In states such as Michigan and Kentucky, CIOs are dealing with an endless sea of legacy systems. They need more effective tools to bring those machines up to 21st-century standards--or they need to rip them out and replace them.

Iowa is looking to bring broadband to its citizens, no matter how far-flung they are. And in Delaware, the top decision-maker for IT purchases wants to make government disappear. That is, he wants government structure to be invisible to customers. But he needs better tech tools from VARs to do it.

In their quest to make IT work better for employees and citizens alike, state CIOs are opening their purse strings wider. State and local governments are spending $44.24 billion on IT goods and services. At a growth rate of 7.5 percent, state and local IT spending will rise to $54.96 billion by 2008, according to Gartner.

Most CIOs aren't seeking to reinvent the wheel. They just want to roll the wheel forward.

"We have the tools in place now for us to move ahead in providing better service to our citizens," says Delaware CIO Tom Jarrett. "What we need is higher productivity, tighter control on incident response and better security. If we can garner the benefits from these new products, we can become more agile and more productive."

Ultimately, what these CIOs want are utilitarian tech tools intended to improve customer service, information-sharing, security, data-analysis and speed.

"We don't go in search of technologies to use," says Matthew Miszewski, CIO of Wisconsin and president of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). "We let the business needs of the state drive our acquisitions. In that area, however, there are a number of items that push us toward satisfactory technology solutions."

In interviews with GovernmentVAR, state CIOs shared where they would like to spend their IT dollars. Here's what they came up with.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

For years, state CIOs have viewed the Web as a way to break through the bureaucracy that separates governments and their citizens.

More than half of corporate CIOs polled in a recent industry report indicated that they'll be implementing SOAs, and state CIOs are pursuing the technology as well. Think about it: In your parents' generation, state government often took the form of a stodgy, faceless organization. Just consider that renewing a driver's license brought to mind images of labyrinthine hallways and endless lines. And even when governments were just getting started online, Web-site pages and portals were often confusing and hard to navigate.

In the past decade, state Web sites have improved greatly, yet their evolution remains a moving target.

"Portal solutions help us provide better services to the public by letting us design user interfaces that are responsive to customers' expectations without regard to government silos," says California CIO J. Clark Kelso.

Arizona has been trying to come up with a common business-licensing system for the past 10 years and is just now turning to a Web-services solution. "The new system standardizes the interface and allows the state to leverage one set of resources to service many agencies," says Arizona CIO Chris Cummiskey.

The call for these solutions isn't coming just from state governments; it's coming from customers too. If Delaware residents want to file a health complaint against a local farmer, why should they have to pay attention to what goes on among government agencies responding to their needs?

"The citizen should enter his request and receive the response without having to know which organization had to participate," Delaware's Jarrett says. "Is it reasonable to expect citizens to know in which Department of Transportation organization the Department of Motor Vehicles falls when they renew their license every five years? No. They should be able to go to the Web site and renew their licenses, regardless of how we've structured the executive branch of government. We want to use [SOA] technology to enable the citizen to go to one place--our portal--rather than several state buildings."

To achieve that, identity-access management has to improve as well. A government customer shouldn't have to register multiple times when dealing with the same state government. "We need to have the ability to recognize the customer, no matter which state service they are accessing," Jarrett says. "It would provide for reduced sign-on. Right now, customers need to remember unique user IDs and passwords for every service they choose to use."

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