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 talk to Chris Seidt, CIO of Louisville, Ky., with a population of 641,000. Read the other four CIOs’ responses here:
- Jonathan Behnke, CIO, San Diego
- Laurel Caldwell, CIO, Latah County, Utah
- Scott Furman, CIO, Chesterfield County, Va.
- Markell Storay, CIO, Charlotte, N.C.
Chris Seidt: Today we have six functional divisions within the IT organization. We’ve got about 20 people in our infrastructure and operations division, and about 18 people sitting in digital services. We’ve got 19 in cybersecurity. Enterprise data is around six, and then technology relationship management sits at around five. Client services has around 17 or 18. A couple months ago, we hired a chief AI officer, and she’s currently in the process of building out her team. She’s going to start off with a four-person, AI-focused team. That is a big change for us.
Seidt: I could see client services changing dramatically. We’re in the process of rolling out some tools to help people with day-to-day issues that they might have with their device or with a piece of software. Some of these tools, AI and others, could dramatically shift how our users consume our services as a service provider. With the cyber team, we deal with billions of logs every year around security events and other activities, and 19 people is not enough to keep up with that today. But AI has the opportunity to really help us there.
How will AI impact how you hire?
What are the drawbacks and benefits of incorporating AI into the IT workforce?
Seidt: Our employees have brought up concerns about the impact of AI on the environment. Have we thought about the sustainability of that? We’re taking a look at how we can work with the providers of these tools to ensure that they’re thinking about the sustainability aspect and the energy consumption. From a workforce standpoint, there’s plenty of work to go around today that we don’t necessarily get to, just because we’re outnumbered. AI can help us be more effective in delivering services to residents.
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?
Seidt: We’ve already started growing in several of these areas. The cybersecurity team was five people eight years ago, and we’ve grown to 19 people. The compliance auditing piece maybe hasn’t been as big of a focus for us, but I could see where organizations would be leaning into that. Overall, that’s largely aligned with where we’ve been making investments and growing our team.
