role it needs to play? 

“We follow partners. It’s like a dance. Watching a couple dance can be absolutely beautiful, but someone always leads. We follow. We don’t make decisions, we support them.”

But 2017 will mean an even stronger need for IT workers to be “guides and navigators,” Gill said. “We should be in a position to guide decision-making. The guide needs to get them where the leaders want to go.” In large part, that comes with using big data to analyze the playing field, he added. 

The new year will mean lacing up a new pair of fast running shoes. “We have to do change better than anyone,” Gill said. “How do we help the university transition in accelerating change? We can see across the organization better than some other departments can. We can help them keep making steps.”

Big data

Gill said big data will be especially prominent as Drake both builds its popular new business analytics program and uses big data to explore changes like a tuition guarantee.

“We are trying to teach our students about big data analytics,” he said. “We are supporting that. We are seeing the demand skyrocket.”

But big data also is a big deal in Drake President Marty Martin’s fact-based world of decision-making, Gill said. “On the decision support side, it’s beginning to show up in what we do. We are trying to be more agile in decision-making. We have a ways to go to catch up with where big data can take us. 

“Analytics is going to be big on our map next year,” Gill said. “Rapidly scaling our ability to make data-informed decisions.”

Barry at Telligen said as a population health database manager, his firm is booming. That means keeping up with bigger and bigger data. “We are seeing great growth right now,” he said. “That means a lot of dealing with data management activities.

“We are investing in two things on R and D — multi-device platforms and data visualization. That really extends beyond data analysis to bringing the data to life. We need to get the data into the hands of end-users and let them do their own analysis without an IT person.

“We are a population health company,” Barry said. “We have health care data about an entire population. We need to identify the individuals that would benefit most from proactive disease management assistance.”

A universal issue in data is how to extract value from those records, he said. 

Interdepartmental cooperation

At Workforce Development, 2017 will bring more work to assure continued compliance with the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, Ross said. “It is a regulation the U.S. Department of Labor requires us to do reporting on how we are making sure we are helping people get jobs. It involves integration across departments. It streamlines the system no matter where you enter it. This is a fairly large endeavor for all state governments.”