Agile Leadership Podcast Interview with Ed Toner, Chief Information Officer, State of Nebraska

Welcome back! Every month on the Agile Leadership Podcast, we bring you inside the thinking of executives from the public and private sector who are leading agile teams. This month, host Jeff Dalton interviews a very special guest, whose experience bridges the public and private sectors. Ed Toner, a/k/a the “Blue Collar CIO,” brings his private sector background in industrial engineering and manufacturing to the technology leadership of the Great State of Nebraska as Chief Information Officer. Please join us in welcoming Ed!

To listen to the interview, please click the image:

Ed Toner was Appointed by Governor Pete Ricketts as Chief Information Officer for the State of Nebraska on June 9th, 2015 to utilize technology to improve delivery of government services. Since taking over as Nebraska’s chief information officer, his leadership team has consolidated key information technology systems, resources and services which has positioned the state to provide quality support at lower costs.

Ed is accountable for the strategic direction and daily leadership of $120+ million annual budget, 350+ person IT team serving over 18,000 State employees and approximately 1.9M citizens of Nebraska.

He has successfully executed State-wide Consolidation in less than 18 months which transformed the State from a Decentralized to Centralized infrastructure model saving the State of Nebraska $16 M+ in recurring annual savings via Contractor and FTE reductions, elimination of software duplication, migration to one State network with the elimination of associated hardware and 90% server virtualization eliminating 200+ physical servers.

Ed consolidated 90 counties infrastructure increasing security, performance and reliability while saving the State of Nebraska $5 M+ over 10 years. Reducing county IT costs by 20% annually.

He implemented a Data Center strategy which moved Nebraska away from Disaster Recovery model to an Active/Hot Standby solution between two geographically separated Data Centers while consolidating 6000+ sq. ft. of Agency Data Centers.