How digital service experience is shaping CIO approaches to state operations

Two state tech leaders recently reflected on their shared history of transitioning from digital service leaders to chief information officers, a change that they found depended more on building trust and optimism in agencies than technical expertise, they said during a webinar this week. 

“What I learned in my digital service role was that nothing we did executed well or at full scale until we had the appropriate relationships built across the IT organization,” said Bry Pardoe, CIO for Pennsylvania, during the webinar hosted by Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation. 

Upon switching to the CIO role last October, “it just became very obvious to me that being an expert in everything [IT] wasn’t what was needed … it was how can we connect and convene people around a shared mission and do that in service of citizens,” Pardoe said. 

The first 90 days in her new role, for instance, entailed speaking with staff members across state agencies to better understand their challenges and goals for serving constituents. Connecting with other state organizations helped build trust and inform strategic plans moving forward, Pardoe said. 

Recent findings from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ annual survey revealed similar sentiments. For 86% of CIOs, customer relationship management was a priority for them this year, and another 80% said they were focused on communication and transparency when building business relationships to support their service delivery modernization efforts. 

In her first year as Pennsylvania CIO, Pardoe has helped the state transition from legacy systems to cloud platforms, implement zero-trust safeguards and develop a shared digital infrastructure across agencies to enhance service delivery and efficiency, state officials said in a June statement. Pardoe recently reached the one-year anniversary in the position. Previously, she served as the executive director of the Commonwealth Office of Digital Experience, known as CODE PA, beginning in 2023. 

“I think this idea in digital service teams … is to be the counterculture, to be the outsiders who are like, ‘Let me show you how you can do it,’” said Sarah Tuneberg, CIO for Colorado, adding that building optimism within other state stakeholders through “little wins” is “essential.” 

Tuneberg entered the role of Colorado’s CIO in June, following her time as director of Colorado Digital Service in 2024 and her service as deputy executive director for digital and delivery at the state Office of Information Technology. 

In the CIO role, however, “suddenly you’re trying to bring that optimism and those small experiments … into the mainstream,” she said. One way to do that is by focusing on specific users and implementing improvements and changes in small chunks, Tuneberg explained. 

As an example, she pointed to Colorado’s recent efforts to realign its IT operating model to one “that pairs technology teams with state agencies to work directly on the services Coloradans care about most,” which state officials announced in May. According to the state’s strategic reset document, such work involves building solutions iteratively, maintaining shared infrastructure and establishing governance, security and data standards. 

But at the time, a lack of “experimentation or evidence” of such solutions’ outcomes could diminish agencies’ willingness to adopt changes, Tuneberg said. 

“I saw from a digital service lens that we had a real model [and] evidence for how we could deliver differently, [and] how we can be cost efficient and deliver working software,” Tuneberg said, adding that “it has been really interesting in Colorado to try to scale those lessons. One of the things that’s really hard is you can’t tell people that, you have to let them experience it.” 

Colorado has also recently prioritized sharing user research across state organizations to better connect state employees to the impact their work has on end users, Tuneberg said. For example, the network team has been sent to visit veteran care homes in the state to directly observe how residents are using digital services to connect with their family members. 

Such efforts help people “shed some of their pessimism and get enthusiastic and motivated again about how we do this work together,” she explained. 

Indeed, as a CIO with a digital service background, it is “deeply satisfying to be the one that recognizes the people that do that work because they’ve gone for so long unrecognized,” Pardoe said.

While delivery “is where my heart is,” Pardoe said, scaling digital service values across the state’s IT organization has “been amazing to me to see how much progress we've made … and so we just continue to try and reinforce that all the time.”