LEXINGTON, Ky., Thursday — The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), the Center for Digital Government (CDG) and IBM today released a report entitled, Preparing for Future Shocks in State Government. The report is intended to help frame what future disruptions may look like for state chief information officers (CIOs) and how they can effectively tackle them.
The report includes highlights of over twenty state CIO interviews on the topic of resilience. The interviews uncovered key themes about the threats state governments face and the tools, processes and resources CIOs need to build more resilient organizations. CIOs are facing issues from future public health crises and cyber threats to climate change, workforce shortages and disruptive new technologies. The research looked at how CIOs approach resilience from multiple perspectives: enterprise resilience, IT resilience, workforce and employee resilience and personal resilience.
Doug Robinson, NASCIO Executive Director, commented, “The past few years have presented a multitude of challenges and increased demands on state CIOs. State CIOs have had to be resilient in the face of uncertainty to lead their organizations.”
“Responsible AI and automation are essential elements of state leaders’ IT modernization strategies as they strengthen resiliency,” said Frank Attaie, General Manager for IBM’s U.S. Public Market. “This roadmap will help state CIOs as they extend their capabilities and agility in responding to future disruptions and we look forward to collaborating with them.”
“CIOs play an important and unique role in state government resilience,” said CDG Senior Vice President Teri Takai. “Our research shows they are working closely with traditional emergency management teams for both cyber incident response and physical disaster recovery. They are at the forefront of confronting public sector talent shortages, and leading statewide discussions around technology modernization to reduce threats to critical government services.”
