New CIO charts enterprise data platform, cautious AI rollout for State Water Board

Ben Rogers, the State Water Board’s new chief information officer, told the Water Quality Coordinating Committee he plans to reorient agency technology from siloed, project‑by‑project systems toward shared enterprise platforms and an authoritative data warehouse.

"Rather than build isolated applications every time, we want a single platform where teams can build, reuse components and share data," Rogers said, describing an approach that emphasizes Snowflake for a centralized data warehouse, Power Apps and Power BI for low‑code staff self‑service, and enterprise standardization to reduce duplicative contracts and maintenance burdens.

Rogers underscored the importance of data governance before deploying large AI models. "If our documents say the sky is red, powerful AI will say the sky is red — so data quality and governance must come first," he said. He described pilot uses already under way, including an AI‑assisted public‑comment analysis that grouped similar submissions to speed staff responses, and productivity pilots that assess Copilot and document summarization tools.

The CIO asked the board and staff to help prioritize enterprise projects: building the data warehouse, addressing technical debt, and creating platform enablement that will accelerate future projects and allow program staff to build more tools without always depending on specialized IT labor.

What happens next: DIT will continue stakeholder workshops, expand pilots of low‑code tools, and build a prioritized enterprise IT strategy that balances technical debt, platform investment and emerging‑technology pilots while formalizing AI guardrails and privacy measures.