Amid AI, Quantum Tech, Chesterfield County, Va., Invests in Cyber

The structure of public-sector IT is changing. Faced with tight budgets, an urgent need to ramp up artificial intelligence, and ever-present concerns around cybersecurity, state and local IT leaders are re-evaluating their skills mix.

In the realm of nuts and bolts, the move to cloud and software as a service is reshaping the IT organization. “You had a whole cadre of mainframe developers and mainframe system admins, and now your mainframe is virtual. That’s been a big shift,” said National Association of State Chief Information Officers Executive Director Doug Robinson. Add to this a growing emphasis on enterprise-scale solutions and the rapid emergence of AI. All that together impacts how IT is organized.

At a higher level, “the major evolution is the move from the CIO being a technology expert — a boxes-and-wires, green-blinking-lights kind of person — to being someone who leads change in the organization,” Robinson said. As change agents, CIOs are looking to align their organizational structures with both the emerging technology tools and the practical needs within their jurisdictions.

To understand how that’s done and where things are headed, GovTech convened a virtual roundtable of city and county IT leaders. Here we interview Scott Furman, CIO of Chesterfield County, Va., with a population of 390,000. Read the other four CIOs’ responses here:

• Jonathan Behnke, CIO, San Diego
• Laurel Caldwell, CIO, Latah County, Utah
• Chris Seidt, CIO, Louisville, Ky.
• Markell Storay, CIO, Charlotte, N.C.

Give me a rough breakdown of your IT organization today. How do you think that will change?
Scott Furman: We’ve got about 106 full-time equivalents, and 30 to 40 percent of those are in infrastructure and operations (I&O), traditional tech-support type roles. Another 30 to 35 percent are in digital services. This is where we’ve got our software development resources, data management, as well as some of the modern digital workflow activities. Information security is about 10 percent and planning and administration makes up 15 percent. There’s going to be a shift as we develop further in terms of modernizing our infrastructure. I expect that the I&O folks will probably see a smaller footprint over time, while we will see growth in data governance, analytics and AI operations.

What role(s) in your org do you think have the most potential for change in the coming years?
Furman: We’ve recently introduced the role of site reliability engineer and AIOps. The other area that’s growing is data stewards and privacy officers: Data is at the root of all that we can do with AI. If we don’t have good data, then the AI queries and capabilities are going to be suboptimal. Finally there’s this whole opportunity — and we have this a little bit right now, in our business relationship management area, and more broadly in terms of technology translators — where we bridge the gap between the deep technical silos and the business functions themselves.

How will AI impact how you hire?
Furman: We are looking for folks that are critical thinkers. Regarding human-agent teams, how do those resources complement one another? We are focused on those folks that have the ability to think critically, who can understand different contexts that maybe, at this point, the maturity of AI agents don’t effectively pick up. And we’re looking for folks who can keep up with the pace, who have capacity to learn rapidly and the ability to take that learning from idea to impact.

What are the drawbacks and benefits of incorporating AI into the IT workforce?
Furman: Just think about the opportunities that this opens up. There are a number of mundane, repeatable tasks that we still do within the enterprise, and the introduction of some of these new capabilities opens up the opportunity for folks to explore and upskill and really broaden out their capabilities. It opens up some possibilities, where before we had our heads down working on those mundane, repeatable tasks. With that, though, comes a challenge. The velocity of change is increasing and not everybody can pedal that fast. You will have folks that maybe just don’t have the energy or the interest to pursue and invest in upskilling, reskilling, resetting. That’s unfortunate.

The most recent Digital Cities (2025), Counties (2025) and States (2024) surveys* reported that cybersecurity, compliance auditing, AI modeling and data analytics are the areas with the greatest need for increased IT staffing. Is that true of your organization?
Furman: That’s spot on. We are investing heavily in cyber, with the introduction of AI and the fast-approaching introduction of quantum. That really upsets the apple cart in terms of our current cyber protection structures. With AI and data, we’re leveraging those capabilities to help modernize and fortify our structures. And we are being more proactive in how we are monitoring our compliance and our control structures. If we have issues with our control structures, bad actors will find them and very rapidly exploit them.

*The Digital Cities, Counties and State surveys are conducted by the Center for Digital Government, which is part of e.Republic, Government Technology’s parent company.