EOTSS has expanded its technology team in recent years with the appointment of the state’s first chief IT accessibility officer, Ashley Bloom, and the establishment of a Digital Accessibility and Equity Governance Board.
State of Massachusetts
The deputy secretary’s background includes serving as the chief technology officer at Harvard University. During her time there, she also served as a member of the Massachusetts Governor’s Strategic Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. She also worked for previous state administrations as the data center infrastructure and engineering director, and in health and human services.
“I really love that you can deep dive and make an impact in so many different areas in government,” Bradshaw said.
She was drawn to the role, Bradshaw explained, because of the opportunity to leverage her technology experience and skills to deliver on the bold vision of the secretary, Jason Snyder. This includes EOTSS being a consolidated IT provider, and exploring ways to harness technology’s potential, from AI to data sharing, to overcome state challenges.
“How could I really think about helping the commonwealth drive both IT service stability and operations — which is a key part of any big technology organization —but also, advance innovation?” she said.
As Bradshaw explained, throughout her career, she has worked to balance innovation and operations in technology roles. Because the deputy secretary role is a new one for the state, Bradshaw will shape a strategy for working with teams to sponsor “the big projects that are needed to align to the outcomes that the state’s looking to get.”
In so doing, she will be working across the secretariat team to advance initiatives such as IT consolidation for effective and secure service delivery, as well as AI enablement.
Her time serving on the governor’s AI task force enabled strategizing on how to position Massachusetts as a leader in AI, Bradshaw said. The task force spent more than a year exploring and offering recommendations for this goal. As she detailed, working with thought leaders on this challenge allowed the team to not only create recommendations but to put them into action. She highlighted the Massachusetts AI Hub as one demonstration of this work.
Bradshaw said she also expects to work with the chief technology officer in exploring how to effectively establish a center of excellence for AI. The center of excellence, along with the task force itself, are the products of a February executive order.
Other functions of her role include financial and business planning for internal services, contracts and procurement management. As she explained, these functions are “equally important” for technology enablement. Bradshaw also hopes to align the operating budget to support business planning for core IT services.
“I think anyone coming into a brand new role has the opportunity to take stock of what has been done — to appreciate the work and the strategy and the movement and the bold vision that’s already been set here — and then really figure out those places and those touch points where you can make an impact,” Bradshaw said, noting that for the foreseeable future, she hopes to use her skills to advance the organization’s strategic missions.
