Latah County, Utah, Looks to Grow IT Skills, Not Staff Numbers

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 Laurel Caldwell, CIO of Latah County, Utah, with a population of 42,000. Read the other four CIOs’ responses here:

• Jonathan Behnke, CIO, San Diego
• Scott Furman, CIO, Chesterfield County, Va.
• 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?
Laurel Caldwell: We’re a smaller agency. We have six full-time and two part-time IT people. We have a couple of people who are more senior level, more experienced. They would be the ones that would tackle things like firewall changes or networking activity. Some of those people who are managing the firewalls also have to know how to develop to some degree, but they’re not full-on developers. I would love to devote one person to just cyber and one person just to help desk, but I don’t see that changing. We all need to have some degree of expertise in all of those areas.

What role(s) in your org do you think have the most potential for change in the coming years?
Caldwell: It really becomes a risk management view of everything, wanting to make sure that our end users in county government are able to do their jobs so that they can serve the constituents. One of the big things is education around AI. AI needs good data behind it. What is good data? What does that look like? And then as people are dealing with that, they also have to train the end users, to make sure they understand what good data is and where the risks are with AI.

How will AI impact how you hire?
Caldwell: I don’t see us hiring more people, but we definitely do have to hire, because there’s turnover. They will need to have an understanding of what good data looks like and how to use AI responsibly, so that they’re not just putting data all over the Internet. They need to understand what cyber risks are involved in that. If they have a good head for those things, that makes them a better hire. As AI becomes more embedded in all of the solutions that we’re using, IT people will have to understand how that all works.

What are the drawbacks and benefits of incorporating AI into the IT workforce?
Caldwell: One of the worst things about AI is making the assumption that it’s giving you a correct answer and not taking the time to verify it. I’m also worried that everyone will start coming up with the same answers and we will lose the creative answers that humans usually come up with. AI also tends to replace the entry-level positions: If AI is filling in that gap for people, then the people themselves aren’t going to get that education. That’s another concern. On the upside, you’re going to get to answers and solutions quicker by incorporating AI. And AI can work 24/7, so it’ll help the constituent get to the answer they’re looking for on their own schedule.

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?
Caldwell: I would love to have an increase in staffing in those areas, but I don’t think that is going to happen. I don’t think that in the next five years I would even have a data analytics person. I don’t think that that’s even remotely possible for my location. As for compliance auditing, we have to do some samplings of that along the way, but I don’t know if we’re going to do a full audit. That’s just something that the current IT staff will have to learn how to do, and it will become one of their additional duties.

*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.