“I love mission-driven work. It’s so much more rewarding,” he said. “I was in the private sector prior to coming to the state in the first place for many years, and once I found working at the state, I just loved it.”
Among his endeavors as CIO has been hiring the commonwealth’s first chief IT accessibility officer, creating a Digital Accessibility and Equity Strategic Plan, implementing single sign-on for the public, and deploying a bevy of modernization projects. Most recently, he’s been focused on an AI push. In February, Massachusetts became the first state to deploy enterprise ChatGPT for the entire workforce, creating training plans and methods for sharing use cases along with the rollout.
“[At our first AI training] we had almost over 50 percent of our workforce,” he said, noting that it was held during a school vacation week. “Having that many people attend ... there’s genuine excitement, people with willingness to learn.”
Snyder has also taken a highly collaborative approach with local governments in the Bay State. Massachusetts worked with local law enforcement to help them comply with new criminal justice information system standards, and rolled out a new cloud-based system for state and local agencies to use. The new Cyber Incident Response Team has helped support local efforts, including everything from fielding basic questions about how to hire a CISO to crafting incident response plans to assisting in post-incident response.
