State CIOs are more change leaders than techies, report says

PHILADELPHIA — State chief information officers are now change leaders in their organizations, rather than technologists, according to a report released late last month.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers said that CIOs now have a dual leadership role of maintaining reliable operations while at the same time driving transformation and modernization. NASCIO said that marks a “fundamental shift” away from being focused on the day-to-day management of technology infrastructure to being a change leader focused on strategy and those dual missions.

“The characteristics we see here build upon but go beyond operating disciplines,” the report says. “There are inherent characteristics in the state CIO role that make it dynamic, engaging and interactive. These interactions are essential to gaining collaboration and support from the state government ecosystem, comprised of agency organizations and their individual cultures.”

It marks a dramatic change from 2017, when NASCIO found that a state CIO must act as a broker of various disparate technology services and marry those with agency needs. That change comes as state CIOs have a heap of issues to worry about, including the growth of artificial intelligence for good and bad uses, limited budgets, an aging workforce and a desire to modernize legacy systems without compromising vital services.

Leading change amid all those competing factors, then, has become critical.

“The strong attributes are being able to effectively communicate the value proposition, being able to lead strategy, being able to have relationships with this ecosystem, beyond just the agencies, it's with their vendors and their corporate partners and with strategic alliances and federal partners,” Doug Robinson, NASCIO’s executive director, said during the organization’s Mid-Year Conference last week in Philadelphia. “It's much broader than simply relationship management with their customer agencies…. [It’s a] strong necessity today, because of this world of disruption and constant churn.”

Robinson said, however, that being a change leader remains an “aspirational journey” reliant primarily on building relationships with agencies and other leaders within a state government. Many have been successful and now have the CIO as a cabinet-level position in their state, while resident expectations mean technology is now at the forefront of decision making.

“Why did the role of state CIO move from the transactional or operational service delivery piece to this more of a strategic advisor?” said Nevada CIO Timothy Galluzi during a panel discussion. “It's really because government has changed, and that's driven by our constituents, our citizens, their expectations of government. They see what kind of services they can get from online marketplaces, and they see how technology is driving that customer relationship management, and they expect it of government.”

Having that extra gravitas as a state CIO was especially critical for Galluzi and his office in the immediate aftermath of a debilitating cyberattack last year that was eventually blamed on a state worker inadvertently downloading malware onto a state machine. Beforehand, Galluzi said the CIO’s office had worked to build relationships and trust with other agencies and had clear lines of communications as they worked to mitigate the damage and protect critical services.

The CIO has been in the governor’s office since 2023, which Galluzi said “opened up a lot of doors” and gave him direct access to agency leaders to hear their pain points and frustrations. Then, when the worst happened, the foundations for a successful response were in place.

“It would have been a completely different scenario if they didn't know me from Adam, and I came in and said, ‘All right, you guys need to do this, this, this and this,” and I would get a lot more questions back,” Galluzi said. “I would get a lot more mistrust on what we were doing. They wouldn't have confidence in our level of competency that we were leading through this.”

It means that CIOs must spend a lot less time looking at servers, wiring and other equipment, and instead must focus on using their influence to get people on board with their mission. That can be tricky, given the fear among some employees that AI is coming for their jobs, but it’s then on the CIO to allay those fears.

“There's a lot of fear,” North Dakota CIO Corey Mock said during a separate panel discussion at the NASCIO conference. “We see it in our organization. Fear will lead to that friction. You'll have people seizing. They'll resist. You're going to find yourself fighting against that negative momentum, that resistance, and that's only going to make things more complicated, more difficult, and for that person, it's probably not going to end much better.”

“If influence is helping people to not be scared, then I don't know how anything's more important right now in the AI space, because you have to build that trusted relationship,” Connecticut CIO Mark Raymond said.