This week, I attended the North Carolina Digitial Summit, hosted in Raleigh.    This conference brings together state and local government officials to focus on trends in IT governance, IT services, and new and innovative ways to deploy IT strategy.   Most attendees were state agency heads and Chris Estes, State CIO, delivered opening remarks.

Very interesting trends included a continued focus on delivering cloud solutions, IT as a Service, to reduce capital expenditures and focus more on IT as an operational expense on the balance sheet.

Gale Roper, CIO of Raleigh, and Bill Greeves, CIO, of Wake County, both discussed the success of their Open Data Iniaitives, citing a number of apps which have resulted from providing open data to the citizens.     (Fire Hydrant locations pulse point, to name a few)    In fact, the Raleigh Open Ideas portal is an innovation platform, which is helping the Planning Department by encouraging citizens to provide more ideas on how to reduce calls to the Department.

The most impressive part of the conference was hearing from Gov Girl, Kristi Fifelksi, who is the main drive behind how to leverage social media, videos, you tube and twitter to make government for interesting and to increase citizen engagement.     I really enjoyed this presentation and came back with some ideas on how we may be able to offer some of these ideas to the Town of Morrisville.

Overall, a great conference and I walked away with some new ideas.   Great to see our CIO, Bo Singleton there.