Wireless, VoIP And IP video technologies are in high demand across the board, but especially in rural states where they can bridge the gaps among widely dispersed populations.

"Our population density is very low," says Wyoming CIO Larry Biggio. "Often, people have to travel significant distances to conduct state business and obtain services. This results in increased costs and time. IP video can reduce those costs. The higher quality of IP video helps reduce travel costs for meetings, legal hearings and telemedicine appointments, for example."

VoIP is in demand for similar reasons.

"As our current local voice contracts come up for renewal, we need to look at how we can augment our current systems with new technologies such as VoIP as an opportunity to lower last-mile costs and provide mobility," says Kansas CIO Denise Moore. "That's particularly true in the event of a disaster."

The government of Iowa wants to establish a wireless broadband connection for far-flung customers currently served by conventional copper lines.

"A typical rural Iowa community that would be impacted would have one to two elementary and middle schools, a public library, a government-support service office and maybe a local hospital or clinic connected by copper T-1 lines," says Iowa CIO John Gillispie. "These lines are not only expensive; they're limited in bandwidth. A wireless solution can provide high-speed broadband access without the high cost of fiber installation and can meet customer demand for scalable broadband access."

Centralized, Statewide ERP

Many states want to move away from making piecemeal decisions about IT investments and take a big-picture approach to acquisition instead.

A number of CIOs say they want good ERP solutions. "We want a holistic view of an agency's IT spending," says South Dakota CIO Otto Doll. "Ultimately, we may want to prioritize across the entire enterprise when making any IT investment. To achieve business-process improvements, agencies must first have rigorous modeling of critical business processes."

Retiring Legacy Infrastructures

Many states are living with IT systems that are as old as--or older than--their operators. They're functional, but not efficient or practical in the Internet Age. Newer technology leads to a better user experience and lower costs.

"We can upgrade the skills of our employees in newer technologies," says Michigan CIO Teresa Takai. "And that will help us prepare for the pending retirement of many of our long-standing employees."

Beyond that, legacy systems are a bear to manage, and CIOs say they need better tools to do it.

"We must know what we have before we can manage it," says Mike Inman, commissioner of technology for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. "We're saddled with innumerable legacy systems. They encompass every aspect of the business. After that, there are the decisions to be made regarding fix or replace. We need solutions to help with both. Our entire effort to consolidate IT infrastructure began from the premise that we needed to reduce waste, redundancy and duplication."

NEXT: Data capture and storage