STATETECH: The change in NASCIO’s mission statement emphasizes that state CIOs rely on tech partnerships more than they did in the past. Why has the role of state CIO changed?
ROBINSON: I think it’s the nature of constant technological evolution. I spent a dozen years in state government and IT, and we had an owner-operator model. The state owned the equipment, the data center and the full technology stack, and it wrote a lot of the software. It was essentially a self-contained ecosystem. You had partners, but they weren’t actually involved in operating or servicing at that level.
Clearly, we’ve evolved with cloud, Software as a Service and third-party off-premises solutions — the evolution of the whole environment of business modernization. Now, you have scaled cloud solutions and business software that states can consume. This requires really tight partnerships to work. This has also come about because states are always dealing with budgetary and resource constraints that make it exceedingly difficult to get capital for large projects and technical expertise.
LEARN MORE: Modernization with a human-centered design.
STATETECH: What does the role of state CIO look like now?
ROBINSON: The “CIO as a broker” model is the future, where the CIO is the inductor of a variety of sourcing options rather than the source of all the options. If you look at our data, including our 2023 State CIO Survey where we asked CIOs what they see as their role in terms of serving their customer agencies, there are dramatic changes.
The role of state CIO has always been focused on what I’ll call the operational delivery side, the infrastructure side. But now we see 96 percent of CIOs saying that their role is to provide strategic direction and policymaking. Infrastructure provisioning was only the third most-voted service that CIOs will provide. That’s a big shift in the role.
It’s important to understand that CIOs are business leaders of IT. Technology is now part of the fabric of government; it’s no longer a back-office function. It’s a strategic enabler to transformation. You’re seeing many CIOs embrace that their role is no longer just to be the mainframe person or the computer person. They should be at the table with the other major leaders to talk, whether it’s about budget, human capital management, personnel issues or technology. Infrastructure and delivery are still part of the role, but now so are leadership, strategic direction and policymaking.