Tech Insiders Offer Views of What’s Ahead in Gov Tech

With the dawn of a new year, and the expected release this week of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023-2024 budget, Industry Insider — California surveyed industry insiders for their predictions for state and local gov tech in the coming year. Herewith is the first round of responses:

Chris Cruz, chief information officer for state and local government and education, Tanium
I believe that you will see a continued commitment by most government organizations to a hybrid work model in 2023 as state information technology deals with continued retirements, attrition and competition from other government agencies and the private sector for skilled workers in the areas of security, policy and operations, applications and project management competency areas.

There will also be a continued demand for C-Level executives at the CIO (chief information officer) and CISO (chief information security officer) level, and offering additional flexibility in these positions will allow for a better candidate pool and long-term sustainability.

State IT will also need to standardize common technology and security platforms to deal with the resource allocation challenges to manage appropriate workloads, reduce budgetary spend and meet the continued expectation of the hybrid workforce and the constituents served.

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Ashok Bhatia, president and chief executive officer, Mentis Solutions
As the world around us becomes exponentially more digital and society’s expectations evolve with technology, government agencies are putting people at the center of everything they do. But in this age of interconnectivity, legacy systems still prevent organizations from connecting as impactfully as possible with the people they serve.
In my opinion, 2023 will see heavy investments in citizen/customer experience improvements with new policy and administration focus, cyber threat resilience and delivering secure experiences; modernizing legacy systems and upgrading infrastructure by moving to cloud and low-code systems for cost effectiveness and serving efficiently; more investments in today’s hybrid workforce for digital professional development to counter newer ways of working, training, engaging, attracting, and retaining talent; and increasing data, AI, and automation initiatives for evidence-based decision-making on programs, informing policy, business processes and service delivery. Collaborating with industry vendors and consolidating procurement efforts is critical to innovate ideas and approaches to meet and deliver solutions to our most pressing demands.

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Scott Paterson, chief executive officer, IT Integration Services LLC
I foresee continued concentration on the top three IT priorities:

• Cybersecurity
• Digital service delivery
• IT workforce

These priorities are not unique to states, but echo throughout the IT industry, and have been an ongoing challenge, which I believe requires a continued collaborative approach. Creating partnerships between public and private entities has never been more important and will continue to expand in order to successfully implement public solutions and services.
Challenge creates opportunity: This is the time to take full advantage of the momentum created over the past few years to continue, and strengthen, the partnerships between the public and private sectors.

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Bhavik Patel, chief executive officer, and Savita Farooqui, president, SymSoft Solutions
We believe that 2023 may be focused on process and application modernization. These are obviously efforts that have already been ongoing for the state, but with hybrid work scenarios and the need for government entities to at least match pre-pandemic efficiency, there may be a greater, renewed push for additional systems and processes to be modernized.

We also believe that there will be larger interest in Web 3.0 technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, to provide better internal organization information sharing and more innovative technology solutions to the citizens of California.