City of Arvada

For government technology leaders, the hardest decisions are rarely as simple as choosing between something good and something bad. Instead, they involve balancing several things that are all important.

We want to innovate. We need to protect our systems and data. Ultimately, we need technology to help deliver reliable, accessible services to the people we serve. The challenge is that these priorities are often at odds with one another.

New technology may create tremendous opportunities while introducing new cybersecurity risks. A rigid security control may reduce risk but add friction for employees or residents. A modernization effort may promise a better future but create short-term disruption to the services people depend upon.

Government CIOs need to find the right balance.

Innovation Isn't the Same as New Technology

Innovation is often associated with emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, automation, analytics and increasingly sophisticated digital services. These technologies certainly create opportunities, but innovation isn't necessarily about adopting the newest shiny thing.

Sometimes the most innovative thing an organization can do is change how it makes technology decisions. For example, better project intake, stronger architecture review, clearer governance and more disciplined prioritization probably won't generate the same excitement as the latest AI demo. Yet these types of improvements can have a profound impact on an organization's ability to deliver technology successfully.

The goal isn't to implement more technology. It's to use technology deliberately to make government serve its customers, internal and external, more effectively.

That distinction becomes particularly important in local government, where technology isn't an arms race. Residents don't care what platform processes their permit application or what infrastructure hosts a system. They care that they can accomplish what they need to.

Security Can't Be Bolted On Afterward

Historically, organizations could treat security as a specialized function that became involved after technology decisions were made. That approach is increasingly difficult to sustain. Prioritizing cybersecurity as a core principle makes everything downstream easier to justify and defend.

Every application, cloud service, integration, mobile device and connected system changes an organization's risk profile. Security therefore must be part of the conversation from the beginning. That doesn't mean saying “no” to innovation. It means understanding risk and planning accordingly.

Work with your leadership team to understand your organization's risk appetite. Then understand what data the system stores, accesses and shares. Define how vendors will securely connect. Build resiliency plans for when the service is unavailable. Determine what the organization's exposure will be if the system or provider is compromised. Pay attention to your supply chain as part of the risk assessment. And understand how AI might be incorporated and what additional risks that may involve.

"The objective is to design technology services that are secure enough to protect the organization, resilient enough to depend upon and simple enough that people can actually use them."

Addressing these types of things early isn't intended to stop innovation and you will likely have to emphasize that to your internal customers. Instead, it allows your organization to innovate responsibly.

The Measure of Success Is Service

Ultimately, innovation and security exist to support the mission. Government IT has a unique responsibility because technology failures ultimately become service failures. When an internal business system is unavailable, employees may be unable to perform their jobs. When a public-facing service fails, residents may be unable to obtain a permit, pay a bill, report an issue or access information.

That makes reliability and usability just as important as technological capability.

A highly secure system that nobody can effectively use isn't a successful technology solution. Neither is an innovative system that creates unacceptable operational risk.

The objective is to design technology services that are secure enough to protect the organization, resilient enough to depend upon and simple enough that people can actually use them.

Solving for All Three

The most effective government technology strategies recognize that innovation, security and service aren't independent objectives. They are variables in the same equation.

Technology leaders need to create environments where experimentation is possible, risk is understood and managed and the impact on employees and residents remains central to the decision.

Sometimes that means moving quickly. Sometimes it means slowing down to get the architecture or security right. Sometimes it means rejecting a cool new technology because it doesn't solve a meaningful problem.

And sometimes the most valuable technology decision is the least glamorous one: replacing aging infrastructure, simplifying a process, improving governance or making an existing service more reliable.

For government CIOs, success isn't measured by how much technology we deploy or how many innovations we can point to. It's measured by whether technology helps us deliver better services, more securely and more reliably.

That's the balance and increasingly, that's the job.