Management

Creating Capacity: A Better Way To Think About Government Modernization

State CIOs should fund data as mission-critical infrastructure, reduce complexity and free staff for higher-value work.

Jim Weaver is the national strategy adviser for Everpure. He formerly served as CIO of North Carolina.

During my time as CIO for the state of North Carolina, I sat through many budget discussions. Some took place during routine annual planning, while others followed a cybersecurity event, a new legislative priority or an urgent technology need that couldn’t wait. No matter what brought us to the table, one question came up almost every time: What gets funded as “core” and what gets funded as “extra”?

Too often, I watched data lose that fight. It got filed under modernization, or worse, under operations and maintenance — the catchall for keeping the lights on. That’s the wrong bucket. Data isn’t a byproduct of the systems we buy; it’s the asset those systems exist to produce. When we fund it like overhead, we get exactly the outcome overhead gets: whatever’s left after everything else is paid for.

Today’s CIOs are making that call under even greater pressure. One in two states expect general fund spending to remain flat or decline in fiscal 2026, even as demands for artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and digital services keep growing. Workforce constraints are compounding that pressure. The approaching midterm elections add more uncertainty, as priorities and funding decisions could shift.

In that environment, anything labeled “modernization” is vulnerable, and anything labeled “O&M” is often the first thing cut. If data lives in either bucket, it will keep losing. It’s time to treat data as a mission-critical budget priority.

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Modernization Is a Commitment, not a Purchase

When people think about modernization, they first think about technology: a new platform, upgraded infrastructure or an emerging capability. But every investment shapes the next five, seven or 10 years of operations. It has to be secured, monitored, maintained, upgraded and integrated with everything else. Vendors and contracts must be managed, and staff must learn to use, support and eventually replace it.

One or two new systems rarely feel overwhelming. The burden builds as state and local IT organizations accumulate more vendors, platforms, data silos and integrations across agencies with different missions and needs. Skilled employees spend more time keeping technology running, leaving less time to strengthen cybersecurity, improve resident services and prepare for what comes next.

That complexity quietly consumes government’s most limited resources: time, talent and budget. While those costs don’t appear as a line item in a budget, they’re real. They show up in duplicated effort, maintenance debt and stalled projects because the people needed to lead them are busy keeping old systems and projects alive.

Fund Data Like a Mission, not a Maintenance Task

This is where I’d push CIOs and budget officers to change the conversation. Data governance, quality and integration shouldn’t be negotiated as part of whatever platform happens to generate the data, and it shouldn’t be the thing that gets deferred when a budget tightens. It should be its own line, defended on its own terms, because every mission outcome a state cares about — faster benefits delivery, better fraud detection, a cybersecurity program that can actually see its own environment, an AI initiative that doesn’t hallucinate policy — depends on the state’s data being trustworthy, integrated and governed.

To make that case credibly, leaders need to change how they evaluate technology investments. Instead of asking what a proposed investment would let the agency do, ask what it would let the agency stop doing. Will it eliminate a manual process, reduce the number of systems the team has to manage, or free skilled employees for higher-value work? That question should prompt a review of what’s already in place — whether an existing tool can meet the need, whether overlapping capabilities can be consolidated, and whether a process could improve without adding another system to support.

That discipline matters most as governments expand their use of artificial intelligence. AI has real potential to improve public services, but that value depends on the data foundation underneath it. Layer AI onto fragmented, ungoverned data and agencies get faster mistakes, not better outcomes. Strengthening that foundation isn’t a modernization nice-to-have; it’s the precondition for every AI investment a state is about to make, which is exactly why it belongs in the budget as a mission priority, not as operations and maintenance.

For today’s CIOs, I’d encourage evaluating every major technology investment against the goals of their modernization strategy by asking three questions:

Are we fully using what we already have?
What work or complexity will this help us eliminate?
Does it strengthen the data our mission actually depends on?

Public sector technology leaders will always face difficult budget choices and rising expectations. The ones that succeed will be those who stop treating data as the exhaust of modernization projects and start funding it as the mission asset it is — because that’s what turns a modernization budget into lasting operational capacity.

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