For 16 years, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) has surveyed CIOs about a variety of topics. The 2025 Survey of the states came out on October 12th and it’s chock full of important findings. 

When asked what challenges a state CIO faces, some common themes were “legacy systems; workforce woes; managing expectations of new technologies like artificial intelligence; lack of funding; procurement processes; and innovation with limited funding/chargeback.

One thing that distinguishes this particular survey from those that come from other membership organizations is its incredibly high participation. It couldn’t have been higher, with responses from 51 states and territory CIOs on eight topics.

Here are some of the highlights:

• “When asked if the CIO organization has funding to support IT accessibility services 54 percent of states answered no.”

• When CIOs were asked which action items regarding GenAI have been implemented in their states, 76 percent have enterprise policies and procedures on development and use; 65 percent adopted a governance framework; 41 percent had procurement terms and contract provisions; 41 percent had transparency and accountability and just 27 percent had seen impact on operations and workforce.  

• “We asked about overall budget changes for FY26 in their CIO organization, half the respondents said their budget had increased. Eighteen percent said their budget decreased and 32 percent said it stayed the same.”

• When asked to describe the current maturity of their state data management governance, 4 percent of respondents consider their data governance as very mature; 20 percent said it was mature; and 66 percent said it was in the beginning stages.

• How are CIO’s currently applying data analytics? 94 percent said they were creating enhanced dashboards and meaningful reports; 74 percent said fraud prevention; 63 percent said policy-driven decision making; 51 percent said more efficient public service delivery and 39 percent said performance-based budgeting.

• The top five services that CIO organizations offer to local governments are GIS (51 percent); network services (47 percent); co-location (43 percent); security service/infrastructure (40 percent) and data center hosting (38 percent).

Finally, NASCIO asked open ended questions aimed at seeing whether the CIOs anticipated their service delivery models to change over the next one to three years. Some of the trends that emerged, according to the report: “CIO’s highlighted increased consolidation and centralization; greater emphasis on customer experience; ongoing modernization of legacy systems; streamlined operations and expanded services to agencies.” 

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