Jeffrey Baldo, senior manager for strategy business development at Salesforce; former agency information officer and chief information officer for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
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The state government workforce in 2023 will continue to undergo a major shift toward remote work. The western part of the U.S. seems to be shifting more in this direction than in the east, due to states with long commutes to rural areas. Currently these are a few statistics of states showing the difference between working remotely and reporting to an office (these figures do not include staff who have to report based on job function):
- Colorado is showing 40 percent remote and 60 percent in the office.
- Nevada is showing about the same as Colorado. However, with new leadership coming in, workers have been heading 100 percent back to the office. This could potentially create a labor issue, as many new and current state employees negotiated remote positions.
- California is still the leader in remote workers, showing around 75-85 percent.
State government has had to reinvent itself, and telecommuting is here to stay. There will be a bigger spotlight on employee activity and keeping track of metrics, forcing IT departments to deploy more tools.
Lastly, states will continue to struggle to find people to work, so self-service will continue to grow and allow citizens to do more transactions online versus going to a field office.
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Steven Garcia, sales executive for the state of California, SailPoint
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In 2023, chief information officers are searching for ways to elevate their security posture yet maintain operational efficiency. Organizations are in the process of implementing solutions purchased from 2022 and assessing their effectiveness. Since employees will work remotely for the foreseeable future, IT continues to support this outcome caused by the pandemic.
The security breaches last year were derivative of bad user behavior, and so leadership this year will look for ways to foster meaningful change by better understanding the behavior of its users, and what they require to function more effectively and securely. This focus will evolve how departments establish resources, refine their policies and job requirements, and renew expectations justified by realistic metrics from quality data.
Governance will be a more focused topic in 2023 to understand how certain frameworks can help unite everyone under a common goal to operate more effectively and securely. As departments and agencies evolve their identity governance and security programs, IT data begins to help the business understand itself more effectively, making departments more intuitive on how they function and deliver constituent services.
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Chad Hodges, president, HSB Solutions
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The coming year is going to be an interesting one for the technology space, especially the gov tech space. We talk all the time about the challenges that the government technology space faces and we make cute and polite euphemisms about those challenges being opportunities, but the reality is those challenges are rapidly becoming near-impossible roadblocks that need a creative and innovative new approach to getting things done for the citizens of our great state.
We, as the public- and private-sector government technology community, serve those citizens every day, whether we know it or not. Technology is not the issue we face day to day; it’s our people, our processes, our willingness to push the boundaries of that safe space of “that is how it’s always been done.”
We have a workforce that will drastically change this year and next with both a rapid loss of decades of knowledge, in the form of retirements, and a looming recession and job losses in the private sector, creating new influxes of candidates to the public-sector workforce. We will have a skills gap that won’t be technology-related, but in fact process- and procedure-deficient. People are our lifeblood; they are what make our companies tick and our government run smoothly, and they are the future of what can be in this state.
I, for one, want to see the amazing growth happen. Of course, technology will help leapfrog any gaps, but our people will be the ones that make all that technology run correctly and be used in the right manner.
