California CIO Survey Ranks Priorities for 2018

Cybersecurity and risk management top the list of priorities in a survey of California municipal IT leaders, echoing results that have emerged in 2017 across cities and counties.

Hong Sae, chief information officer for the city of Roseville, posed a question to his colleagues on a mailing list for members of the Municipal Information Systems Association of California (MISAC), essentially asking them to rank their top five business, technological and cultural challenges and opportunities for 2018.

The rankings, tabulated by Sae, were as follows:

1. Cybersecurity and risk management
2. Strategic planning – master, road map, smart city
3. Service management Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL/standards)
4. Business process efficiency
5. Aging infrastructure/modernization
6. Disaster recovery and business continuity
7. Resource and budget constraints
8. Systems replacement and governance
9. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
10. Data, transparency and business analytics

 

Of the 29 members who responded, 21 (72 percent) represented municipalities (counties, cities, towns and villages); and eight (28 percent) represented special districts (schools, utilities, transportation, regional councils, etc.). Nineteen of the 29 (65 percent) were from Northern California; 10 (35 percent) were from Southern California.

“Sae further dissected the responses by population or customers,” says a report on the MISAC website.

For municipalities between 100,000 and 300,000 people, the top three priorities were cybersecurity, business process efficiency and strategic planning and management.

For those with populations over 300,000, the top three priorities heading into 2018 were resource constraints, aging infrastructure and cybersecurity.

These results largely reflect those outlined by Joseph Morris, vice president for research for the Center for Digital Government, in Techwire’s State of Technology Industry Forum in September. In the center’s 2017 Digital Counties survey, the top three CIO priorities were cybersecurity, IT staffing and mobility/transparency and open data, and data governance.

In the center’s survey of Digital Cities CIO priorities, the top three priorities were cybersecurity, citizen engagement/experience, and mobility/devices/apps.

Roseville's Sae was the subject of a Techwire interview last spring.

The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, the nation’s only media and research company focused exclusively on state and local government and education. Techwire, Government Technology and Governing are among e.Republic’s publications.