Jacob brings more than 25 years of experience in public- and private-sector IT, with expertise in digital strategies, enterprise technologies and large-scale innovation initiatives. His elevation comes after the departure of longtime Executive Deputy CIO Jennifer Lorenz, who left the agency this summer.
Lorenz had been with ITS since its founding in 2012, serving as executive deputy CIO under two chief information officers. She also stepped in as acting CIO during the transition between Tony Riddick and current CIO Dru Rai and played a key role in creating the Joint Security Operations Center in Brooklyn and guiding the agency through major incidents, including the 2024 CrowdStrike outage.
With Jacob now officially in the role, ITS is looking ahead to the priorities he will focus on in the coming months.
Scott Reif, ITS chief communications officer, said Jacob’s top responsibility will be executing the CIO’s vision. His other current priorities include “carrying out the next steps in the ongoing transition to a dedicated agency service model, achieving additional customer experience gains, continuing work on enhancing the statewide cybersecurity posture, bringing AI education and training to the state workforce, and making progress toward the agency’s operational excellence metrics,” according to Reif.
Jacob assumed the role in an acting capacity immediately following Lorenz’s departure, Reif said, and was officially appointed executive deputy CIO in recent weeks.
In his previous positions as chief digital transformation officer and deputy chief technology officer at ITS, Jacob led enterprisewide application strategies, managed an 1,800-person workforce and drove modernization initiatives across multiple services.
Before joining ITS in 2011, Jacob designed enterprise solutions for clients at Unisys and HCL Technologies. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Mumbai in India and currently teaches data computing, networking and cloud computing as an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Albany.
