With the new year practically upon us, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) is sharing its top 10 IT policy priorities and technologies for 2022.
The State CIO Top 10 for 2022 represents state technology leaders’ top policy and technology priorities for the coming year, as voted on by state CIOs. NASCIO has published this list annually since 2007.
The top 10 IT policy priorities for 2022 are:
- Cybersecurity and Risk Management: which encompasses a focus on governance, budget and resource requirements, security frameworks, data protection, training and awareness, insider threats, and third party risk.
- Digital Government/Digital Services: which includes a focus on framework for digital services, portals, improving and digitizing citizen experience, accessibility, identity management, digital assistants, and privacy.
- Broadband / Wireless Connectivity: which includes a focus on strengthening statewide connectivity, implementing rural broadband expansion, and 5G service deployment.
- Cloud Services: which CIOs view as focusing on cloud strategy, selection of service and deployment models, scalable and elastic services, governance, service management, security, privacy, and procurement.
- Legacy Modernization: which includes enhancing, renovating, and replacing legacy platforms and applications, and business process improvement.
- Identity and Access Management: which encompasses supporting citizen digital services, workforce access, access control, authentication, credentialing, and digital standards.
- Workforce: which leads CIOs to focus on preparing for the future workforce and reimagining the government workforce, transformation of knowledge, skills and experience, more defined roles for IT asset management, business relationship management skills, and service integration.
- Enterprise Architecture: which includes a focus on governance, formulating, refining or implementing an EA strategy, business architecture, business process modeling, statewide EA program management, Federal reference models, and whole-government enterprise architecture.
- Data and Information Management: which includes an emphasis on data governance, data architecture, master data management, open data, sustained access to government data, data portals, enhancing the role of data, information & intelligence, knowledge management, data integration, data management strategy, roles and responsibilities, and dataops.
- Consolidation/Optimization: which encompasses centralizing, consolidating services, operations, resources, infrastructure, data centers, and communications and marketing “enterprise” thinking.
“It is no surprise that digital government, broadband and legacy modernization are ranked as high priorities by state CIOs,” said Doug Robinson, NASCIO executive director. “The past two years have highlighted their importance to governors, state CIO customers and the citizens they serve.”
Given the recent spike in cyberattacks against state and local governments, cybersecurity remains the top priority on the organization’s list for the ninth year running. Additionally, NASCIO noted that enterprise architecture makes the list for the very first time.
In a press release, NASCIO also highlighted that digital government/digital services ranked as number two for the second year in a row. Additionally, broadband moves up one spot to number three. Legacy modernization also moved up two spots to number five, after being ranked number seven last year. NASCIO noted that consolidation/optimization has fallen to number 10, marking the lowest ranking it’s had since the Top Ten started.
For the first time since 2008, budget and cost control didn’t make the Top 10 list
NASCIO also shared state CIOs top 10 technology priorities for 2022:
- Cloud Solutions;
- Identity and Access Management;
- Legacy Application Modernization/Renovation;
- “X” as a Service;
- Artificial Intelligence/Robotic Process Automation;
- Security Enhancement Tools;
- Data Analytics;
- Data Management;
- Low Code/No Code Software Development; and
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
