State CIO outlines Oregon IT workforce, cybersecurity priorities and project oversight

State Chief Information Officer Terrence Woods told the Joint Committee on Information Management and Technology on Jan. 31 that Oregon’s executive-branch IT environment is large, dispersed and undergoing modernization, with cybersecurity and legacy-system replacement among the agency’s top priorities.

"I am Terrence Woods, and I am your state chief information officer," Woods said at the start of his presentation as he outlined EIS’s strategic framework and program areas.

Woods said there are about 2,344 IT classified positions in the executive branch that support roughly 47,680 executive-branch employees, producing an overall ratio of about one IT classified position for every 20 to 24 employees. He and committee staff noted that roughly 30 agencies, boards and commissions have no IT classified positions and instead buy services through contractors, the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) shared services or larger parent agencies.

The CIO described the state’s organizational model as largely decentralized with a mix of enterprise services: "There are…