Arizona has a unique arrangement for its top IT leadership that doesn’t follow typical hierarchical structures. While CIO J.R. Sloan works in the Department of Administration, overseeing emerging technologies and meeting the state's IT needs, state CISO Ryan Murray operates within the Department of Homeland Security, protecting data privacy and security. Meanwhile, Chief Data and Analytics Officer Josh Wagner heads the new State Data and Analytics Office.
“It’s a little outside the box, but the intent is for these three functions to be independent and partnered, to holistically support data without having to compete for resources,” explained Wagner in an interview with Government Technology.
Wagner’s office, and his role as the state's first chief data officer, were created in the spring of 2024. Despite the newness of the office, Wagner brings nearly 25 years of government experience, having previously done transformational work with performance metrics that improved daily life for Arizonans, such as speeding up wait times at the Motor Vehicle Division.
“I’ve been in government for a long time, and this is the hardest job I’ve ever had. It is also absolutely exciting,” said Wagner. “I love making an impact on the people of Arizona. It’s really gratifying to align with the data side because I’ve always been highly technical, and I feel like I came home into this position.”
Though Wagner currently reports to Sloan, the long-term plan is for the three offices to form "three legs of the stool" to comprehensively support data and IT infrastructure. The three leaders are also all part of the state’s new AI committee, emphasizing their collaborative approach to emerging technologies.
PRIORITIZING DATA QUALITY FOR AI
For the past year, Wagner’s team has focused on building visibility into the vast landscape of state data. This crucial foundational work aims to understand what data exists across agencies, enabling them to focus on quality and readiness before launching innovative projects.
“Everything’s data driven these days, and data has to be in the right shape for whatever you’re trying to do with it,” said Wagner. “It’s a really wild landscape, as much as agencies may have some level of maturity around their data at an enterprise level, we don’t really know what’s out there. We’re still trying to understand what data is available, where our assets are, much less what the quality of them are.”
CISO Ryan Murray, another key member of the AI Steering Committee, thinks in terms of the real-world impact of data-driven decisions.
"When we’re making decisions about people’s lives, we have to be incredibly cautious about having AI make decisions about these things, whether that’s child support or health-care needs or putting people in jail," said Murray. "I think we owe it to our citizens to make sure that we’re doing that the right way."
SECURING DATA BEYOND THE PERIMETER
While data governance is actively coming together under Wagner, Murray is intensely focused on protecting existing state data, including safeguarding it even when it leaves state offices.
Arizona's partnership with Virtru for cloud security and encryption arose from critical needs.
"I would say the real origin of what’s caused us to enter into the partnership with Virtru was gaps in Google and its capabilities,” said Murray, referencing significant concerns from state agencies handling sensitive information when they first migrated to Google's enterprise Workspace nearly a decade ago.
These concerns centered on highly sensitive data, such as addresses, health-care information and criminal history and the potential for Google employees to access state data. That prompted Arizona to seek full control and protection over its information; they wanted the ability to track data movement, monitor access and revoke permissions at any time once data left their direct control, an ask that garnered strong support from stakeholders.
Murray described the process of securing data with Virtru as user-friendly, moving beyond the need for workers to manually type "encrypt" in an email subject line. Instead, it’s simplified to pushing a button, which has been a significant driver of adoption.
“If we can take the complication out of it, and we can make it easier for people to just do the right thing, we’re going to see significant uptake on adoption,” said Murphy.
Christian Eng, senior director of state and local government for Virtru, emphasized the strength of Arizona’s existing security.
“We’ve been in a good environment for the past 10 years, because every single piece of data is encrypted with a unique pair of keys, which when you compare that to the greater security landscape, that’s usually quite a bit better than what most customers are because they’ve been using TLS encryption, they’re only encrypting libraries, not encrypting data anywhere else,” said Eng.
Beyond current encryption capabilities, Virtru is also developing solutions to enhance data tagging and classifications, a process already active in Virginia.
A MODEL FOR FUTURE GOVERNANCE
As the vision for the AI Steering Committee takes shape and Arizona continues to build on a foundation of data privacy, security and governance, the state’s unique decentralized leadership hierarchy presents a unique model for other states to observe.
“It’s nice we can sort of pull and push on each other of these things respectively,” said Murray. “We have that interesting relationship between the three of us where we can all kind of pull and push on our specific needs to make sure we’re all sort of moving in the right direction for everyone.”
