As state chief transformation officer, Zarina Baber heads the Office of Transformation and Strategy Delivery within Minnesota Information Technology Services, where she works in lockstep with CIO Tarek Tomes. Her goal is to make sure projects and priorities align not only with IT’s strategic plan, but with Gov. Tim Walz’s statewide agenda.
“The way we approach modernization is it is not just for IT,” she said at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Annual Conference in Denver last month. “We bring along our business partners because we feel that modernizing and delivering to our business outcomes is a shared responsibility of business leaders as well as our IT folks.”
That unified effort is key to how Baber is driving transformation in Minnesota, along with a shift from project management to product management, which has made processes more agile. She said part of her role is to champion transparency and share data with Tomes to keep him up to speed on each of MNIT’s initiatives, along with any associated risks to watch for.
Another area of statewide focus for Baber is customer experience, a central part of the governor’s One Minnesota Plan. As one of the initiative’s leaders, she reports to Walz’s office quarterly and says putting the customer at the center of Minnesota’s services is “totally transforming the culture.”
“The customer’s voice is constantly engrained and brought into how we do things,” she said, “not just from a design perspective but what are their pain points? What does the journey look like as they’re interacting with our agency services?”
