With NASCIO award win and $9M saved for Pennsylvania, CIO Bry Pardoe reflects on keeping up with quickly changing IT landscape

After securing a win in the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ (NASCIO) 2026 State IT Recognition Awards, Pennsylvania CIO Bry Pardoe said the work was driven by a simple goal: keeping pace with a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

The winners, announced Tuesday during the awards and recognition dinner of the 2026 NASCIO Annual Conference in San Diego, were drawn from a slate of finalists announced earlier this month. The award series honors technology innovation and excellence in state government.

Two of Pennsylvania’s NASCIO award submissions received recognition as finalists this year: its contact center modernization project, which won the award, and the PA.gov content optimization project. 

Pardoe said the contact center modernization project saw 63 contact centers moved to a modern cloud-based foundation in less than a year. She said the work required agency coordination, workforce training, service-flow documentation and a dedicated customer success manager who helped to connect business needs with technology execution. 

“It was the perfect combination of people showing up who knew that we had a mission to work towards, but also showing up as collaborative partners because this isn’t just an IT project that gets flipped overnight to support services,” she said. “We had to work hand-in-hand with our agency partners to say, ‘What are your flows? How does it work?’ We need to train and enable the workforce to make sure that they are ready to work in the system.” 

Part of this effort was to help the state keep up with the breakneck pace of technological change, led predominantly by advancements in AI, Pardoe explained. 

“A lot of what we try to do in state government is keep up with the pace of technology as it is continuing to transform, and there is so much capability out in the market today for things like AI enablement and like automated triage of calls — we needed to get the foundations right so that we could take advantage of that technology,” Pardoe said. 

“We also had to do it really quickly. I mean, the world is moving faster than I think any of us can fathom,” she added.

Anticipation of this rapid change not slowing down anytime soon — and the turbulence it may cause across the whole of IT in state governments — was a central finding in this year’s 2026 State CIO Survey. 

The effort also saved the state $9 million. Pardoe said the state originally awarded the project to a new vendor to migrate the contact centers to its platform. However, when the office learned it was going to take three years to complete and cost the state $9 million, they decided to move the transition work in-house. Instead, the state decided to work directly with an existing vendor to migrate to its secure FedRAMP cloud platform.  

That emphasis on speed and efficiency also shaped the PA.gov optimization project, which was important as the state’s website is the “first point of engagement” for so many, Pardoe noted. Right-sizing the project was also a focus. Rather than attempting to update all roughly 30,000 pages at once, Pardoe said the state prioritized high-traffic content to make progress on the large and complex undertaking.

Specifically, she said the teams began with roughly 20% to 30% of pages per agency, prioritizing the highest-traffic content and consolidating pages where appropriate. They also made the web pages compatible with AI search engines. 

“Many folks now aren’t necessarily Googling it; they’re going to the AI provider of their choice to search for that information. So, setting up the content on our website so that it is easy to understand, easy to crawl, and making it something that is simple for folks to engage with is so critical to getting them to the right place at the right time when they need support the most,” Pardoe said.

“We knew we had to lift and shift a lot of content, and so the team has taken a really thoughtful approach of prioritizing what is the most important, most interacted-with content, and let’s start there.” 

The awards, Pardoe said, were a well-earned recognition — not for herself, but for her team. 

“I mean, IT is so often behind the scenes, but we are a critical foundation for service delivery in every agency that we support,” she said. “So being able to shine a light on my staff that is working tirelessly to connect the dots, make things better, make things more efficient and easier. I’m just really excited about the opportunity to celebrate them and all of the work that they’ve done through this process.”