Gary Bateman, 2013 Honoree
- Title
- CIO
- Employer
- Iowa Workforce Development
- Location
- Des Moines, Iowa
- Characteristic most important in an IT hire:
- Passion. Talent runs a close second, but even talent is useless without passion.
- Skills you'll hire for this year:
- Java, .Net, Oracle, SQL and BI.
- How are you turning your IT department into a services organization?
- Teaching IT staffers the concepts of business and pairing them with business units to experience business first-hand. I want my staff to lead the transformation of business process redesign, and to be successful, they have to know business.
- Coolest current project:
- Redesigning our unemployment insurance benefits system from a legacy batch system that is case-centric to an online system that is client-centric.
- How do you evaluate emerging technologies?
- We have developed an 'innovations committee' to research emerging technologies. If we think a technology looks promising, we try it as a pilot project.