State CIOs take on bigger role in natural disasters

People throughout the Southeast are still digging out from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene. The storm didn’t just damage homes, roads and bridges, it also brought down technology and communications infrastructure, leaving many residents cut off from the outside world.

Five days after Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, the Federal Communications Commission reported that more than 1,500 cellphone towers were out of service across six states—Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia—while internet services, television and radio stations were also reported down at various times during the storm. 

As Florida braced for what some said could be the storm of the century Wednesday, worries grew that a similar story might play out in the wake of Hurricane Milton.

Helene served to highlight the growing role of state technology leaders in natural disasters. It’s a shift that state CIOs are increasingly thinking about as they take on more and more responsibilities in disaster management and preparedness, according to a recent survey by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers.

NASCIO’s annual State CIO Survey found that the vast majority of state CIOs—94%—said they are responsible for maintaining a “robust, reliable and secure infrastructure,” while 92% said they are charged with coordinating with other state officials.

Just under 80% said they play a role in restoring communications services, while 77% said they are tasked with contracting with third-party, off-premise cloud solutions that can be stood up quickly to provide uninterrupted services.

“CIOs continue to see their role as focused on continuity of operations as opposed to provision of new or enhanced services while states recover from a disaster or disruption in business services,” the survey found.

Of the 49 state CIOs surveyed, 72% said their state generally takes a federated approach to technology disaster recovery and business continuity, meaning responsibilities are shared across state agencies and among leadership.

That federated approach can take many forms. California CIO Liana Bailey-Crimmins said in a session at NASCIO’s annual conference last week to coincide with the survey’s release that the state requires each agency to identify its critical services, develop a regularly updated disaster recovery plan should those services be interrupted and then test those plans.

IT experts from the California Department of Technology will then visit agencies, evaluate their plans, produce a confidential report on aspects that need to be improved, and discuss ways with agency leadership that the state can help pick up some of the cost to modernize and stabilize those systems. Bailey-Crimmins calls the visits, “Disaster Recovery as a Service.”

“We don't want cost to be the reason that people are not doing the right thing for the right reasons,” she said.

In a separate report last year, NASCIO found that state IT leaders are at the “forefront of managing an array of disruptive threats.” Beyond natural disasters, state CIOs face the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks and public health events. Perhaps one of the most disruptive threats in the last several years was the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted a rush to digitize government services. Based on this year’s CIO survey, digitization is still a high priority.

Almost two-thirds of state CIOs—62%—said they have adopted human-centered design into their digital services, making them more usable by focusing on how people interact with them to improve digital experience. And just over half (55%) said they have embraced a so-called “no wrong door” approach, meaning that residents can go to any part of state government, either online or in person, and engage with services.

Bailey-Crimmins drew a comparison with Amazon and Netflix’s customized customer interfaces and recommendations, and asked why government can’t do something similar.

“Sometimes [the recommendations are] wrong but are there things that we could be doing on a government level to really enrich that experience, make it easier—not less bureaucratic—and at least meet the human being, the person where they are?” she asked.

Washington CIO Bill Kehoe said the path forward is tricky, however. Indeed, the survey found that digitization efforts are dogged by worries about data, funding and workforce skills.

“The biggest constraint here is that digital delivery extends beyond current organizational and financial control boundaries,” said one CIO, according to the survey. “We struggle with sustaining services like this.”

Washington has experimented with an online portal, designed to act as a one-stop shop for constituents to access government services. But Kehoe said some agencies are still skeptical. Those agencies may feel they already know their customers, he said, and be resistant to change.

But leaders need to think about what residents want, Kehoe said. They want to feel like they are doing business with the state as one entity, rather than with five or more separate agencies that act independently, require endless form filling and do not share that information with each other.

“There’s nothing more important that we can do,” he said, “than to get this right for our residents.”