"You must build very strong relationships with your business partners and make them your
decision partners, so that the right technology comes to the business to move it forward. You can’t keep up with all the details, so you must learn to rely on your technical experts for solutions"

DORINE ANDREWS
CIO
Peace Corps

Dorine Andrews, Chief Information Officer for the Peace Corps. In this role she is responsible for leading an 80 member team that provides global information technology solutions for headquarters and regional offices in the United States and in more than 70 countries worldwide. Prior to joining Peace Corps, Ms. Andrews’ extensive career includes consulting and teaching, as well as considerable research in the areas of managing organization and technology change, knowledge management, marketing and the internet and online community development. She has co-authored books on IT organization management and business process re-engineering and published many articles in these disciplines.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

I inherited an array of aging technologies and platforms and we were awash in paper driven administrative processes. The lack of electronic document management combined with multiple fragmented and incompatible data sources made information management a challenge. However, the redevelopment of our enterprise platform to more effectively manage information had to take a back seat to our mission of critical systems and infrastructure. Today, we are undertaking the redevelopment of our structured and unstructured data through a two year platform modernization effort. The challenge is that we are attempting to do this while we face federal budget uncertainties and cutbacks.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

Many of the Peace Corps posts volunteers to serve in locations that have poor connectivity. A continuing challenge is providing the bandwidth necessary for many of today’s web and cloud based applications. These posts must have their own instances of applications and databases that we must sync back to headquarters. It’s an old fashion solution, but this is what we have to do.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

Mobile communications technology: As a global operation and a federal agency requiring encrypted messaging we are continually scanning the horizon for alternatives. Data center operations and network automation: The more we are able to automate manual maintenance and security functions, the better.

My roles and responsibilities as CIO

One role is that of translator. I take complex technical concepts and solutions and turn them into plain English with concrete benefits that our business partners can understand, set funding priorities, and manage expectations. My other role is to provide the overall technology vision, a sense of urgency, and the freedom to innovate, so we can work smarter, save the agency money, and support their technology needs more effectively. I rely on the technical skills and knowledge of my directors and managers to deliver solutions and options that fit within that framework.

Lessons learned as a CIO
You can’t keep up with all the details, so you must learn to rely on your technical experts for solutions You must build very strong relationships with your business partners and make them your decision partners, so that the right technology comes to the business to move it forward.