Indiana CIO Tracy Barnes to step down at end of Holcomb term

Indiana Chief Information Officer Tracy Barnes will step down from his role on Jan. 10, Gov. Eric Holcomb announced Wednesday.

Barnes, who joined the state government as an IT director in 2015 and has spent the past four years as its top technology official, is credited with improving the state’s cybersecurity, creating Indiana’s State Earn and Learn IT training program, furthering adoption of cloud computing among agencies, creating a “one door to Indiana” strategy for state services and advancing data governance and transparency efforts.

In an interview Wednesday, Barnes said he’s most proud of his success in building relationships with local governments to improve their cybersecurity practices. Barnes prioritized cybersecurity for state and local government throughout his tenure, including by leading a 92-county tour, in which he sought to build relationships with county officials and better understand their cybersecurity capabilities and challenges. In 2022, with help from Indiana University and Purdue University, the state set out to conduct cyber assessments of more than 300 municipal governments.

“What we’ve done to reconnect with local governments and really bolster the entire state’s technology and cybersecurity posture, that has felt phenomenal. They literally said to me: We have never trusted the state and, Tracy, you’ve made an effort and found a way to help us come together to move this stuff forward,” Barnes said, recounting a recent conversation with local officials.

Barnes said the success of the statewide cybersecurity program was partially thanks to a strategy that sought not to punish non-compliant county governments or to seek strict legislative mandates, but to understand the challenges facing Indiana’s local governments and find ways to overcome them.

“They saw that and they felt that,” Barnes said. “Coming to them, understanding who they were and what their issues were and then truly listening and starting to build programs around that. It definitely paid off.”

‘Next level’

In Indiana, Barnes served as a deputy auditor of operations, and chief of staff for Lt. Gov Suzanne Crouch before being named to Holcomb’s Cabinet in March 2020, at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many technology officials during the health crisis, Barnes’ time leading the state’s IT efforts centered on boosting capacity for remote workers and expanding its suite of cloud offerings.

In a press release, Holcomb said Barnes advanced the state’s IT infrastructure to the “Next Level.”

“Within weeks of being named to the position, he and his staff implemented steps nearly overnight to keep the state of Indiana operating during the pandemic as well as developing longterm policy critical to state government operational security,” Holcomb said.

“We had everyone turning to us and asking: ‘How do I do this now?’ ‘How do I make this work?’ ‘How do we get this done?’” Barnes recalled during a technology conference last April. “That’s not always been the position we’ve been able to be in — we get stuck at times being looked at as just technicians.”

Barnes said the pandemic was helpful in focusing everyone’s attention on technology issues facing the state, as businesses closed their doors and record numbers of residents headed home to work or filed for unemployment.

“Indiana’s legislature had not been aggressively involved in tech policy and so that was also part of it,” Barnes said of the state’s cybersecurity advances. “How do I get them aware and engaged and involved? And we ended up getting a couple bills passed that created the incident reporting requirement, and also last year created the increased requirement for assessments and [multifactor authentication] and .gov adoption.”

Holcomb’s office also credited Barnes with leading development of its generative artificial intelligence chatbot, which helps users find information on the state website, and increasing the number of services available to the public through the services portal Access Indiana.

Forced evaluation

Last September, Barnes told StateScoop that AI projects like the state’s chatbot were sparking new interest in data governance and data cleanliness, a longstanding sore spot for many states. Last November, Indiana launched Pivot, a personalized recommendation engine for the state’s workforce, which Barnes said was among the projects that forced agencies to take data governance efforts more seriously.

“It’s really kind of forcing us to evaluate our data strategy and pushing our agencies how we’re capturing, managing, tracking and organizing that data in a much more practical fashion that allows it to be ingested and provide right, expected outcomes for something like an AI engine,” he said in September.

And in 2021, Indiana launched a data proficiency program, allowing hundreds of state employees to earn badges showing they met standards of data literacy.

Barnes will step down after eight years serving the administration of Eric Holcomb, a Republican who will be termed out of office in January. Gov.-elect Mike Braun, a Republican U.S. senator whose politics are in near lockstep with President-elect Donald Trump, will take office Jan. 13.

While some cabinet CIOs survive gubernatorial transitions, Barnes said he’s not interested.

“It’s a bit of a different mindset and operational priorities, and so as with any role, it has to go both ways,” Barnes said. “We have to be a fit for each other, and so really as I’ve begun to see some of the plans and priorities unfold, it’s not a good fit for me.”

The outgoing CIO, who spent more than a decade leading an IT consulting company, said he doesn’t have a new job lined up, but that he’s looking forward to taking a month off to evaluate his career options.

“Very proud of what we’ve done here,” he said. “An amazing team, an amazing administration and looking forward to the next chapter.”