Mr. Kerry Gustafson

Kerry Gustafson

Mr. Gustafson , Director of Application Technologies with the State Of Delaware , has provided public sector information systems leadership for over 25 years as both an employee and contractor.He combines the maturity and judgment gained from those years with recent experience leading enterprise resource planning systems implementations and Internet application development.

Kerry's Masters Degree in Education led him to systems design with the Maryland Board of Higher Education.Subsequent independent contractual work was performed for the Maryland State Board of Community Colleges and the U.X. Office of Education's National Center For Educational Statistics.He worked with many of the state community colleges.

For the last 14 years , Kerry has worked for the State of Delaware where he is currently the Director of Application Technologies for the State's Office of Information Services.Here he initiated projects to modernize the State's approach to application systems.He has taken an active role in managing the initial procurement and implementation of ERP statewide systems for human resources , accounting , purchasing , and budgeting.Currently , Mr. Gustafson is acting as the Technical Lead on a statewide SAP Implementation Project.

Kerry Gustafson has worked for two years as Director of Delaware's Integrated Management Systems project which defined requirements , created RFP's and selected packages from PeopleSoft and KPMG , which were successfully implemented.

Kerry has been involved with both successful and unsuccessful public sector information systems projects.He values the lesson from unsuccessful projects , but says the successful projects are a lot more fun.He has definite opinions on how to bid information systems work in the public sector arena to increase the public sector flexibility , encourage favorable pricing , ensure vendor accountability , and reduce project risk.He believes that sound project management must begin with provisions in the RFP.He has worked with the State's Attorney Generals both in the crafting of RFPs and contracts and working through the disputes that have arisen in project management.He believes that any bid or contract that ends up in the courts represents a failure but has had vendor selections survive court challenges and had negotiated the recovery of funds from non-performing vendors while pursuing remedies in the courts.

According to Kerry Gustafson, Director of Application Technologies, "By using Java, we will be able to reuse our core applications and data on our S/390 systems while vastly improving the ease at which our customers access information and receive services.