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Feb. 22, 2019 - Work Worth Doing - Doug Burgum

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#3: Shawn Riley: Building North Dakota's Cyber Moonshot

As our Chief Information Officer and director of the Information Technology Department, Shawn Riley is working to make sure the state is equipped for today and prepared for tomorrow. On this episode, we talk about cyber security, technology in schools and working as one across state government.

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	North Dakota's history is full of legendary people and today North Dakota is a place where anyone can be legendary.
	Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States once said, far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
	This is a show about people doing just that for the people of the great state of North Dakota.
	Here's Mark Staples, a member of my team to tell you more about today's episode.
	Hi.
	Here on Work Worth Doing, I'll be joining in every now and then to give you a bit more context, background, and perspective on the conversations you'll hear throughout this series.
	There is a very high likelihood that the device you're listening to this podcast on is connected to the internet.
	In fact, practically every aspect of life now has some relationship to the internet.
	From the smartwatch on your wrist to the doorbell in your home, technology is connecting us in ways we never would have expected.
	All of that interconnectedness creates immense potential for progress and efficiency between people and across industries.
	But it also poses certain risks for cybersecurity.
	In 2018, companies like Facebook, Marriott, and British Airways saw massive data breaches where cyber attackers stole millions of records full of sensitive information.
	On this episode, Governor Burgum sits down with Sean Riley, our Chief Information Officer and Director of our Information Technology Department, or ITD. Sean has spent two decades working in IT leadership roles in healthcare and other private industries.
	Prior to his current role, he led the IT unification effort at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
	Today you'll hear a discussion on what we're doing to protect our citizens' data and improve the experience for users interacting with our systems, all while saving money in the process.
	Here's Doug Bergam and Sean Reilly.
	Sean, great having you on.
	Work Worth Doing.
	Let's jump right into it.
	Cyber is in the news every day.
	How many attacks are coming in to hit the state of North Dakota every day, every week, every month?
	So on an average month, 5.7 million attacks.
	So we are getting attacked from country after country all over the world.
	We're getting attacked internally from our own country.
	We're getting attacked from all over everywhere.
	But 5.7 million attacks is what we get on a monthly basis coming into the state of North Dakota.
	And it's a mind-boggling number.
	It's something that people just don't quite get that much.
	But as you think about it, you're talking about multiple attacks per second.
	We brought the legislature in for a review session a couple of weeks ago so they could all see a little bit of how we're defending ourselves.
	We had a big map on the wall.
	You can go up to that and you can see all the nations that are sending attacks our way from all over the world.
	And then we'd go to the next page where they could see them actively happening.
	And it was just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, as they're coming in.
	And when you say map, we're actually...
	Because I had a chance to visit your hackathon.
	This is a projection coming off of a computer screen in real time that shows a map of the world that shows actively through IP addresses where the attacks are originating and how they're coming into our state.
	Yeah, this is an active map that is digitally created that is updating itself every five minutes or so and you'll see This little circle on each nation of different colors and different sizes and it's evolving and moving as the day goes on.
	You can see from every nation where things are coming towards us and from very unexpected places sometimes.
	And you and a very small team of warriors are trying to defend everything from all these attacks.
	But just help us understand what form do the attacks come in and what are the assets that we're trying to protect?
	Sure.
	So we've got 11 cyber warriors today trying to defend a network of 252,000 people.
	And right now we're trying to defend everything from that kindergarten student's personal information all the way to national defense type documents.
	So everything from what sits in our National Guard, Department of Emergency Services, Highway Patrol, Corrections, Attorney General, all the way to the other side of data where you've got a kindergarten kid who's learning how to code on their tablet That means we've got data that's not just...
	It's every student's great information.
	We've got health information for people that may be on Medicare and Medicaid.
	We have information about people that are in long-term care.
	We've got information about everybody that's involved in our court system, the criminal justice system, people who've served in our correction system or who have been released from our correction system.
	And we've got financial information from anybody who has ever paid taxes in the state of North Dakota.
	And we also have got We've got business information of anyone who's registered a business with the Secretary of State.
	And then we've also, we're the largest landowner, the state of North Dakota.
	So we have the land board as the largest landowner and the largest mineral owner.
	And so we've got, the state has financial assets that we hold in trust that we're managing for all of the citizens of the state that help pay for...
	75% of our K-12 education, and we've got the Legacy Fund, the PERS Fund, you know, go on and on.
	But the breadth of information that we have literally touches not just the 252,000 people on the network, but likely every citizen in the state.
	Yeah, and that's a really good short list of what you just gave there.
	That's a good short list of what we really have.
	And the reality is this government is very different than the private sector in this sense.
	If you go to whatever company and they lose your data, you can go somewhere else.
	But we don't give people that option.
	If you don't give us your personal data, you can't drive.
	If you don't give us your personal data, you can't phish.
	And our responsibility is immensely different than your largest private sector companies because we force people to give us information to be able to actually operate in the day-to-day world.
	And this really focuses our teams on saying we must absolutely keep data that we force people to give us must be secure.
	This was almost too perfect.
	Just as we started recording this podcast about cybersecurity, the alarms in the Capitol started going off.
	Okay, thank you again for everybody.
	- Everybody, here we go. - Great luck. - Fortunately, it was just a test.
	Unfortunately, we had to wait a few minutes listening to...
	It keeps it fun, right?
	Before we could continue.
	The alarm test was over soon, but security alerts are a constant issue for Sean and his team.
	As he said, the state of North Dakota has 5.7 million attacks a month.
	That's 184,000 a day, about 7,600 an hour, and 127 attacks every minute.
	Suddenly those alarms didn't sound too bad.
	Just like any other organization that maintains their assets, the state of North Dakota has to defend its technology and digital assets.
	That's the entire premise behind the need for cybersecurity.
	So, what does cybersecurity really mean?
	What are we doing to defend against those 5.7 million monthly attacks?
	Well, it's a multi-pronged approach with a lot of intricate work going on behind the scenes.
	Sean helped put it in words we can all understand.
	So, North Dakota is a unique and complex organization, and we're all tied together, which gives us advantages, but it also creates certain risks.
	Talk about the particular risks just in the executive branch of some of the risks that you found when you arrived.
	The reality is that the advantage of information is its interconnected nature and its ability to be able to do analytics.
	What we want to be able to do is take information and enable policy makers.
	And the reality is, is of all the data that we have today, there's a ton of interconnectivity.
	So getting to something as simple as the cafeteria menu and getting to that type of system externally coming into our state network, getting to that cafeteria system, gives you then accessibility to...
	Credit card, which can also give you accessibility to someone's employee information, which can then give you accessibility to their paycheck.
	And the reality is we have downstream systems where things that you would never expect would ever be a threat or even a big deal.
	You may even go, hey, well, but it's open information.
	You can go put in an open records request and get this info.
	You can, and we'll provide that info through the proper mean.
	We don't want to give open access to these bad actors who use those systems and pivot it to get anywhere else they can try to get to in the network.
	We've had instances of nation-state actors using school districts Sitting their environment on that school district, so an elementary school, kindergarten through third grade, using that to try and pivot and attack the National Guard, the criminal justice systems.
	They've tried to attack other systems in our financial world.
	And then they've also attempted to really take over many, many different systems to use to attack somebody else completely.
	And this happens on a daily basis.
	The one that just really will drive everybody nuts, they'll send you an email with a link in it, and the email looks really, really official.
	It's a phishing email, which means it's not real.
	It comes from somebody.
	We had a person inside, very good person, knowledgeable, been through the training several times.
	Click the email, comes up and says, oh, you can't get to this file unless you put in your username and password.
	She puts in her information.
	The bad actors then stole all of her email, looked through it, and said, what can we do with this?
	Well, they figured out what her job was.
	They figured out how her job worked.
	They then went into her account, crafted an email from her, so it's actually really from her, sent it out to 3,500 other people in the state trying to steal their identities.
	And that's the kind of stuff that we're dealing with on a constant basis.
	So part of having a secure system is not just...
	All the right technology and all the right detection so we know when people are in our system, but it's also really about the human element and training.
	So talk a little bit more about what we're doing across the Information Technology Department, or NDIDT as we call it, to help shore up the human element in our system.
	So picture yourself, picture in your mind a castle, and within that castle you have this Nice safe space and you've got this large wall around you and then outside of that you've got a moat, right?
	And the way the internet used to work is that if you're inside the castle, you're safe.
	And if you're on the outside of the castle, you're in danger.
	The reality is today's world looks more like a regular city.
	So it looks like a Fargo.
	It looks like a Grand Forks and any regular city out there where the roads are the internet.
	Everybody's coming in and out all the time.
	And that's happening because we have this explosion of devices.
	As that's evolving, we have to change how we approach security.
	And part of that approach has to be not only the technology, but it also has to be the individual person.
	And that individual human being is always a problem.
	And we have to help people understand what the threats are.
	So what we do is we do phishing demonstrations.
	We also do phishing campaigns.
	So everyone, including yourself, Gets emails that are sent by us that when you click on it says basically, ha ha ha, we caught you.
	And then we go back and we do campaigns with folks and say, do re-education and say, this is what you should look for.
	That's an evolving process because the bad guys, they're smart too.
	The bad guys know what kind of defense tools we have and they try to leapfrog.
	And this is the ancient 600-year-old arms and armors model now applied to the cyber world.
	So we continuously change that and we continuously evolve that.
	But we're trying to minimize the need for humans to understand what's good and bad.
	But today, you still have to continually educate in that space.
	So a couple of terms.
	The castle example, that's the classic firewall that people have heard about for decades that somehow the firewall would save you and we need to do that.
	But the firewall is basically an outdated concept because of this interaction that you're calling the city, which is also sometimes called the Internet of Things, which means that every device is connected with every other device and it's not just the devices that are, quote, on the network because if someone has a cell phone...
	A cell phone can also be interconnected with all of our 252,000 email addresses that are connected to this network.
	And so then we've got this multiplier effect where everything that's coming and going through this network Very active information represents risk points that we have to both guard against and educate.
	People have no idea how many points are around them.
	They just don't realize this.
	Walk into any store.
	Walk into your local Walmart or Target or Shopko or whatever store you want to walk into.
	And when you come in, there are cameras looking at you.
	Now, people will notice the cameras, but they don't think of those cameras as being internet-enabled devices.
	They are.
	The lights that are on the ceiling are internet-enabled devices.
	The system that's pushing air in and out of that building, keeping it warm in the winter and cool in the summer, is internet-enabled devices.
	When you walk around and you see a fire alarm somewhere, that's an internet-enabled device.
	And this is becoming more and more and more and more common.
	You'll see people everywhere now wearing a smartwatch.
	It's very common now.
	Everything is interconnected now and it's just becoming more and more and more.
	And that hockey stick is going to keep on going up for a long, long time.
	In 1999, legislators created a statewide network known as the North Dakota Statewide Technology Access for Government and Education Network, or StageNet for short.
	This program focuses on providing broadband connectivity, internet access, and other networking services for all state agencies, colleges and universities, local government, and K-12 schools.
	The advantages created by StageNet are not free from cybersecurity challenges, but our schools are better connected than nearly any other state.
	With StageNet providing high-speed internet access across the state and enhancements in the works, our students have a whole new set of opportunities before them.
	As a state, we have a responsibility to prepare our students for these opportunities.
	You've been able to, in addition to all the effort you're putting in to help move North Dakota forward, you've also been partnering with the Department of Public Instruction around a great effort around what's been called the The K20W initiative.
	And maybe just talk a little bit about what are we doing to try to spread cyber education, help introduce and educate all the users, but also create the workforce for the future that have the skills to be able to help North Dakota reach its fullest potential.
	Sure.
	So this starts from a conversation that you can just kind of go through this mentally.
	When was the first time that Everybody on earth was talking about the world ending if computers die, right?
	And everybody's thinking through this and anybody who's got a little bit of age on them will go December 31st, 1999, right?
	Millennial bug.
	Here we are right now in 2019, 20 years later, and how many states in the United States, how many have said we're going to have computer science and cyber science as integral parts of the standards of education?
	North Dakota.
	That's it.
	And that's compliments of the changes that we've made here in this last year.
	So starting with a partnership with over 40 different organizations, private sector and public sector, we started in January of 17. I'm sorry, January of 18. We started a conversation and said, we want to have every student, every school, cyber-educated, kindergarten through PhD.
	And that conversation very, very quickly evolved.
	And the reality is, I have a hard time getting 40 organizations in the same room most of the time, much less getting everybody shaking their head up and down saying, yes, this is absolutely the right thing to do.
	And it is amazing the outpouring we've had.
	We've had private sector companies calling us up saying, we want to hear about this.
	I've had many, many other states asking about this.
	But we've brought together an organization that was able to, in 11 months' time, Be able to deliver a computer science and cyber science standard and integrate those two standards together.
	Those drafts have been out now since November.
	They'll be finalized through the process here in February.
	So in an amazing time, I worked on the science standards in Minnesota.
	When we did the update of the science standards in Minnesota, it took us 27 months to do the update.
	Here in the state of North Dakota, we got two new standards, both done, both integrated, both done in 11 months.
	And so it's just been a Herculean effort by a huge, huge team.
	And I have to pass a ton of gratitude to Superintendent Kirsten Baszler and to Rosie Cloverdance, who have been the two people who have been just the cornerstone people to really help push this initiative through.
	Huge thanks as well to Bismarck State College and some of our private sector companies have been part of this, Palo Alto with their donations and Microsoft and many others, but just an immense effort to get a ton done in a very, very fast amount of time that nobody else anywhere in the country, and I'll challenge anybody to find me, somebody else on earth that has done this so far.
	Again, grateful for your contributions and your effort in the whole team, because it's not only important for North Dakota, but also for the nation.
	I think the projections are that in 2020, there's going to be 1.4 million computer science jobs available in this country.
	And right now, there's, you know, close to 600,000 jobs that are out there, so this number's growing rapidly.
	And as we talked about earlier in the show, the The need to be cyber aware touches every job, whether you're in technology or not.
	In an interconnected world, everyone's got to have a base level of knowledge around cyber, just like they have a base level of understanding of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
	I was, in August, standing in front of a room of many thousands of people at a conference, and I was presenting about our cyber and technology initiatives, and we're trying to help other states be able to follow this.
	And I asked the room a question and I said, can anybody tell me a job that doesn't use computer technology today?
	One guy was very brave.
	I applaud him for his bravery, but he yells out, he goes, professional golfer!
	And I'm not a golfer, so I'm sitting there for about a second thinking about this.
	And before anything even comes to my mind, the room just erupts on him.
	You know, people going, oh, I got an app over here about my backswing.
	The other guy goes, oh, I got a laser on my golf club.
	And the whole room turns around and go, all right, even golfers, they need computers.
	The reality is it doesn't matter if you're going to be a computer engineer or you're going to be a doctor or you're going to be a waitress or you're going to be a farmer.
	Every single person coming into the workforce is managing some kind of technology in their job.
	How can we as good stewards of education possibly sit here and think that, oh yeah, a kindergarten kid doesn't need that.
	They absolutely need that.
	They need to know the fundamentals.
	They need to know the basics of technology.
	They need to be able to enable technology because they're going to have it.
	I sat in a classroom in Liberty Elementary here in Bismarck.
	And this is last year, end of the school year.
	And I went in the classroom and I was told, hey, these guys are doing something cool.
	You should go and see it.
	So I walk in the front door.
	When I walk in the front door, this little girl about 10 inches across, maybe barely hip high, and she runs around the corner and she stops dead in her spot.
	She turns to me and her hands go up and she goes, stop!
	And I'm like, ooh, scary little kid.
	So I stop.
	On the floor is a robot, and this robot's about six inches tall.
	It's running the little blue wheels on the thing, and it drives down the hall.
	It stopped right behind her.
	It turned right by itself.
	It drove right up to me, and the head of this robot looks up at me and says, please take your message.
	And in the back of that robot is a little Lego box, and I reach down and I pull out a piece of paper, which I still have in my office, hang in my office right now, and I unfold this big piece of paper, and it's a welcome to the classroom.
	I go into this classroom and here's 25 kids who have BoboBots and DashBots and CodeForKids.org and they're sitting there with little tablets, little 5-inch tablets, running all the languages to be able to run their robots.
	And these kids are doing these robots right here.
	They're sending them down to the library to go pick up library books to come back.
	And they're doing group works with it, and it's just awesome stuff.
	And you sit here and you go, these kids, that girl right there, is going to be working on stuff that we haven't even thought of yet.
	We haven't even contemplated what she's going to be engineering and designing and building and delivering.
	Why wouldn't we give them this skill?
	Why wouldn't everybody get this skill?
	Because this is going to be part of everything we do.
	Then you wrap in the cyber side.
	And I come back and I sit there and I go, here's 25 kids working on these robots, trying to get stuff done, going to be changing the world tomorrow.
	Why did they have to sit here and worry about who's attacking that robot right now?
	That should be my job, to defend them so they get an education so they can design the future.
	That's the kind of stuff that we're working through right now, and we're moving this through the state of North Dakota everywhere between smart labs and robotics and computer science and cyber.
	We're changing the world a little bit.
	These stories help us identify what cybersecurity looks like on an individual level, but it's important to remember that this is happening all across the state and around the world.
	Making sure North Dakota is equipped for today and prepared for tomorrow is a major task, and it is best addressed with a system-wide perspective.
	That's why it's so important for Sean and the ITD team to work across agencies with a unified approach.
	What are the things that you found to be some of the biggest challenges here as you try to move North Dakota, the state of North Dakota forward?
	A lot of people think of government as having a disadvantage in how it gets things done, but the reality is it's simply a different governance structure of a huge organization.
	And huge organizations take a lot of effort to be able to move.
	The challenges here, I think, really boil down to the way that organization has been structured is that it's very individual and it is, think of it more as a United Nations than a singular company.
	So the state of North Dakota, if you're a citizen not working for the state, looking in outward towards the state, it looks to you like this is a singular entity and a singular purpose of that entity.
	If you're someone on the inside, it doesn't feel that way at all.
	It feels like, well, we're DOT, or we're WSI, or we're the bank, or we're the et cetera, et cetera.
	And that identity is very, very different.
	And whatever reason we reach this individualistic identity, it creates a lot of havoc.
	And it means that we've got a lot of people working in a lot of different directions, doing completely different strategies.
	Even though they're good people with good hearts trying to get good work done, they're not aligned in what they're trying to do.
	They're not unified in their methodologies or their model or what they're trying to deliver.
	And this really reflects back on the siloed approach of budgeting that occurs when we budget in silos and we're organized in silos.
	And why that matters to the citizens that are listening is that if you were saying, hey, I want to get a fishing license and I need to get a park pass and I also need to update my boat license, Today, that would involve trips to three different websites that aren't interconnected.
	And tell us a little bit about when you went into the whole customer-facing side of things.
	How many external-facing websites did you have and run across from just the executive branch?
	And what are we doing to try to unify the experience so that a A citizen dealing with North Dakota might have more of an experience like they do when they deal with Amazon or when they deal with Apple, which are two of the top consumer experiences that everybody has today.
	I'm really big on citizen experience and the overall user experience and trying to understand that.
	Our teams have been Spending time to try to embed themselves in the process that's delivered to the citizen and understand how that's working.
	And as we walk with the citizen and kind of follow along behind them, we're finding one is a completely decentralized web presence if the web actually can serve the citizen.
	And the problem ends up being so we've got about 170 different ways to get into the state government Almost none of those are interconnected with each other.
	So if you want to be able to do two things, you have to go to two places.
	Nobody would shop at an Amazon if I had to go open up new accounts, every single product that I ever built or ever bought.
	You'd go in and you'd be irritated and you'd go somewhere else.
	And the reality is that's how our web works.
	But the other problem we have is many, many of our processes aren't even reflected in our websites at all.
	So what do we do?
	We say, here, go to this website, fill out this form, print the form out, and then walk into the office, and then we'll help you, and then we'll send you to the other offices across town.
	That sucks.
	I mean, point blank.
	Nobody wants to do that.
	So the reality is, is we have to reinvent processes when we have to look at our processes and say, how are we going to do this better?
	And the front-end websites is a huge portion of that, but the back-end of how we deliver service is where we're really going to get that meat and potatoes and really get that value for the citizen.
	Not only do we make the citizen's experience much more streamlined, but we lower costs overall.
	Every single agency can be more effective if we don't have to rework and rework and reprocess and reprocess and on and on.
	And there's just a huge, huge opportunity there.
	Yeah, and speaking of the sort of business process re-engineering, because we have to get the business processes, the back end right, so we can have the right customer experience on the other end.
	Tell me, does the state of North Dakota still paying for fax machines?
	Oh, we have a ton of fax machines.
	Not only do we have fax machines, but we've got a couple hundred fax lines.
	We still have some pagers.
	Anybody out there have a pager?
	No.
	Maybe if you're a doctor.
	Sorry, doctors.
	But we have a lot of archaic tech.
	We have technology here that is point blank older than I am.
	And I'm not the super young pup anymore.
	And I should have nothing that predates Jimmy Carter in this environment running technology.
	And it just shouldn't exist anymore.
	And the reality is, is we still have a lot of that stuff in its core to what we're trying to get done in some places.
	So it's archaic.
	Taking nothing away.
	When faxes were invented, it was an amazing breakthrough.
	But if we have a fax, that means that someone is actually filling out a paper form faxing to us.
	That means that we are paying a state employee to do data entry.
	I think you and I have talked about the state of North Dakota needs to get out of the data entry business because that's really not an IT function.
	Well, absolutely.
	And we have a lot of processes that are predictable and repeatable.
	And predictable and repeatable means it can be automated.
	And I know that scares people.
	Automatically, when they hear automation, they think, where's my job?
	You mean like if I want to get the same hunting license the next year in the same zones for the same species, that would be a predictable...
	It would be a predictable event, right?
	And the reality is that you get folks who get very worried very quickly about automation if they're the worker, if they're the employee.
	But the reality is we have a huge, huge need across the state.
	We have an intense amount of things that we would love to be able to expand and do more and do better.
	And if we can take away a lot of the drudgery work that is just data entry work and we will let a computer do that.
	That's what they're for.
	Let them do that work.
	We could free up a huge amount of resources to be able to get more done and do more work worth doing instead of work that just plain drudgery.
	Well, fascinating, fascinating world of cyber, but that's only a portion of the job as the Chief Information Officer for the State of North Dakota.
	We also have to deliver the systems that manage everything from people's medical payments and insurance payments and You know, down to helping manage our schools and universities.
	Again, tell us what you found when you came here.
	How high is up?
	Where do we have to go from where we are today?
	And where's the opportunity ahead of us?
	So one of the first things that we did when I came into this organization is to say, how good are we and what is our opportunity to improve?
	We started with assessments, and we used those assessments to bring in really an outside view, compare us against the National Institute of Standards and Technology Standards, and to compare us against the private sector and really those best practices from a worldwide basis.
	Because the reality is that on a government-to-government basis, the state of North Dakota does really well, but the reality is that government technology It's not exactly where people want it to be, right?
	Ask anybody, say, so do you have to stand in line or can you use your phone to get this done?
	And absolutely no citizen wants to go stand in line anywhere.
	I've never met anybody who says, great, I want to go stand in line for two and a half hours.
	That's great.
	You know, when we have other services in the state government that, you know, they open at 8 in the morning and they close at 4 in the afternoon and they're open Monday through Friday, nobody wants to deal with that.
	They want to deal with 24-7, 365 available technology that's at their fingertips so they can get stuff done and then go on to the rest of their life.
	And the reality is that on a government basis across the entire country, we are not providing that.
	We are simply not doing it.
	So I have no interest in measuring us against other governments who aren't doing it either.
	We want to measure ourselves against a world-class environment.
	So as we measure ourselves in that world-class environment, we're not where we need to be.
	Just point blank.
	All right, so when you take this and look at that zero to five scale, and zero means we don't do it at all, and fives is world class, we're in the ones across the board for almost every service that we provide.
	Moving from ones to threes, you're talking about huge efficiency gain, you're talking about huge capacity for the citizen, much, much, much better experience for the citizen.
	That's what we've been looking at and where we're going to take things, and that's where some of our big initiatives like IT unification come from.
	When we talk about the work we do at the state, we've really distilled it down to six words, empower people and improve lives and inspire success.
	Tell me about the team.
	That you have at IDT and tell us about the distributed team across the whole state.
	Tell us about how bringing all those folks together with a common vision, common platforms, how is that going to help us achieve these dreams and the vision of empowering people, improving lives, and inspiring success?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, that's...
	You have to have a mission statement that people can get behind, and you have to have a mission statement that everybody can look at and say, that's what I want to be part of.
	And what we've been doing as we culturally evolve ourselves, we've been bringing that language into our projects.
	How are our projects empowering people?
	How are our projects inspiring?
	How are we improving, etc., and kind of moving through that.
	Now, the organization that we have today, the IT organization, is evolving very, very quickly and we're going through this kind of multi-facets of evolution.
	So one aspect is this component of improving our processes, really streamlining what we can deliver.
	Another aspect comes down to the overall efficiency.
	Then the third aspect comes down to alignment.
	And that alignment aspect is absolutely critical.
	And today's major initiative that we're working through is IT unification.
	We've got 17 different organizations with 17 different strategies and 17 different visions all trying to work individually.
	And that is not cost-effective, and it's not effective to the strategy of the state of North Dakota.
	So that is where our IT unification initiative comes in.
	We're bringing together a large collection of people all across the state into a single agency, and that is what we're really trying to move through the legislature right now.
	When we hear the word unification, which may be new to people, tell us, how is unification different than consolidation?
	Yeah, so there is a spectrum.
	And the spectrum goes from competition, and you move to the right, and you get into cooperation, and then you get to coordination, and then consolidation.
	And the last one, because we ran out of words, was C's.
	is unification and the reality is as you move from that spectrum left to right you go from being adversarial to ultimately more and more working together and through that process we've heard about consolidation that happened here in the state of North Dakota back in 2003. Consolidation was a process specifically around infrastructure and the reality is is that process Was done in such a way that it didn't necessarily take into
	account the agency's real strategies and their operations.
	So what we've done is we've applied a totally different model to unification.
	This model is called Workforce Transition.
	And what we've done then is we sat down with every single agency leader and I said, How can we use technology to enable your business?
	And as we walk through that conversation, then we sit down with all of the people they think are IT staff and every person individually gets evaluated.
	We get skill set assessment.
	We get job description reviews.
	We get a start-stop-continue plan.
	That plan is really a personalized project plan.
	We take that type of information and it gives us the ability to align all of these people, not because they happen to be in the wrong or right place, but because they actually do the right work.
	And what that's done then, we evaluated well over 600 people.
	What we've come down to is about 460 people that we want to bring together and into an IT organization that is comprehensive across the cabinet and for the executive branch.
	And we can start delivering an experience like most of our citizens are receiving from their interactions from the technology vendors that they interact with, whether that's with, again, whether it's Amazon or Apple or wherever it might be.
	Consumer expectations are increasing, and we are interfacing with those same consumers, and we have a responsibility to make sure we get our game up as well, because it all ties back to where do people want to live.
	People are choosing where they want to live, and if we can make our state a great place to interact with government, that can help us attract and retain families and workforce here in North Dakota.
	So it all...
	It's all part of a larger purpose.
	So thank you, Sean, for being here today.
	Thanks for caring so deeply as you do.
	Thanks for being passionate about the security of the citizens' data.
	And so thank you.
	And any closing final words for our listeners today?
	You know, as we think through technology, it doesn't come without pain, right?
	And it doesn't come without change.
	We have to invest dollars that people would love to be able to put in other places.
	I understand that.
	We have to change our organizational structures, and there's a lot of teams out there that are kind of family-driven teams, and that this unification feels like it's a threat to that family, and we get that.
	Those things are hard, but the reality is if you're going to do work worth doing, you're doing hard work.
	I don't want to do easy work.
	I have no interest in easy work.
	Let the computer do that.
	Let's do the hard work to make real significant change.
	Let's change the world.
	This is our opportunity and perfect time to do it now.
	No reason to wait for tomorrow.
	We have the path and we've got the team to do it.
	So thank you, Sean.
	Thanks for your leadership.
	Thanks for being on Work Worth Doing.
	Thank you.
	The cybersecurity field continues to expand at a rapid pace.
	If you want to be part of the team that's helping keep North Dakotans data safe, go to nd.gov slash ITD. Thanks to Sean Riley for joining us today.
	On our next episode, we hit the road.
	Literally.
	And one gentleman got to work with his snowmobile and started picking people up and we started getting plows out.
	They actually come to my home with a snowplow to get me out of my house.
	I like to call our snowplow operators, our snow and ice control operators, the heart and soul of the agency.
	We'll talk to Tom Sorrell, Director of the North Dakota Department of Transportation, and take a ride in one of our state's 350 snowplows to show you what it's like keeping our roads safe in all seasons.
	Thanks for listening.

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