As the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania advances its digital transformation agenda, strong partnership between business leaders and IT is turning strategy into measurable outcomes. This session will dive into Reimagine PA as a real-world example of what business-and-IT alignment looks like in practice—how shared priorities, clear governance, and integrated teams help move enterprise change from planning to delivery. You’ll leave with practical takeaways you can apply to your own cross-agency initiatives to better align technology capabilities with mission-critical goals.

• Learn how business and IT leaders structure shared ownership and accountability to keep enterprise initiatives moving  
• Understand the governance and decision-making approaches that support Reimagine PA and reduce friction across stakeholders  
• Explore how team models and talent strategies help deliver outcomes faster while strengthening long-term capability inside government

Robyne Lyons

CIO, Integrated Enterprise System Office (IESO), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Office of Administration

Eric Locke

Payable Services Director, Office of the Budget, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Eric Cole

IESO Director of Business Operations, Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania, Office of Administration

As resident expectations rise, government agencies are under pressure to deliver seamless, frictionless services. Yet while most leaders recognize the importance of resident experience, many still struggle to provide consistent outcomes across fragmented systems.

This session explores how experience orchestration are helping agencies reduce friction, enable self-service, and deliver more connected, resident-centered services—ultimately building trust and improving outcomes

Human-centered service design isn’t a trend — it’s now essential to how governments deliver value. Pennsylvania is leading the way through CodePA, a first-of-its-kind digital initiative focused on simplifying access, improving usability, and embedding equity into every layer of service delivery. This session will highlight how Pennsylvania is transforming end-to-end experiences by redesigning systems from the user’s perspective — not the government’s.

Explore how the Commonwealth is closing service gaps and scaling better design through co-creation, enterprise tools, and an unwavering focus on user outcomes.

• Improve public trust through better service design
• Close access gaps using community-driven co-design
• Streamline enterprise services and digital front doors
• Build inclusive feedback loops into digital delivery
• Enrich internal design capacity through the CodePA framework

Cities are increasingly leading public sector innovation by redesigning services around real resident needs, strengthening delivery practices, and modernising the fundamentals that make change sustainable. This session brings together leaders from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Lancaster, and Pittsburgh to share how city teams are applying thinking like human-centred design and service design to improve citizen experience, while also investing in the foundations behind the scenes: good data, clear processes, and the governance required to operate at scale.

The focus is on how innovation becomes enterprise-wide and repeatable. Rather than chasing "silver bullet" solutions, these cities are rethinking how digital services are designed, governed, and delivered—anchored in data, aligned processes, and intentional innovation and continuously improved across departments. This session will explore:

• How cities are pairing resident engagement and service design thinking to reduce friction, improve usability, and strengthen end-to-end citizen experience
• Why fundamentals matter: how good data practices and strong process design enable scalable service delivery and measurable outcomes
• Why governance, data quality, and process design must come before new tech
• How innovation is being operationalized through people and processes, multidisciplinary teams, clearer service ownership, and consistent delivery rhythms
• Practical lessons that state and local leaders can apply to scale service improvement and modernization across government

Dartanion Williams

Chief Data Officer, City of Baltimore

Hannah Louie

Director of Project Delivery, Office of the Chief Administrator, City of Philadelphia

Doren Brown

Bureau Chief - Civic Engagement, Department of Neighborhood Engagement, City of Lancaster

Andrew Hayhurst

Senior Manager, Innovation & Performance, City of Pittsburgh

Sujatha Kamma Moderator

Industry Expert Advisor, Public Sector, Healthcare, Education and NPO, SAP

State governments often operate with fragmented security models — inconsistent visibility, uneven maturity, and reactive incident response. Pennsylvania is choosing a different path. By centralizing cybersecurity under the Enterprise Information Security Office (EISO), we are building a unified, enterprise-scale defense model that delivers:

• Full-stack observability across shared infrastructure and hosting platforms
• Enterprise vulnerability management for all agencies — enabling proactive risk reduction
• Enhanced endpoint detection and response — reducing mean time to respond from 6 days to under 10 minutes
• A shift from IT-centric conversations to enterprise risk dialogue with agency leadership.

This session will highlight how centralization enabled scale, speed, and measurable risk reduction - transforming cybersecurity from a fragmented function into a shared enterprise capability.

Pennsylvania is in a moment of genuine transformation: AI adoption, citizen-centered digital services, enterprise security at scale. Every one of those commitments depends on the same thing: IT operations that can keep up.This session draws on real outcomes from government agencies that have already made the shift to examine what becomes possible when the operational foundation matches the ambition.

• The operational foundation matters as much as the ambition.
• Fragmentation has a cost most agencies haven't calculated.
• Peer agencies are already seeing what's possible.
• The shift is a leadership decision, not just a technology one.

Montgomery County is positioning AI as a practical capacity multiplier for local government—improving responsiveness, lowering administrative burden, and strengthening outcomes across high-volume services like elections, 911, courts, and human services. This session will examine how counties can move from interest and pilots to resident-centred implementation by pairing clear use cases (faster, more accurate service at scale) with governance mechanisms that protect trust. Drawing on MontCo’s approach, this session will explore what it takes to operationalize AI responsibly while building workforce readiness and ensuring innovation does not compromise fairness, privacy, or accountability.

• Target high-volume services with immediate resident impact
• Build governance and guardrails that deploy with the system
• Be transparent about AI use and keep humans accountable
• Anticipate misinformation, bias, and privacy/security risks
• Train staff and measure outcomes to sustain performance

Cybersecurity in 2026 demands more than defense — it requires speed, adaptability, and shared action across all levels of government. As Pennsylvania accelerates its shift to a defend-forward posture, agencies must rethink how they plan, respond, and partner to manage risk in real time.

This panel will bring together state and local leaders to unpack what’s working, what’s changing, and what’s next for cyber resilience in the Commonwealth.

• Advance shared threat intelligence across jurisdictions
• Improve cyber readiness through coordinated planning and playbooks
• Reduce complexity by adopting enterprise-wide zero trust models
• Bolster incident response with local-state-federal partnerships
• Future-proof cyber strategy against AI-driven threats

Dr. Fidele Niyonzigira

Chief Information & Security Officer, Department of Human Services, Allegheny County

Dr. Bruce Young

Professor of Cybersecurity Graduate Studies, Harrisburg University

Chris Allwein

Cybersecurity Intelligence Manager, Pennsylvania State Police

Sujatha Kamma Moderator

Industry Expert Advisor, Public Sector, Healthcare, Education and NPO, SAP

AI adoption is accelerating across government, but scaling it responsibly requires governance that is grounded in real operational use cases, aligned risk management, and cross-agency collaboration. This session will examine how Pennsylvania is advancing responsible AI adoption through idea identification to use case definition, testing, and piloting, with practical guardrails and stakeholder engagement embedded throughout. It will also highlight how use cases can directly inform policy development, and how cross-agency support can accelerate scale while protecting public trust.

• Advance AI use from individual tools to standardized, repeatable workflows
• Translate AI ideas into clearly scoped use cases and determine where each use case will deliver value
• Align AI oversight to existing enterprise risk management frameworks and engage internal stakeholders early
• Apply ethical governance and public oversight to high-impact use cases, using guardrails that emphasize stronger questions and clearer accountability

Keith Hartung

Director of Cybersecurity & Chief AI Officer, Pennsylvania State Treasury Department

Tim Smith

Chief Information Officer, Berks County

Amanda Martin

AI Committee Co-Chair, Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission

Mark Wheeler

Chief Information Officer, Montgomery County

Himanshu Goil

CEO, TechForGov AI

Chris Devlin Moderator

Vice President - State/Local Govt. & Education, SAP

As expectations rise for simpler, more secure digital services, Pennsylvania needs a whole-of-state approach that modernizes legacy platforms while scaling AI and data innovation responsibly. This session will help you apply practical strategies to re-engineer high-impact processes, align leadership around shared priorities, and reduce delivery and trust risks so you can improve outcomes for citizens and your agency.

• Understand how to better leverage and utilize the technology and data already held by our agencies
• Embrace risk as a driver of innovation across agencies and leadership
• Explore new models for collaboration across government, industry, and community
• Improve citizen experience by redesigning services and internal workflows to be simpler, inclusive, and secure.
• Advance automation by leveraging in-house applications to streamline repeatable processes, including settlement workflows, and remove manual handoffs.

Kathryn Hartzell

Assistant Chief Technology Officer - Technology and Innovation Management, Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission

Allen Mehta

Chief Information Officer, Philadelphia International Airport

Alice Sanders

Deputy Executive Director for IT, PENNVEST