Raj Subramanian, the Chief Information Officer for the Ohio Office of Budget and Management, has told me that he considers migrating OBM's IT to the cloud to be one of the smartest decisions he has ever made. In the current issue of Government Technology, he explains why.
Yes, cost is part of it. OBM has a responsibility to be a good steward of Ohio's public funds. But mostly, it's about speed. Raj is among the vanguard of CIO's who focus their energies on business value. His primaryobjective is to put innovative, high-value functionality in business users' hands quickly. Appian Cloud is his platform for achieving that. In just one year, his small team launched four transformative process applications on Appian, three of them enterprise-wide, on employees' desktops and their mobile devices.
In the Government Technology piece, Raj talks about how, as an engineer, he has a natural love for problem-solving. However, he had to ask himself what types of problems were worth the expenditure of his precious IT resources. "I wanted my team focused on delivering solutions to improve existing business processes," he says. "This could not happen unless we had a stable infrastructure ñ and a dedicated team to take care of everything below the applications layer."
He discusses perceived cloud issues such as security, integration and loss of IT control. On the latter, he draws a particularly interesting analogy: "Companies did have more control over their telephone calls when they had their own telephone switchboard. Can you imagine having one today?"
Read Raj's full piece in the link embedded at the top of this post. If you want to hear him tell the story, check out this video on our website.
Ben Farrell
Director of Corporate Communications
Ben Farrell
