Written by Benjamin Freed
For the tenth year in a row, cybersecurity and risk management rank top priorities for state chief information officers, according to the National Association of State CIOs’ annual list released Monday.
Digital government services remained at the familiar second spot for the fourth year in a row, but the rest of NASCIO’s list saw its members re-prioritize for 2023 as concerns about the state’s IT future take hold. indicates that Employee issues ranked him third, with the state’s CIO focused not only on hiring new employees, but on redefining how the government’s tech jobs are designed.
For the past several years, the IT workforce has been ranked number 7, a rise consistent with recent surveys of both NASCIO’s CIO members and state chief information security officers. Both groups say it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit and retain workers for a variety of reasons. Reasons include a continued desire to work remotely, a legacy of quirky job titles and descriptions, and challenges in making the public sector attractive to young millennials and members of Gen Z. Entry into the labor market.
Traditional modernization and identity and access management climbed to 4th and 5th place respectively, while cloud services slipped to 6th place. But broadband slipped from his 3rd place to 9th. That’s despite a huge federal infusion of money for high-speed Internet access starting to flow into the states. Ranked eighth last year, Enterprise Architecture has dropped off the latest list in favor of customer relationship management.
State CIOs ranked identity and access management tools, including multi-factor authentication, number one on their list of high-priority technology tools and practices. The lack of MFA implementation continues to be a problem across the public sector. Especially in a ransomware-plagued school system where 81% of school districts have not fully adopted procedures, according to one recent report.
Several other technical tools were repeated as well, such as robotic process automation and low- or no-code software development.
NASCIO’s 2023 Strategy, Policy Issues, and Management Process:
- Cybersecurity and risk management
- Digital government and digital services
- Labor force
- Legacy modernization
- Identity and access management
- cloud service
- Integration and optimization
- Data and information management
- Broadband and wireless connectivity
- Customer relationship management
NASCIO Technologies, Applications and Tools for 2023:
- Identity and access management
- Modernization of legacy applications
- cloud solution
- Software, Infrastructure, Platform as a Service
- security enhancement tools
- Artificial intelligence and robotic process automation
- data analysis
- Low-code and no-code software development
- Enterprise resource planning
- business process integration tools
