NASCIO 2024: North Carolina CIO Jim Weaver Eyes Broadband and Cybersecurity Challenges

STATETECH: Can you tell me a bit about your current priorities for IT in the state of North Carolina?

WEAVER: One of our department’s top priorities has been not only connecting all North Carolinians to reliable, affordable high-speed internet but also ensuring they have the devices and skills they need to safely use it. It's been a phenomenal team effort to get us to where we are with regard to broadband. Roughly 80% of the state's unserved and underserved citizens will be covered by initiatives that are currently in flight.

We're talking about access to high-speed internet, which we define as 100 megabits per second download and 20Mbps upload. I dislike the term "digital divide."  I think of  it as a digital continuum. The word “divide” leads you to believe that you're going to fix something. But this is going to be an ongoing process for us as speeds and feeds and technology continue to evolve. We’ll continue to look at this in terms of faster speeds and other factors to address the equity issues of every North Carolinian across the board.

I would also like to highlight our Next Generation 911 efforts. We have Next Generation 911 completely deployed across 124 public safety answering points here in the state. It's a very robust program. In my role as the state CIO, I chair the N.C. 911 board, and we have a phenomenal team there that's doing some really great work across our counties to address workforce issues and cybersecurity challenges.

Cybersecurity is another of our priorities, and we have a whole-of-state approach here in North Carolina. Governor Roy Cooper takes cybersecurity very seriously. Directly from the governor, my No. 1 priority was broadband and No. 2 was cybersecurity.

We've done a lot of fantastic things in this area. Bad actors only have to be right once, but we have to be right all of the time. We have a significant number of projects underway to strengthen our cyberdefenses.

Geographic information systems are another big area of focus for us. In a recent third-party GIS survey conducted nationally, North Carolina was the only state to receive an A grade.

Since I came here in 2021 our agency has done a lot of work to tackle the fundamental funding issues of IT in the state. We've been able to get some significant things accomplished, but we've got a lot of work yet to do with how we fund projects and  IT holistically across the entire state in a different manner.

STATETECH: North Carolina has a reputation for strong data analytics. Can you tell me about your work there?

WEAVER: Our government data analytics center is doing excellent work. Christie Burris, our chief data officer, leads a remarkable team. Our health information exchange is part of NCDIT’s data division. Our GIS team reports to our chief data officer as well. We place a great deal of importance on data quality and governance. As we look forward to adopting artificial intelligence, data is critically important.

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STATETECH: Getting more people online enables them to interact with helpful government services. Can you give us insights into how you're augmenting citizen services in North Carolina?

WEAVER: What you saw during COVID was a rush to get more services online because we had to do it. Remote online capabilities were essential for people to transact business with state government and apply for critical benefits. A lot of state agencies ran forward with a perspective of, ‘I'm online and here's how you consume our services.’

Now, we're looking at it from the North Carolinian perspective. How does the North Carolinian engage with a multitude of state agencies? We must start thinking a little bit differently about how we engage with that consumer base. At the end of the day, they're engaging with us, and we have to make sure we have that perspective. Of course, they must be online to engage with us, and that's another reason broadband is so important.

When I took this job in March 2021, we believed there were about 266,000 households in North Carolina that lacked access to the internet. We believed there were about 1.3 million households in the state that had difficulty paying for internet access. I recall that we had 430,000 households that didn't have a laptop or desktop in their home. Of that 430,000, about 180,000 didn't have a smartphone. And then there were about 1.2 million North Carolinians that did not have adequate digital literacy skills.

Today, we have over 901,000 households that have benefited from the Affordable Connectivity program. We are very confident that we hit our 80% goal for broadband subscriptions. We built our initiatives with American Rescue Plan Act funds. We addressed infrastructure, affordability and digital literacy. What's going to make these efforts successful is that we're targeting the grassroots level. We're in the communities, we're in the anchor institutions, and we have engaged community leaders on these problems. We also have turned to our GIS programs and overlay data sets, which allow us to drill into a community and take a look at opportunities for investment to build infrastructure.

STATETECH: At the last few NASCIO conferences, there has been no bigger buzzword than artificial intelligence. Where is North Carolina with respect to adopting AI?

WEAVER: I grimace a little bit when I hear the term AI because candidly we've been doing artificial intelligence for some time. AI has been around for 30 or 40 years. We have reaped the benefits from it. Now, in North Carolina, we are examining generative AI and the nuances involved. We've been encouraging a risk-based approach. We're more concerned about publicly available generative AI than the GenAI we can bring into our four walls. And so, we're really taking a hard look  at our data. Do we have good data discovery in place? Do we have good data governance? Do we have the data classification that we need? We must ensure that we are taking a risk-based approach to this.

Our initial focus with generative AI is on back-office processes. We are learning the tools and the technology and how to do it in a manner that benefits us. We are improving our overall procurement process and accounts payable and accounts receivable. We are saving workforce hours in those areas and deploying people to more pressing needs. As we get more comfortable, we will move closer to using GenAI for citizen services.

STATETECH: Speaking of NASCIO, what are you looking forward to at this year's conference?

WEAVER: The NASCIO Top 10 list is developed by the state CIOs. My colleagues and I weigh in on the list. I joke that broadband shows up at No. 7 because I voted seven times. Our governor has made it very clear that it's our No. 1 priority.

NASCIO is a phenomenal organization. Over the summer, we had a meeting in Milwaukee — our CIO Leadership Forum. We established an emerging leader program, and every state CIO was asked to select an individual to participate in the program. The feedback in response to that has been truly rewarding. Participants in the program gain a better understanding of the challenges we face as CIOs. But one thing that really stood out for me was that people do not realize how much of a family we are.

DISCOVER: State CIOs can maximize effective citizen services by considering inclusiveness.

It doesn't matter what state you're in. You're dealing with the Top 10 issues identified on our NASCIO priorities list. Each of us might prioritize them in a different order, but we are all working on them. And so, at NASCIO, we sit down to talk to our colleagues about what they've been able to do to improve digital services and the overall digital government experience. And we talk about cybersecurity issues and other important topics.

From Alaska to Florida, from Maine to California and our territories, this is an association focused on the needs of the membership. This year, we will continue the conversation on artificial intelligence, talking about the technology, talking about data, talking about security, talking about risk. You'll also see the new report from NASCIO in collaboration with EY on data, data quality and data management, as well as our report from Deloitte on cybersecurity, which we publish biennially. And we are going to have more conversations about workforce concerns and how we develop our talent pipeline.

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