Return to Virginia Business - September 2003

George C. Newstrom — Virginia Secretary of Technology

Related links:
- Hampton's tunnel vision
- Q&A with Charles Steger, President of Virginia Tech

Q: What is COVITS 2003?
A: The symposium is an annual event that for the past fours years was held at VMI in Lexington. This year we are hosting it in Roanoke, and our co-host is Virginia Tech. We’re delighted to continue a relationship with a major Virginia university, and it is the Warner administration’s intent to continue doing that every year.

Q: What is the focus of the symposium?
A: To work with academic, government and business leaders to talk about technology and how technology underpins their business. This is in contrast to how COVITS started, which was technologists talking to technologists. We really want to explore what technology does to help the enterprise.

Q: What unique attributes does Virginia bring to a high-profile event like COVITS?
A: The wonderful university and education structure we have in place in Virginia. The governor always talks about how education is the underpinning of the future of Virginia and that’s why he is so committed to the funding for education.

Virginia also has a tremendous technology infrastructure. The telecommunications industry is based here, and Northern Virginia is a large component of that. The governor still talks about the fact that 50 percent of the Internet traffic of the world goes through Virginia every day.

We also have the capabilities, the people and the work ethic to grow the technology and telecommunications industries. That’s probably one of the unheralded things about Virginia that people don’t know, and that’s the reason for bringing more visibility to this conference every year.

Q: What are some of your future plans for COVITS?
A: We, the Warner administration, made a commitment that we would move the symposium around every year. So the first year (2002) it was in Lexington. This year it’s in Roanoke. Next year our plan is to move it to the central region or to the Tidewater area. We are working with those two areas right now, and we will make that selection and announce that selection at COVITS this year. And the fourth year we will most likely go into Northern Virginia. So we will have the final year of the conference under the Warner administration in that region.

Q: How will you measure the success of COVITS?
A: When I get on the next plane and travel to any location outside of Virginia, if people recognize Virginia and talk about Virginia and note our capabilities of what we can do — our strengths, especially around technology — we will consider that a success.

Return to Virginia Business - September 2003