GovTech talked to Sponholtz at the National Association of State CIOs Midyear Conference last month to find out more about his background, approach to leadership and agenda for pushing tech forward in the rapidly accelerating world of AI.
Video Transcript
What brought you to the CIO role?
I started my career actually in state government. I was super excited to have a job and just to start my professional career. But kind of worked through programming and desktop support and moving into business analysis and things like that. Just lots of different areas across IT, different domains and roles. And just over the years really enjoyed working with state government just because it has such a great mission. Love to be able to get up every day knowing that I'm serving the visitors and constituents and citizens of the state of Florida.
What’s your approach to leadership?
What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in 2026?
I mean, you could talk about quantum, you could talk about AI, but I would probably say planning has gotten a little different recently. So used to be when I was, uh, CIO at DEP [Department of Environmental Protection], develop a five-year plan for modernization and, and new applications and things like that, and we could depend on that pretty well for forecasting needs and work. The rate of change that's happened over the past few years, past couple years, has really made it so while a three- to five-year plan's super important, we just go into it knowing that it's probably gonna look a lot different in the next five years. So I'd say planning the way we've historically done it is still important, but definitely gonna have some changes just based on the rate of change we're experiencing right now.
What positions in Florida IT do you think have the most potential for change?
Generative AI is changing the way we develop code and maintain code. I would say the senior-level developers and architects are becoming more and more valuable because they can effectuate a multiplier force as far as using generative AI to do coding. But what we have to remember is to make sure we're continuing to pull people into the workforce development pipeline so that we have the next generation of developers and architects and senior developers. We don't wanna box out our entry-level developers. We need to be able to grow them up and make sure they understand so we have good, sustainable, secure applications with this new model.
What are the next big projects on your plate?
We're focused on a few major initiatives around data-centric, uh, threat monitoring and threat intelligence looking at ways that we can consolidate purchasing through the state, especially for software and service commodities looking to rebuild our architecture rule and technical reference associated with that.
It's also creating data exchange or data service marketplace, so agencies can publish APIs and data services in a standardized format with expectations on how it's gonna be used within applications across the enterprise. Not consolidating data, but basically surfacing that data where it exists in the agencies so we can have better data interoperability. Super important for the work we're doing today, and as we move into this generative AI and development with AI, be able to really make it so we can move faster and more predictably because we have a better understanding of the data.
