Cloud

NASCIO 2024: Enterprise Architecture Key to Addressing Priorities

State CIOs discussed advancements in artificial intelligence, digital services and identity management.

Mickey McCarter is the senior editor of StateTech Magazine.

In closing the programming for the annual conference of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers recently, state CIOs emphasized the importance of enterprise architecture in achieving their goals in burgeoning IT focus areas.

Speaking to challenges outlined in “The 2024 State CIO Survey: Building Blocks of the Next Generation CIO,” state CIOs linked generative artificial intelligence, digital services, and identity and access management to a strong enterprise architecture program during a NASCIO 2024 conference panel in New Orleans on Oct. 2.

“Enterprise architecture and its various component architectures must be leveraged to reduce complexity and variety,” notes survey report, which adds that CIOs are reducing complexity in part through adoption of more cloud initiatives and implementations to take advantage of Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service solutions.

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State Workforces Widely Adopt Specific AI Use Cases

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on GenAI in 2023. The development of that executive order required California to lean heavily on AI stakeholders and partners through an advisory committee, California CIO Liana Bailey-Crimmins told conferencegoers. California "turned to the vendor committee to see if we hit the nail on the head or not" in drafting the executive order.

The 2024 State CIO Survey asked chief IT officers if their organizations used GenAI tools “in their daily work.” Among respondents, 53% said yes, and 29% said no; 6% weren’t sure.

When asked what types of AI tools their agencies use, state CIOs said:

65% Free online tools
59% Commercial-off-the-shelf
35% Custom developed by third party
16% Developed in house
8% No GenAI tools
6% Don’t know

Washington CIO Bill Kehoe said he wasn’t interested in “AI for AI’s sake.”

Rather, “how can it help us with our resident engagement? How can it help us in cybersecurity? How can it help us in data analytics?” he asked.

In a previous NASCIO panel, state CIOS overwhelmingly said GenAI was being used for virtual meeting assistant transcriptions, cybersecurity operations, document generation and management, and software code generation. Connecticut CIO Mark Raymond said his state was actively using GenAI for the first three use cases and “dabbling” in software code generation, which Kehoe called a future “game changer.”

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States Eye Improved Customer Experience for Digital Services

The 2024 State CIO Survey documents a rapid acceleration in the adoption of digital services. “In the 2022 State CIO Survey, states and state CIO organizations reported moving fast to embrace digital transformation and technology modernization,” the report states.

State CIOs identified the major challenges confronting the growth of digital services in 2024. Their top three responses were:

Lack of adequate funding and budget
Data and information quality requirements
Workforce skills and capability constraints

California recently began streamlining its CA.gov website to serve as a one-stop portal for citizen services. Public sector organizations will always face budget constraints, Bailey-Crimmins told NASCIO 2024. “We want to make sure that we are focusing those resources on the right thing that matters to our administration and matters to the public.”

Kehoe said collaboration has been challenging when it comes to funding statewide government IT budgets. “Traditionally, government has been one budget, one agency. Now, we are looking at enterprise solutions,” he said. Building IT services across agencies can prove challenging.

Washington state is funded for a one-stop resident portal, but it is finding challenges with buy-in across agencies. “We need to revamp our budgeting system to do this right,” Kehoe said.

Bailey-Crimmins envisioned government adopting an improved citizen experience, where residents would perhaps receive service recommendations based on their history, similar to how Netflix recommends content based on viewing patterns.

CIOs Identify Enterprise Architecture as Critical to IAM Success

The 2024 State CIO Survey casts identity and access management solutions as key to providing digital services, and it reports good news for IAM in state government: “The demand for citizen-facing IAM can be attributed to the increased demand for digital government services. While there’s still work to do, much progress has been made on IAM.”

“Our IAM initiative is not a stand-alone project. It is definitely an enterprise service,” Kehoe said. “This is key to our residents portal, and we are tying these things together.”

In moderating the CIO survey panel, NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson emphasized the importance of a formal enterprise architecture program. The state CIO survey found that only 4% of states lack an enterprise architecture program, which it called “encouraging news.” Otherwise, 35% said their program had a low level of maturity, while another 30% said they were “somewhat mature.” Only 13% rated their enterprise architecture programs as “highly mature.”

“Enterprise architecture is not tied to any one project but provides for the orchestration of the entire project and IT investment portfolios,” the survey states. “EA will be more important going forward as states are addressing such critical challenges as identity and access management, digital government and services, cloud services and emerging technologies.”

Keep this page bookmarked for our coverage of the NASCIO 2024 Annual conference. Follow us on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @StateTech and the official conference Twitter account, @NASCIO. Join the conversation using the hashtag #NASCIO24.

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