That’s one of the messages offered by Matthew J. McCarville, the new CIO of Nebraska, during an interview with Government Technology after the NASCIO 2024 Annual Conference in New Orleans.
McCarville spoke at the conference about artificial intelligence and other matters, and expanded upon some of those issues about three weeks after the conclusion of the event. It featured numerous Government Technology interviews with his peers along with panels and reports focused on the pressing issues before state tech leaders.
In the recent interview, McCarville sounded a call for even more “diversity in thought” when it comes to CIOs and the workforce they lead as governments move to the cloud and embrace the types of mobile and digital tools that are relatively common in retail and e-commerce.
Diversity, of course, can mean different things to different people, but the concept is hot in gov tech even amid the political backlash against DEI. As McCarville explained it, diversity can mean coming into a CIO position from what seems like a non-traditional career path, as he did.
“The CIO path is changing greatly,” he said. “You are seeing a lot more people from outside [state government],” adding that the model could help replace appointments that are based on how long a certain candidate has put in at a particular state agency. “You are seeing a lot of states break out of that.”
McCarville was no stranger to state government when he accepted the CIO job in Nebraska in the spring, taking over for a man who had held the job since 2015. McCarville had worked as chief data officer for Florida even though the bulk of his professional experience was in private industry or academia.
His career includes stops at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he was CIO and assistant vice chancellor of IT services and operations, and MTX Consulting Group/Maverick A1, where he was vice president of education, data strategy and chief strategy officer.
He even worked at a company anchored around one of the jewels of 19th-century technology — the Union Pacific Railroad, where he was manager of operating systems and practices, work that included data analytics and fuel strategy.
McCarville is also proud of his education. The Nebraska native attended his home state’s Creighton University, where he received a a Bachelor of Science in business administration, a Master of Science in business intelligence and analytics, and a doctorate in business administration.
He is hardly the only state CIO with such an advanced education and path to state tech leadership. For instance, Mississippi CIO Craig Orgeron — who talked at NASCIO about attracting fresh talent to state agencies — can also boast about having a doctorate and private-sector experience.
McCarville, though, is relatively vocal about how his education and private-sector work strengthens his hand as a state CIO.
“I would say it makes me very well rounded,” he said.
As he sees it, one significant benefit of his previous experience is that he has hired interns — often the seed corn of public agency IT workforces — in his old positions, giving him an advantage when it comes to stocking his agency with the best young talent.
That could prove exceptionally vital as the state tries to boost its AI capabilities while also updating its tech and tech processes — the idea being that fresh, well-trained brains can take agencies into a future that will be cloud-based, reliant on AI and building data analysis tools that can help governments deal with a wide range of problems from homelessness to public safety to budgeting to disaster management to procurement.
“Tech is now woven into all the problems that agencies have,” he said.
