Governments have reputations for bureaucratic inertia—in many cases for good reason. Strategies, systems, and policies get entrenched and perpetuate for decades because substantive change takes extraordinary effort and strong leadership.
Technology, on the other hand, changes rapidly, and governments often have a tougher time than the private sector keeping current with IT. But public sector organizations that do fast forward to the future reap huge benefits. Recent enterprise IT developments, such as server virtualization and cloud computing, can enable great leaps in efficiency and in the quality of service to the public.

William Kehoe, CIO for King County, Washington, a 13,000-employee organization that serves Seattle and nearby communities, has moved his IT unit far down that road of transition. In addition to moving to the cloud and standardized systems, he has completely restructured the county IT organizational structure and the way it delivers services. As an agent of sweeping organizational change, Kehoe has learned that the human element is more challenging to manage than the technological one.
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