Cloud

Creative Leaders Aim to Attract the Next Generation Workforce

New technology and new hires go hand-in-hand, new management strategies can help to get young and innovative employees on board.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan Petersen has worked in publishing for more than two decades, most of it spent creating award-winning content and strategy for CDW’s family of tech magazine brands. As editor-in-chief, he works with his team to develop compelling and useful industry-focused stories to share with the technology world. Outside of work, Ryan enjoys spending time with his children, traveling, online gaming, and following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

State and local governments conduct day-to-day business in very close proximity to the citizens they serve.

Citizens now access government, data and all of the information they need to get their own business done in innovative new ways, and government service only stands to improve.

The pressures to perform are immense, but important. Citizens, rightly, demand greater accessibility as their own world of personal technology grows. And why shouldn’t they? Technology also allows government to offer more and better ways to share information than ever before. The question is no longer, “Can we?”, but instead, “What’s the most efficient way?”

Several forward-looking IT leaders are testing those waters, and creating new solutions to some age-old problems thanks to the cloud, hyper-fast wireless networking, mobile devices and more. But beyond even the nuts and bolts that keep everything humming, creative leadership and new management strategies also serve to push the envelope.

Initiatives Aimed at Engaging Innovative Talent

In Indiana, CIO Dewand Neely is building out the state’s first open concept office environment, where he hopes to encourage better communication and teamwork among his team members. “It’s really about everyone being more open and approachable,” he says. “It’s also having a workspace with more daylight and a more modern feeling that may attract the next-generation workforce.”

Nevada CIO Shanna Rahming has proposed a student internship program that would bring college students to the state as a means to increase the overall workforce. “This will help our pipeline for potential employees when they graduate, but also bring fresh ideas and new knowledge into our state IT shops.”

It’s true: The need to attract millennials to government IT service is great. As new initiatives such as IoT projects, broader data mining and virtual reality become more commonplace, citizens will expect their government IT offerings to follow suit. Who better to lead us into that next age of progress than digital natives? Governments laying the enterprise groundwork now should have no trouble launching that next wave of innovation.

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