Innovate or die: The case for a public sector chief innovation officer
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COMMENTARY | Chief information officers are asked to keep mission-critical systems running and also innovate. That means innovation becomes a risky side project, not a priority.
All of us have had to engage with government systems and websites, grudgingly. As someone who spent 15 years in the California State Legislature, my job was to improve that experience.
I also had the privilege of working with a chief information officer who led the institution through the computing era, the internet and most recently artificial intelligence. Public sector technology leaders are expected to roll out tools perfectly or face media scrutiny and angry constituents.
As the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in the spring of 2020 and unemployment hit 14.7%, millions turned to government systems and websites for a lifeline. Systems crashed, constituents went hungry and many struggled to keep a roof over their heads.
Public sector technology leaders who had mastered reliability, security and staying out of the newspaper were suddenly in uncharted territory. I watched California’s unemployment system fail people who needed it most, while fraudsters drained billions from it.
California was not alone. New Jersey struggled to find developers to update its legacy system because Common Business-Oriented Language, the language it runs on, is obsolete.
Some may argue that no one could have prepared for the volume the pandemic created, and that even the best-prepared agencies would have struggled. But these problems precede the pandemic.
Florida's $77 million unemployment website had issues with fraud, bad automation, and lackluster password recovery. Lawmakers identified the problem. In 2014, they created the Agency for State Technology and funded it with roughly $4.8 million in its first year — 16 times less than the flawed website. Florida diagnosed the issue appropriately but underfunded the fix.
We continue asking chief information officers to do two jobs that compete with one another: keep mission-critical systems running while leading transformational change. Maintaining secure, reliable operations will and should take priority. The result is that innovation becomes a risky side project with little incentive and serious consequences for failure.
Take a rocket launch at NASA. Failure means congressional hearings, media scrutiny, and angry taxpayers. SpaceX, meanwhile, leverages the hard work of NASA engineers and fails repeatedly, getting closer with each attempt.
Computing gave government the chief information officer. Citicorp created the first chief information security officer role in the 1990s after a string of cyberattacks. And most recently, the surge in available data and constantly changing regulations around it made way for the chief data officer. The rise of emerging technologies demands a chief innovation officer.
The new role should identify the problem, build the intervention, and evaluate the results. It needs fluency in technology policy and in the workflows of the institution it serves. Information officers haven't failed to innovate; there are countless examples of successful public sector systems. The problem is they are shackled by political ecosystems that punish risk and an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.
New Jersey has learned this lesson. It created a cabinet-level chief innovation officer in 2018 and in Jan. 2026, the state became the first in the nation to codify a cabinet-level innovation team into law. The office survived a change in administration with Chief Innovation Officer Dave Cole staying on.
If governments want to reap the benefits of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence to improve public services, they need dedicated innovation leaders with the autonomy to identify problems, test them, then partner with chief information officers to roll out what works.
The next crisis is inevitable, whether it be a cyberattack or a leap in artificial intelligence no one saw coming. The governments that build the tools and roles that meet the moment will not be scrambling to respond. The ones that don't are gambling with people's lives.