Security remains at the top of importance, with cloud services coming in at a close second. This year’s voting lacked a common element that most of the surveys had seen in past years — there wasn’t that large a gap in votes for the top two items, possibly reflecting an emphasis on cloud services.
“There is an overarching continued consistency in the areas of budget and cost control, security and risk management,” NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson said in a statement. “Digital government appears for the first time as priority four, which is indicative of states’ efforts to focus on citizen services using digital platforms and integration.”
Also reflected in the survey is a growing trend toward shared services, or consolidating and unifying services across the enterprise.
“Data management and analytics, cloud solutions and certainly security are demanding our attention. Unification of services will drive the need to improve data management discipline, enterprise governance and optimization,” NASCIO president and Oklahoma CIO Bo Reese said in the statement.
The results match up with what the Center for Digital Government* found in 2016 with its own survey of state CIOs, as well as 2017 surveys of county and city IT staff — all of them list cybersecurity as their top priorities.
NASCIO State CIO Priorities for 2017 |
Center for Digital Government, 2016 |
| Security and Risk Management | Cybersecurity |
| Cloud Services | Shared or Collaborative Services |
| Consolidation/Optimization | Cloud Computing |
| Digital Government | IT Staffing |
| Budget, Cost Control and Fiscal Management | Budget and Cost Control |
