On Thursday, April 21, Multnomah County Chief Information Officer Sherry Swackhamer was awarded the InnoTech Oregon 2011 IT Public Sector Executive of the Year award. The annual award recognizes leadership in the use of information technology within an organization, demonstrated through accomplishments in the areas of creativity, impact, innovation, process transformation and leadership.
In addition to one or more of these achievements, current community service activities were also considered during the selection process.
Swackhamer was nominated for the award by 2010’s prize recipient, Nick Jwayad from Portland Public Schools, and Curt Pederson from Oregon State University. InnoTech is considered the region's premier business and technology innovation conference and expo, and this year more than 1,500 business and technology professionals attended the eighth annual event.
Swackhamer was recently appointed director of the new Department of County Assets, which includes the Information Technology division. Before joining Multnomah County in 2003, Swackhamer spent 20 years in the accounting, internal auditing and information technology fields. She led the transformation of the county’s information technology organization, implementing cost effective solutions such as Google Applications for Government to manage email and calendars, new tools to access records and processes for the Board of County Commissioners and hosting external county websites in Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.
Swackhamer called the award “an important milestone” for herself as well as for Multnomah County. “This award reflects how far Multnomah County has come,” Swackhamer said in an email. “We are leaders in not only program innovation, but leaders in technology innovation.”
Members from the county’s Information Technology division also spoke at the conference about the recent implementation of Google Apps for Government. In October 2010, Swackhamer and IT staff received considerable national attention for the Google migration project, which will save taxpayers over $500,000 in employee time and licensing costs.