State

Texas names Amanda Crawford as CIO

Crawford, who joined the Texas Department of Information Resources as its executive director in February 2019, succeeds Todd Kimbriel, who retired in May.

By Benjamin Freed

November 11, 2020

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The Texas Department of Information Resources announced Tuesday that Amanda Crawford will take over as the statewide chief information officer.

Crawford, who’s worked for the Texas state government for two decades, joined DIR in February 2019 as the agency’s executive director. At the time, the roles of executive director and CIO were split, with Todd Kimbriel serving as the latter since 2015.

“It is an honor to lead a front-line agency whose technology services and technical support assure Texas government can function at its best,” Crawford said in a press release.

Kimbriel retired last May after 12 years with DIR.

Texas CIO Amanda Crawford (LinkedIn)

Along with Crawford’s promotion, DIR’s governing board also named Chief Technology Officer John Hoffman, who’d been serving as interim CIO since Kimbriel’s retirement, as deputy CIO, in addition to his current title.

Before joining DIR last year, Crawford spent nearly two decades with the office of the Texas attorney general, including nearly three years as the deputy attorney general for administration in a judicial department with more than 4,000 employees and a $1 billion annual budget.

During the COVID-19 pandemic — which has infected more than 1 million Texans and killed 19,300 — DIR has, like many other statewide IT agencies, scrambled to launch new digital services and accommodate the growth in remote work. But the crisis has boosted other agencies’ confidence in DIR’s capabilities, Hoffman told StateScoop in June.

“Going forward, I think that we have gained a sense of maturity through this process that I think we will all remember and we will have muscle memory around for a long time,” Hoffman said on an episode of the Priorities podcast.

Crawford, who led DIR through the August 2019 ransomware attack that affected nearly two dozen cities and counties around Texas, has also overseen several new programs this year to improve the state’s cyber defenses, including a new bulk-purchasing agreement with FireEye, in which public-sector entities across Texas will be able to purchase the company’s security and threat-intelligence products at deep discounts.