My earliest computer was a Commodore VIC-20, when I was about 10 years old. But my plan when I went to college was to study history and become a lawyer. I switched to electrical engineering, and after grad school I went to work at Nortel Networks in the System Engineering Group. From there I came to be the Chief Technology Officer for the state and took on more responsibilities in the pure IT domain.

Our task is to break down barriers so that agencies can focus on their core businesses and develop their expertise, and farm out their IT functions to our bureau. We ensure joint buy-in by including them in the decision-making process. We've established several organizations to give departmental CIOs the opportunity to give input into the standards-setting process and a voice with regard to statewide governance, which is also one of the charges of my bureau.

I'm very proud of the team that we've built. If something were to happen to me tomorrow, I would leave behind a cadre of educated leaders that set aggressive goals. They listen, and they understand the importance of getting out of the office and getting their hands into the day-to-day activities. We had an opportunity three years ago to identify many managers who were being underutilized and really give them an opportunity to step up and take on a broader role within the organization.

Significant turnover at the executive level creates some inherent instability in terms of setting priorities. Also, there are a lot of competing business cycles in the state government: audit cycles, legislative cycles, election cycles. So if I want to move equipment out of a data center that's run by the Department of Revenue I have to bear in mind that I can't put their operation in jeopardy during tax season.

We rely on standard platforms and technologies from companies that we know will have some longevity. Those things are important to us because, again, we're caught in the midst of these cycles that add some unpredictability to our operations. So it's very important to us to work with companies that are going to be around for the long term, that we can depend on, and that have a predictable product cycle.

We inherited a Linux environment and its support staff from an agency that was running some Web servers on Linux boxes. It's really sort of a negative for us, because we're trying to build a shared services environment and that would be a nonstandard, unsupported platform. We cannot leverage the knowledge and skills that we have in the enterprise effectively when we don't have people that are trained on that platform. We've found that we don't have the time or resources to expend on what could be construed as "science projects" from a business perspective. What's important is building a safe and secure environment under whatever operating system you choose to deploy.

People say, "Let's think outside of the box." Well, I don't think you should. I think that you should get really good at understanding your box. Be creative, but do the analysis and build a business case. Voice over IP sounds really cool, right? But I'm not here to do cool things. So I think, how can I leverage that technology to radically alter the way that people interact with state government?

I would recommend CIO.com to any of my peers. We also use Gartner extensively, both consulting and online in the knowledge base. For example, when I told the Office of Management and Budget that I needed more headcount in a certain area, I went to Gartner and instantly got benchmarking data that showed we were underspent compared to other states.

We're always challenged with the lack of understanding that IT is an ever-evolving beast. And when the purse strings are controlled by a legislature that changes every four years, they really don't understand, for example, that our workforce is becoming more mobile, and needs the technology to support that.

I was going to say Battlestar Galactica, but I'm sort of nontraditional. I guess I'm going to have to say Star Trek, absolutely. Because Captain Kirk is the coolest man in the known universe, right? Who didn't want to be Captain Kirk?