Advice to Incoming Government CIOs

Building the Capacity You’ll Need

As we head into the 2026 midterm cycle, we’ll see dozens of governorships turn over, new mayors sworn in, and a wave of transitions in state and local IT organizations. For the incoming CIOs, CTOs, and digital service leads, this moment brings a rare kind of opportunity. You’ll inherit legacy systems, legacy contracts, and legacy decisions, but you’ll also inherit a public that expects government technology to work as well as the apps in their pocket.

This is written for those stepping into those roles. I hope it offers a practical view of what really matters in your first year, and how you can build the state capacity to deliver for residents.

Make Policy Reform Part of Your Delivery Toolbox

State and local policies shape everything you will be able to do: hiring rules, job classifications, procurement authority, interpretations of federal guidelines, budget structures written for a pre-internet era. In Colorado, when we started the Colorado Digital Service, we couldn’t hire anyone who lived outside the state. Our job descriptions needed updating, and the budget process was geared toward projects with a start and end, not products that need continuous improvement for years. All of these constraints shape delivery far more than any platform decision ever will.

Incoming CIOs have a unique window to push for reform:
• Hiring and HR modernization: Can you hire remote staff? Can you bring in short-term experts? Can you compensate for modern skills?
• Procurement flexibility: Modular contracting, outcome-based solicitations, pilots before full commitments.
• Budget structures: Moving away from multi-year waterfall appropriations toward funding that supports continuous delivery.
• Federal interpretation: Many “rules” are simply norms. States that ask federal partners for flexibility often get it.

As Jen Pahlka said in her discussion with Sam Hammond, “When we burden public servants, we don’t relieve burden on the public.” Fixing the policy scaffolding around delivery is the best way to reduce that burden.

Take the Long View

Government doesn’t build for quarters or for annual OKRs. It builds for decades. The systems you shepherd today may still be running when your children are grown. Someone will inherit them just as you’re inheriting what came before you.

Adopting a long-view mindset changes how you lead:
• Instrument everything. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Build observability into every service such as uptime, latency, abandon rate, and user pathways/funnels.
• Center the user journey. Residents don’t experience agencies. They experience a life event like applying for childcare, renewing a license, or seeking housing support. Build around that reality.
• Continuously deploy. Policy changes and bugs happen. Focus your delivery teams on the basics like shipping a text change or a line of code. Make sure this is perfect.
• Leave things better documented than you found them. Future teams shouldn’t have to rediscover the map of your systems.

You don’t need to be the CIO who solves everything. You need to be the CIO who ensures the next team can keep building without starting from zero.

Build State Capacity

Real capacity is structural. It comes from three places, none of which involve publishing another strategy document.

Build or strengthen your digital service team

Digital service teams bring modern product, design, and engineering talent into government. They sit close to the work and act as translators between agencies, vendors, and policy staff. They augment your delivery teams ability to understand contractor proposals, guide architecture decisions, and be a smart buyer.

When we built the Colorado Digital Service, we saw firsthand how many people in the region wanted to serve, they just needed an entry point into government that was more familiar. You can create that entry point. Read more about that here.

Work across states — because your problems aren’t unique

Your challenges aren’t new, and they aren’t unique. Whether through health information exchanges, multi-state collaboratives, NASCIO, or informal networks of CIOs sharing what actually works, you can borrow patterns that others have already tested.

The Software Collaborative is one of my favorite concepts.

Partner with organizations already built to help you

Code for America, U.S. Digital Response, Beeck Center, Schmidt Futures, National Governors Association, Recoding America Fund, and academic partners…there’s an entire ecosystem around you. But collaboration only works when it’s structured as real shared work.

Round tables and being on panels at conferences is great, but how can your teams actually roll up their sleeves and collaborate deeply with these orgs? Give your internal team explicit permission and mechanisms to collaborate: shared GitHub repos, co-designed sprints, open technical roadmaps. Don’t just talk about partnership, enable it. We did this during COVID at every level of government and it can be done again.

Modernize HR

You can have the best strategy in the world, but if your only hiring path is outdated job descriptions, low salary bands, rigid classifications, and in-state requirements, you won’t be able to hire the talent you need.

Capacity is people. If you want to deliver modern services, you need modern hiring.

Tie Your Work to Resident Outcomes

CIO conversations often drift toward cloud migration strategies, cybersecurity frameworks, shared platforms, and enterprise architecture. All important. None of them matter unless they connect to the experience of real people.

Anchor your work in questions like:
• Did a resident access a benefit faster?
• Did a worker’s administrative burden decrease?
• Did an agency get the ability to release data safely instead of emailing spreadsheets?
• Did dollars move from overhead to direct public service?

This is the language governors, legislators, and agency heads understand. It’s also the language that earns you the political capital to fix deeper structural issues.

Know the Power, and Limits, of Your Role

You won’t fix every legacy system. You won’t solve every procurement bottleneck. You won’t modernize every program in your turn to run with the baton.

But you can fix the conditions that determine whether your teams can deliver:
• You can modernize hiring and classification.
• You can reshape procurement.
• You can create a digital service team with real authority.
• You can standardize modular, iterative delivery.
• You can document the system and leave it better for the next team.
• You can help your government org interpret federal requirements with more flexibility.

If you do those things, you will have built real capacity, not just for your tenure, but for the teams and leaders who follow.

And residents, especially those who rely most on public services, will feel the change.