GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

Jonathan Askins had never worked in government before December 2020, when Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson hired him as CTO. Since then, Askins has overseen a centralization of state-government networks, an effort he says was long-discussed but never completed. “That’s been something that’s been talked about for years, but over the last 12 to 13 months we’ve seen some really fantastic process,” he says. He’s also been focused on repurposing the state Division of Information Systems as a more business-minded organization. “Everything we do here is customer-focused, whether it’s a department or ultimately the citizens of Arkansas,” he says.

GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

As interim CIO of Iowa, Matthew Behrens heads an organization striving to improve technology both inside government and across the state. Iowa is expanding its cybersecurity operations center to support local governments, while also spending $350 million on broadband to improve connectivity to more than 110,000 homes, schools and businesses, he says. “We feel like we’re making important progress toward ultimately ensuring that all Iowans have access to fast and reliable internet service, which opens so many doors, whether it’s learning online, working remotely, starting a business or receiving health care from a remote provider,” Behrens says.

GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

A 15-year veteran of Michigan government IT, Laura Clark pulls double duty as the state’s chief security officer and — as of last October — statewide CIO. “It’s been an interesting transition,” she says, but one that’s allowed her to look at Michigan’s internal processes and find opportunities modernize legacy systems and support a workforce that’s transitioning from the pandemic into a hybrid-work organization. She’s also got a growing focus on human-centered design for internal- and external-facing applications, especially as Michigan’s single sign-on portal grows. “Our residents no longer want to go agency to agency. They want to go through the portal and complete multiple interactions and they don’t care what agency they’re getting it from,” she says.

GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

Nearly a year into her run as Ohio’s CIO, Katrina Flory has focused on moving more of the state’s agencies onto a modern web platform, which she says has made it easier than ever for Ohioans to reach government resources. The InnovateOhio platform, which was launched in 2019 by Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, has prioritized user experience to improve both digital and offline interactions with state offices, Flory says. “Citizens don’t necessarily have to walk into an office to get the service they need. And if they do walk in they have good service,” she says. She’s also overseen refreshes on a number of internal systems, including Ohio’s ERP system and telecommunications strategy.

GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

As he closes out his second term in Annapolis, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has taken several new steps to broaden the state’s cybersecurity activities. Last November, he appointed Maryland’s first-ever chief data and chief privacy officers, who’ve been tasked with drafting strategic plans for how state agencies handle residents’ personal identifying information. He also forged a partnership with the National Security Agency, conveniently headquartered in Fort Meade, in which an NSA analyst will advise on the state’s data-security plans. Meanwhile, Hogan’s administration is also attempting to lower the barrier to entry on state IT jobs, announcing in March that hundreds of positions will no longer require applicants to hold four-year college degrees.

GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

As New York’s CIO, Angelo “Tony” Riddick spent much of his first year-plus in Albany overseeing the rollout of and revisions to Excelsior Pass, the state’s COVID-19 vaccine passport. Making it compatible with records from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs was a “major accomplishment,” the 30-year Army veteran says. Meanwhile, he continues to lead an IT workforce of 3,100 employees, responsible for tasks like equipping a massive state workforce now on a hybrid schedule and building out a new cybersecurity operations center that opened in Brooklyn last fall. “I have a dedicated force…that simply knows how to get the job done,” he says.

GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

With nearly seven years as Nebraska’s CIO, Ed Toner’s work of consolidating and modernizing state IT systems is approaching a landmark: He says the state is updating its “very last legacy system,” Nebraska’s Medicaid platform. “We’re putting in a no-wrong-door approach so they can come in and get services from one entry,” Toner says. A new front end, called iServe, went live in April “without issue.” Toner says the tech will soon be expanded for use in other agencies. “We’re trying to be more efficient, more effective and customer focused. That’s really what we’re going for,” he says.

GoldenGov: State Executive of the Year

Wood started as Massachusetts’ CIO in 2018, just after the state formed its new Executive Office of Technology Services and Security. Before taking on the CIO role in 2018, Wood served in the commonwealth’s public safety and security office, where he oversaw the modernization of 911 services. The last year has brought plenty of change to Wood’s office, as Massachusetts looks to update its systems and move toward cloud infrastructure. He says that along with those transitions, his team is working to shore up a new mobile work environment, simplify the state’s technology footprint and improve digital service delivery.

State IT Leadership of the Year

When the American Rescue Plan passed last year, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis tapped Natriece Bryant, the deputy chief customer officer in the state Office of Information Technology, as his point person to distribute $1.3 billion to Colorado’s counties. “We have 64 counties in the state, so I have 64 opinions on where that money should go,” she says. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to figure out how you distribute a billion dollars effectively.” She also oversaw the use of another $600 million in ARP funds for state IT improvements, including programs tackling homelessness and the housing shortage.

State Leadership of the Year

Georgia’s longtime chief digital officer, Nikhil Deshpande has played key roles in establishing the state’s social media presence and leading the move to an enterprisewide open-source publishing system. Recently, Deshpande’s team has been working with agencies to improve their digital services, setting up measures to measure the success of various services. “We cannot just be offering online services with technology in mind, we have to cater the services with users at the center and then build the services around user needs,” he says. A key component of improving services: Google rankings. Deshpande said that part of ensuring citizens can use state services is being able to search and find them.

State Leadership of the Year

As CIO of TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program, Hugh Hale recently led the creation of a new, highly automated eligibility system. “We’ve made it much easier to apply for benefits,” Hale says. “About 40% of the applications that come in never have to be touched by a human hand.” Serving the state’s “most vulnerable population,” Hale says he strives not only to improve TennCare’s technology, but hire people with “service-oriented hearts.” “When you get the right people in place, you can point that service mentality and service heart toward really innovative ideas to help others,” he says.

State IT Leadership of the Year

Between 2020 and early 2022, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration rolled out a new service platform it calls Customer Connect, replacing a mainframe environment with a digital system that gives residents one-stop digital access to a range of transactions, including online renewals of driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations, locating auto dealers and uploading medical records for commercial drivers. As the MVA’s administrator, Chrissy Nizer led the new platform’s implementation.

State IT Leadership of the Year

When Wyoming CIO Gordon Knopp resigned in May 2021 amid a major breach of health data, Gov. Mark Gordon asked deputy CIO Timothy Sheehan to restore the reputation of the state’s Department of Enterprise Technology Services. “My core focus was looking at the agency anew,” Sheehan says. “I took a holistic view, did an assessment to understand the state of the agency and realign priorities.” He found ETS was sometimes out of sync with the rest of government. “We weren’t communicating effectively,” he says. “We revamped how we engage our agencies.” There’s also, in light of the breach, a new emphasis on cybersecurity: “It starts with identity management,” Sheehan says.

State IT Leadership of the Year

As the No. 2 data official in Virginia, Marcus Thornton is helping mature the commonwealth’s use of data from within a young agency: Though the Virginia Office of Data Governance and Analytics only codified last summer, Thornton says his team began with momentum from a strong interest from other agencies. “We’re extremely encouraged, especially now,” he says. “We have a new administration here and a lot of the focus has been on cybersecurity and specifically on data. And so we have a lot of agency heads and secretaries with data backgrounds, technology backgrounds.”

State Leadership of the Year

Dale Walters has worked for the State of Illinois for more than six years, first as a telecommunications manager and now as chief of network operations. Walters says one of the lessons that came to the forefront in the last year is balancing implementing technology with supporting the IT team. One of the biggest takeaways from managing a slew of projects during the pandemic is that communication with teams needs to be a “two-way street.” “They also need to recognize during the busy times and during these rough moments that if they have a challenge, I’m here to support them,” he says.

Industry Leadership of the Year

Gary DePreta, Cisco’s area vice president for the U.S. SLED market, has spent more than 20 years working alongside public-sector agencies, but now more than ever he sees the value of the “stewardship role” that those agencies play in residents’ lives. “When the pandemic hit, if you think about the IT resources throughout the country and in particular state, local and education, they really were unsung heroes because we pushed everyone out the door overnight and the world had to keep running,” he says. Now those same agencies are in the “reimagine” phase, DePreta says, driving a new era in citizen experience. 

Industry Leadership of the Year

Emerging technology, like automation, is about upskilling current employees — not replacing them, says Don Horan, the global industry practice director for state, local and regional at UiPath. “When you go out there and say you’re going to automate or do machine learning, people get scared,” says Horan, a former deputy CIO for New York State. “We’re really upskilling and giving people a new tool to become problem solvers. If we stick with that trend, we’ll be very successful.” Horan says he expects the single-point-of-entry to digital services to be the biggest lasting impact from the pandemic. 

Industry Leadership of the Year

Few companies have been as influential over the past two years as Zoom. Matt Mandrgoc started in his role as head of public sector in late March 2020, just as stay-at-home orders were being issued across the country. “We were able to help maneuver this interesting dynamic that all of our customers, and our company, was going through,” he says. In addition to providing a platform that let agencies collaborate virtually, the company also helped keep court processes and legislative engagement moving, he says. “During the pandemic, Zoom became ingrained in a lot of people’s personal lives, and that same ease of use was taken into a professional environment,” he says.

Industry Leadership of the Year

It wasn’t just state and local IT operations that shifted dramatically over the course of the pandemic — it was industry, too. Splunk invested heavily in cloud to “match what our customers were asking for,” says Mary Lou Prevost, Splunk’s group vice president for state, local and education. The company has also expanded its public-sector offerings to include search tools for unstructured data that can affect outcomes in areas including criminal justice, public safety, education and health care. Prevost says the company will continue to use its tools to enable state and local leaders to make better decisions.

Industry Leadership of the Year

The top priorities for state CIOs, as defined by NASCIO, show not only what CIOs are focusing on now, but what government will focus on going forward, says Dean Scontras, Okta’s VP of SLED. “The silver lining coming out of COVID is that it really did help catalyze the reinvention of government,” he says. Okta, as an identity and access management provider, plays a crucial role in that reinvention, he says. “You can’t reinvent government until you have trust in a digital world,” he says. “We’ve helped states roll out benefits digitally, and the identity has to be ensured as a result of that.” 

Industry Leadership of the Year

The cyber threats facing state governments continue to increase in velocity and sophistication, says Tina Thorstenson, VP of public sector at CrowdStrike. “My role in this is to be an evangelist and make sure everyone understands that there are modern solutions available [to combat these threats].” Thorstenson says there’s an increased need for extended detection and response — and more reliance on tech companies to “get it right.” About two-thirds of all states use CrowdStrike tools, which Thorstenson says gives the company a chance to help agencies “partner more fully.”

State IT Innovation of the Year

Illinois implemented an AI-based help desk system to quickly assist residents looking for answers about state services. The state chose Google Contact Center AI to power the system, which numerous agencies use. The system layers chatbots with voice AI software to give customers options for receiving service, while maintaining their place in a phone queue. “We saw over 17 million conversations [in one year], we saw over 300 interactions per minute,” says Dale Walters, the state’s chief of network operations. “And with Google AI, statistically, it showed that we were seeing about a 90% success rate for those interactions.”

State IT Innovation of the Year

California made digital vaccine cards available to its residents last June, launching an online tool that uses QR codes to link residents to their vaccination statuses. Chief Technology Officer Rick Klau says the portal was born “out of necessity” as jurisdictions required people to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 to enter bars and restaurants. There have been few tweaks to the system since, Klau says, but setting the portal up highlighted where data was not making its way from pharmacies to the state’s systems. The portal incentivized health providers to ensure that information was correctly shared. “The quality of the data in the immunization registry itself improved dramatically, so much so that today we estimate over 90% of all requests of the digital vaccine record system are successful,” Klau said.

State IT Innovation of the Year

Indiana is having success with its State Earn and Learn, or SEAL, temp-to-hire program, which offers opportunities in IT to residents who have different work experiences, like working in Amazon warehouses or prep kitchens. Of the 17 people in the program so far, two have “graduated” and started working at the Indiana Office of Technology, with 12 more still enrolled. Participants are working in areas including cybersecurity, cloud operations and operations. “We are in a time when the government is seen as being behind, but we’re actually cutting-edge on this. We’re doing something that others really would like to have to follow in our footsteps on,” says Jon Rogers, IOT’s director of workforce planning.

State IT Innovation of the Year

If the pandemic taught state governments anything, it’s that it’s more vital than ever to make public services available over mobile devices. And though the Texas by Texas app, or TxT, that the Texas Department of Information Resources launched in January had been in the works since before COVID-19, it arrived as demand for digital government continued to surge. At its launch, TxT offered renewals of driver’s licenses, vehicle registration and a growing list of professional credentials. In just a few months, 1.6 million Texans have already created accounts, state CIO Amanda Crawford says.