Rosa Lara

Mrs. Rosa Y. Lara joined the State System in April 2019 with over twenty-five years of information technology experience.  She started her career as an IT consultant serving public sector customers across a number of states. She then transitioned to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania where she has served in numerous roles up to and including Deputy CIO for the Commonwealth overseeing an organization of 2000 IT professionals with over $1B in IT spend annually.

Over her career, she has led the implementation of numerous complex and high-profile statewide initiatives including implementing an enterprise eGrants system at the commonwealth, establishing the commonwealth’s first IT Expenditure dashboard, implementing PENNWATCH, the governments first transparency portal, overseeing the state’s first eGovernment office, leading the IT implementation for the Commonwealth’s first Right-to-Know law and leading the state’s IT response for the influx of Recovery and Reinvestment (ARRA) dollars. Her largest project was leading the Commonwealth’s transition to a new shared service delivery model for IT which included changes to how IT was structured across the state, how IT was governed, how IT was funded and how IT performance metrics were measured; the initiative saved $83M as of her departure.

Since joining the State System, Mrs. Lara is leading to the largest IT transformation in PASSHE’s history – migrating from 14 on premise student information systems to a single student information system in the Cloud – termed OneSIS.  The implementation is targeted to complete in 2025.

Mrs. Lara earned her BA in Public Administration from The College of NJ and earned her Master of Public Administration and an MS in Information Resources Management from Syracuse University.

 He earned his Bachelors (Physics) and Masters (Materials Science) from the University of Virginia and his Doctorate (Theoretical and Applied Mechanics) from Cornell University.