Re-imagining e-Government

The state of Minnesota, in 15 years, will face a major operational crisis,” Gopal Khanna says. “We need to do things now to reinvent how government is run.”

This isn’t the alarmist prediction of a coffee-addled political blogger, but the considered opinion of a state cabinet member. Khanna was named the state’s first CIO, or chief information officer, by Governor Tim Pawlenty last August. The crisis he was hired to handle is a collision of supply and demand that could bring Minnesota government screeching to a bumper-to-bumper slowdown. Call it the information superhighway equivalent of the Crosstown/I-35 interchange at rush hour.

According to Khanna, the causes of the growing crunch include a rapidly aging state work force—Minnesota will lose roughly 14,100 employees to retirement in the next decade—and the growing expectation among “consumers” of government that services such as licensing and mortgage processing should be as easy to obtain as a book from Amazon.com.

Khanna is almost evangelistic in his fervor for remaking Minnesota’s IT structure. As he describes his goals, he punctuates his narrative by jumping up and scrawling on an erasable whiteboard, scribbling flow charts and diagrams to illustrate his points. His vision isn’t exactly that of running government like a business. But Khanna, who has an MBA and extensive private-sector experience, wants to put many of the technology lessons that companies have learned to work in state government. As he puts it, “We need to take an enterprise view.”

"When most people . . . think of the private sector, they think of innovation, and how nimble and dynamic it is. But public workers are equally hard working, equally innovative, and equally passionate."

United State

In the corporate realm, the CIO is a senior executive who oversees all information technology systems and personnel, concentrating on long-range IT planning and strategy. Khanna’s cabinet-level appointment was part of the governor’s Drive to Excellence Transformation Roadmap, a 2005 initiative aimed at identifying opportunities to provide government services more effectively and at a lower cost.

An émigré from India who earned an MBA from the University of Maine, Khanna worked for Mutual of New York Insurance and later for the National Council on Compensation, finally landing with Minneapolis-based American Hardware Insurance Group in 1990. Long active in the Republican Party, he was named CIO and CFO of the Peace Corps in 2002. There he oversaw the development of a standardized computing platform for the corps’ 72 posts worldwide, the design and implementation of an enterprise architecture program, and the creation of the first set of audited financial statements in the organization’s 44-year history.

Khanna’s newest boss has long espoused bridging technology gaps in the state. While interviewing with the governor, Khanna recalls that “I was impressed with his clarity of vision, the way he articulated what he expected—a government that is responsive to its citizens, and continuously improving. Since this was the state CIO position, I expected him to ask what I was going to do from a technology standpoint. But he talked in terms of processes, not just technology, and that was very different.”

As state CIO, Khanna oversaw the development of the Office of Enterprise Technology, a new state department that provides IT planning and oversight not just for state agencies, but also for the state’s K-12 schools, the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system. Its services, he suggests, will be crucial. “The government operations are going to be burdened on the demand side of the equation and the supply side of the equation,” says Khanna, “because the expectations of the citizens are changing rapidly.”