I was born and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming and have been fortunate to make a successful career in state government, working to build innovative solutions to help better serve our state. When Governor Mead took office there was a strong sense of pride—one that I personally share—because Wyoming has a budget surplus and is recognized as being well run.

Under new leadership we have a constant mantra of Innovation and searching for ways to make Wyoming a pioneer in technology and government. Our move to Google Apps for Government formed the foundation of one of Governor Mead's mandates: to provide faster, more efficient responses to constituent inquiries. The governor asked CIO Flint Waters to build an automated system to manage these requests. Flint turned to my Enterprise Development team to quickly develop a solution that would meet the Governor's request.

With Google Apps for Government we were able to utilize the Google APIs along with traditional web development to rapidly build a robust solution in approximately four months. Now, we will be able to see the status of every communication—whenever and wherever we are connected to the Internet. The Governor's staff will be able to assign tasks, route communication through Gmail, and place follow-up items on stakeholders' calendars so constituent requests are handled with transparency and efficiency. Even the Governor can use his iPad to keep pace with constituent concerns.

I will continue to encourage my team to leverage APIs offered by Google to speed up our development and integrate with products used on a daily basis such as Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs and others. We are also migrating many of our internal websites to Google Sites as a CMS solution. Overall, Google Apps supports our culture of innovation and makes it easier for us to rapidly create new solutions that improve our responsiveness and agility.