What does digital transformation look like at the state level? In this insightful fireside reflection from Prodacity 2025, Brian Andrews, Chief Technology Officer for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, shares his experience leading one of the largest IT modernization efforts in state government.

From consolidating 32 independent agencies into a unified IT organization to navigating century-old procurement laws, Andrews discusses how his team is breaking down bureaucratic barriers, improving citizen services, and transforming Pennsylvania’s technology infrastructure.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• How state IT modernization compares to federal digital transformation
• Why government IT needs to shift from agency-centric to citizen-centric services
• The challenge of overcoming bureaucracy & legacy policies
• The role of platform teams, architecture pods, and customer success managers
• How Pennsylvania is adopting lean principles & continuous improvement in IT
• What government leaders can learn from military reconnaissance & mission planning

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: From map maker to state CTO
[01:47] - The scale of Pennsylvania’s IT infrastructure (2,200+ apps, 120,000+ employees)
[02:23] - How citizens experience government services—and why it must change
[05:22] - The challenge of playing the hand you’re dealt in government IT
[06:49] - Breaking bureaucracy: The power of small, empowered teams
[07:20] - Lessons from military reconnaissance & adaptability in leadership
[09:35] - Why state IT leaders have more influence than they think
[11:42] - Bridging the gap between infrastructure teams and citizen-facing services
[13:20] - The role of customer success managers in state IT operations
[15:53] - History lesson: Pennsylvania’s first computer system in 1958
[17:04] - Managing app teams at different stages of modernization
[18:46] - How government IT teams should prepare for crisis response
[22:07] - Final thoughts: Advice for infrastructure & platform teams in government IT

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Brian Andrews (00:03):

Yeah, sure. I feel like Paul, yesterday, I'm in the running for most likely not to be here. Show of hands, has anybody heard of photogrammetry? Okay, A couple people. Yeah. So I started out life as a map maker making maps from Ariel Photography and somehow ended up here as a CTO of the state. So it's been a long strange journey, but right now we're responsible for the management of our data center operations, our network teams, our desktop support for over 120,000 employees and staff. We have over 2,600 field sites and a massive application inventory of over 2200 apps that we support for the constituents and residents of Pennsylvania.

Bryon Kroger (00:51):

Yeah, it's incredible. In fact, as we were talking leading up to this event, I was kind of blown away at the level or the scale of it, Pennsylvania, it's like the size of a Fortune 500 company.

Brian Andrews (01:03):

I mean, we have 32 different agencies that we're supporting with hundreds of lines of business across all of those agencies. And eight years ago it was very interesting. We were, each of those were independent agency IT shops, and we're very early in our journey of consolidating all that into one IT organization. My boss will kill me for bringing this up, but I started out as, or most recently, my position before this was director of network and telecommunications. When I first took over the role, it was the Network Unified Telecommunications and Security Operations Division, which spells nutso, which was kind of also...

(01:47):

Yep. Was not just our responsibilities, it was kind of a culture within that organization too. So it's a real challenge.

Bryon Kroger (01:56):

So, in fact, I think this might be the first time we've had state government leadership on stage in all three years. General Garrant on the first day talked about how digital, I guess trying to run a space force in a digital era, how that's playing out. We hear from that, from federal speakers, from VA last year. How's it playing out at the state level? What are you seeing? What's kind of your why and how is it impacting you?

Brian Andrews (02:23):

Yeah, so digital transformation is a huge effort. Obviously I spent the 2008 financial crisis really kind of helping figure out a lot of problems with our unemployment compensation situation. And what that led me to understand was how residents interact with our services and the challenges that we kind of posed to them. And it's really tied well into my new role because I can kind of parlay that into understanding exactly what's going on out there from a residents experience. And so we're trying to kind of capitalize on a no wrong door approach. There's no reason that me starting a new business per se, I need to know to go to four different agencies for four different processes for taxation, for unemployment insurance, for small business development. All these types of efforts are so confusing and how do we break those barriers down so an individual can approach the state and just say, Hey, I want to start a business and feed into all these different avenues of compartmental line of businesses, kind of behind the scenes invisible to the customer.

Bryon Kroger (03:35):

Yeah, it is also interesting. I mean, you have a military background as well, and obviously I come from that world and there's a lot of lives lost things. I've been blown away hearing some of the stories of things that are in your portfolio that impact humans' lives in a, I mean very real way in terms of their livelihoods, being able to eat, getting access to benefits, being able to, when a family member dies. There's all kinds of things that impact people's lives in critical ways at every level of state government.

Brian Andrews (04:05):

Absolutely. And I think call out to the VA folks on the call, thank you. Really appreciate your services. But along those similar lines, public safety, law enforcement, safety, our mental health institutions, we have a number of large hospitals and trying to build out those services and making sure that they're available 24/7 and changing the workforce culture from the kind of banking hours. Typical attitude. There's a bureaucratic process like I'm a state worker and I'm going to work my seven and a half hours a day, and that's it. And trying to transform the organization into an adaptable and understanding team that is able to provide the services regardless because our culture is changing. Services are expected at the convenience, not of the service provider any longer, but at what the customer wants and trying to drive that mentality into the organization.

Bryon Kroger (05:05):

That reminds me of something you said on one of our earlier calls. You talked about playing the hand that you're dealt. I think a lot of times we talk about the ideal scenarios when we're up on stage and the theory, but in government, you're dealt hands. How has that played into how you approach change on your team?

Brian Andrews (05:22):

Yeah, it's interesting. It can be a real challenge. The organizational culture is just something that we absolutely need to tear down. And how we're kind of doing that is you look at any workforce and you have some driven folks, maybe about a third driven folks that are trying to really get stuff done and understand the mission. You have your Steady Eddies and then you have some folks that maybe need to be elevated and kind of capitalizing on those individuals that breaking that mold from that nutso organization. That was our culture. We were always firefighting, we were always driving towards just fixing what was broken. There was never a larger viewpoint of what's going on. So what we've tried to do is find those individuals that are driven and break them out of the organization and bring them into these pods of architectural and engineering teams of where we are really enabling them, untying their hands, allowing them to make large and impactful decisions to be able drive. We still need those Steady Eddies to keep the lights on, to do the regular change management, to drive the organization. But that strategy, that vision and direction, building out these small pods of architectural and engineering has been a great benefit.

(06:49):

Parker kind of talked about organizational culture at scale and it's a real tough thing. And so trying to flatten out the organization and have these small individual groups that are able to influence and change that has really been beneficial in trying to capitalize on making change at scale.

Bryon Kroger (07:10):

Since you see the army side of things as well as this, what kind of constraints or bureaucracy are you running into and how does it compare to what you see in the Army person?

Brian Andrews (07:20):

Yeah, so I was a scout, right? And reconnaissance surveillance, target acquisition was kind of our hallmark and we kind of had our own culture in the army. It's a very bureaucratic organization, of course hierarchical structure, but as just like a staff sergeant, squad leader as a scout, I may be conducting a reconnaissance mission. I actually have the ear of the brigade commander, and it really kind of has a different mentality. It's not that necessarily you still have a chain of command that you're responsible for, but you have the ear of that senior leadership. And I've tried to kind of capitalize on that mentality of I'm open to anybody's feedback of what's going on on the ground and understanding what's going on in the world and trying to bring that into this organization and how do we take advantage of that. So going back to when I was 17, first joining the Army, we learned these things called the troop leading procedures.

(08:22):

Just kind of like how you start to plan for an effort and they tell you what the mission is, you tell everybody else what the mission is, you understand you start to put a plan together. But step four has always just been something that has been something that I've always held on to and it's star necessary movement. That mentality, especially in a government organization that just takes forever to get the approvals, the money, the processes going through the bureaucratic systems, there's always opportunity to start the necessary movement to find the opportunity. What can I start to work on now to start to further this effort and trying to build that momentum. So once you get that flywheel moving, you can keep it rolling.

Bryon Kroger (09:10):

And are there any strategies that you've seen work on the Pennsylvania side? Because we had a whole talk on day one about strategies, strategies that you've seen really work for overcoming the bureaucracy. I mean, is it making sure people have direct access to you? Do you have to get into changing laws and going to the legislature? It's all layers,

Brian Andrews (09:35):

Right? And what I realized early in my managerial career was we actually had a lot more influence on the process than we thought we did. You just say there's always the mentality of Well, they said or the policy said, and the realization that I had influence over top of the policy as a member of the networking team that I could recommend changes and trying to drive that mentality across the team and saying, Hey, you as a supervisor, you can actually recommend changes to the policy. It's not chiseled in stone. I mean, there are things that are, but the influence and how we can adapt. It's really stretching beyond what we think we're allowed to do and trying out pushing out that boundary and saying, Hey, can I do this? And see what the reaction is has been key. There are things that are incredibly difficult to overcome. We have quite literally a 1929 procurement law that is to try to stop my Uncle John from getting the garbage contract because he is my Uncle John. And working within the confines of that with these giant monolithic efforts, it is a lot of chiseling away at the mentalities and trying to find coalitions.

Bryon Kroger (11:02):

Now, a lot of the work you do is at the infrastructure layer, you and your teams and portfolios as you talked about developing your leaders. In fact, I just mentioned this idea of supporting outcomes. We really care about the end user outcomes. In your case, the citizens of Pennsylvania, sometimes you're one layer removed from that, sometimes two, right? You're serving up infrastructure to common services teams who are serving the app team, who's serving the user. It's honestly one of the most difficult problems I face, even both inside my organization and dealing with our government clients. How do you keep those people connected to the mission?

Brian Andrews (11:42):

Yeah, it's a real challenge. And for years we really haven't done anything with it. We were in a corner. We were just operating the data centers, the teams, the telecommunications, doing the desktop support, the day-to-day stuff. But what we started to do was understanding that we needed to build a bridge between our organizations. We were not going to be successful. We will touch a little bit in a little bit on some of the train wreck issues that we had that kind of spurred a lot of our drive to get better interaction with those. We've built out as part of each of those network and engineering pods, we actually have a customer success manager. That customer success manager is a liaison between the business, between the operations teams, between the architecture teams and any other stakeholders. They're the glue that kind of binds everything together. And it's like whenever I hear a grumbling that maybe one of them is going to leave, they're the glue that holds it all together, I get very, very nervous. And we try to keep 'em very happy because it's a very demanding job. They're getting pulled from every direction. But trying to have that liaison to bring everything together and to get in front of these areas that have been neglected and have just gone about their business for years has been a godsend to the team and being able to facilitate that interaction and understanding where all the pieces fit.

Bryon Kroger (13:20):

My customer success director has distracted me out there nodding violently and clapping, so got a little distracted. She is probably going to come to me with an ask, and we learned about negotiation yesterday, so it's probably going to be very ambitious, but be empathetic. So when the other kind of area that you face there, I mean talk about the end user, but that intermediary user is, I believe in your organization. You have app business owners and those are each headed by a CIO shop.

Brian Andrews (13:47):

Yeah, so we don't actually own the applications themselves. We're early in our consolidation of all of these organizations. We redrew all the lines in 2017, and then we just kind of forgot about it. And then in Covid we started to really start to rearrange a lot of the pieces and start to bring the teams together. I led that with the telecom team, then the network team, and now the data center teams. We're starting to draw all those application teams together. And we have a broad spectrum. We always like to say the departments of transportation and the departments of Taxation, they all have these massive application teams and deeply ingrained with federal partners and the consulting firms of the world. And then we have the forgotten guys. We always make fun of the milk marketing board, the 20 some people that are responsible for driving their mission around milk and trying to bring all them together and getting an understanding of what's going on across vision and direction for their applications and their support.

(14:54):

And so what we're doing is we're creating an app czar, and their job is to just take, not to really understand what exactly what the vision is, but to sort out all those puzzle pieces and to say, okay, these are the corner pieces that we need to keep here. These are the cloud pieces that we're going to put in the cloud and things of that nature to organize the entire vision and direction and understanding where all of those portfolios of services are going and work with those me CIOs and to drive that vision of the business instead of it just making the decisions for it. We had this, I'm a big student of history and in our one conference room where the secretary lives, there is just this little unassuming framed piece of paper. And it took me a couple of years to really look at it and see what it was.

(15:53):

And it's from 1958 and I think it was the Department of Revenue was standing up the first computer system for tracking of taxation and trying to remember that we start out, our existence of it is just another leg of the business. And over time the schism is created as we start to centralize and build enterprise teams and trying to find economies to scale and reduce the number of people that are doing duplicative work. We continue to grow this giant chasm between the business and now my leadership and myself. Our goal is to try to bring that back together and try to become a strategic partner yet again by doing this culture change, by breaking it down, follow those lean principles and getting into, I loved Steve's comment about slow fi. We got to take these people out of these firefighting roles and put them into the opportunity to where they can stop, pause, not deal with the day-to-day, but look and see what the long-term vision and direction is.

Bryon Kroger (17:04):

And as you're supporting those different app CIOs, they're at different stages in their journey and you have to provide infrastructure and telecommunications and support for people at a lot of different stages in a journey. How do you think about that problem? Are you trying to help them along? I mean, it's almost in your interest to get them all to the steady state, but is there resistance to that? How are you approaching

Brian Andrews (17:27):

There's always exceptions, right? If we can get 80% of the organization into some standard solutions and offerings, we count that as a win. And trying to take that culture change, that vision and direction and understanding that we're all in it together and we're trying to start that necessary movement. We're making a lot of headway with the majority of them, but there's always going to be the stragglers. And as long as we're providing solid services that they can depend on, because we haven't in the past, it's been challenging. We're starting to see the attitudes and the direction come back into the fold and seeing value out of the consolidation enterprise efforts.

Bryon Kroger (18:11):

And I think one thing that's interesting is it's almost a paradox in the military. The stakes can be so severe, but we've largely been at peace. We have conflicts around the world, but largely at peace. So I think we just haven't gotten to see this as much, but with our work in federal, and from what I've heard at state, when things go wrong, it's like crisis response becomes a big deal. Have you had any incidents where you've had to engage in crisis response and how do you keep teams aligned to lean principles? All of this goodness that we're talking about, how do you make sure that doesn't go out of the window in a crisis?

Brian Andrews (18:46):

Yeah, I mean, nutso was that team, right? The hair on fire running around, awesome set of folks, but they had their day jobs and they also had the engineering jobs and long-term strategy jobs. And we had some pretty significant events last January. Some of 'em I can't really get into, but one that's kind of near and dear to my heart was we had some problems with some enterprise firewall issues and it was load driven and we were gotten ourselves into a situation where we were testing live and trying to figure out what was impacting residents experience with accessing our services and even our employees accessing services. And we impacted things badly. And that really became, the team really started to gel at that point. We had just stood up our network and architecture pod and isolating ourselves from all the craziness to allow them the autonomy to make decisions, to don't worry about it.

(20:02):

Because the problem with state government is oftentimes there is a zero fault tolerance. We have quite literally officer safety. We have prisons that need to maintain their connectivity to be able to understand what's going on in the organizations. We have healthcare providers, we have mental health hospital institutions for our veterans and for our disabled individuals that if a nurse can't update documentation, it's drastic. It literally is life and death and it gets tough. So you have to be able to create these environments where individuals can make decisions and not be worried about their jobs or their livelihood because there was a little bit of that culture going on and just providing them the trust and the authority to make good foundational change. And driving that foundational change over time to be able to slice off those little pieces of the pie. And now we have this giant 28 agency complex network that we've inherited through decades and decades of independent groups managing their own infrastructure. How do we start to pick this apart and build it into teams and organizations that are small enough and agile enough to be able to make those foundational decisions to put us in a positive place for the future.

Bryon Kroger (21:32):

Nice. And I think one thing that's really important in that it was encouraging to hear kind of the end of that story, how we respond to crisis. That's kind of like in the cybersecurity space, a lot of times once you institute really good monitoring, you start seeing a lot more issues. And if leadership responds to that in a way that's like, oh my gosh, what's wrong with all these issues versus, I appreciate how fast you can respond to these issues. Now in your story, the crisis response, it seemed like leadership's response to that was very much encouragement of being able to get things back on track.

Brian Andrews (22:07):

Yeah, it was awesome. So for decades, we have been contracting out so many of our services. We actually got to start our own knock in house and building out our network operations center, 24 hour operations, massive investment into our monitoring team. And we actually started just the last week, we hired our first dedicated enterprise incident manager. And so we're building out this group that, hey, we're here. We have have our architects and our engineers now we have our dedicated firefighting brigade that's going to watch this. Carried us through the election wonderfully. We've often had challenges with our technology and our infrastructure, especially from a cyber perspective, and being able to understand what's going on, clearly articulate that to management and to respond accordingly and be proactive. There was a time where we would get caught a service being down would be published on our local newspaper, and that was the first indicator that we had that something was down. And so it's been awesome to build out that team in that organization.

Bryon Kroger (23:20):

Awesome. With the last minute we have here, we've actually got quite a few folks that play in the infrastructure platform space. What advice do you have for them specifically as we mentioned, keeping connected to the mission, getting teams that are consuming your services aligned. Maybe something we haven't touched on yet. A final word of wisdom.

Brian Andrews (23:41):

Yeah. No, just go out there, find a mentor, understand what they can bring, what you can do. Always push yourself. If you're comfortable in your job, you're not necessarily learning and go out there, grasp what is offered to you and take that leap. I loved, I forget who mentioned it yesterday. I sit there and I may wait and say, okay, this team is ready, but they were probably ready three months ago. We all are kind of in that situation. There's a lot of imposter syndrome in our industry. Just make that brave step and go out there and take a shot at it. As a map maker and as a scout, we oftentimes don't necessarily know what's over the hill. Start that necessary movement and there may not be dragons back there.

Bryon Kroger (24:31):

Awesome. Well, it was a pleasure having you. Thank you so much. Cool. Thanks

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