This episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast features Liz Thomas, president of Tyler’s State and Federal Group, and Russell Gainford, chief technology officer, exploring how state agencies are turning the 2026 NASCIO State CIO Priorities into action. They discuss how AI, modernization, and cloud technologies are helping reduce administrative burdens, strengthen data foundations, and improve outcomes for residents — while balancing efficiency, security, and public trust.
In this episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast, Liz Thomas, president of Tyler’s State and Federal Group, and Russell Gainford, chief technology officer, share insights from the 2026 NASCIO State CIO Priorities report and explore the trends shaping technology across state government.
Drawing on perspectives from CIOs in all 50 states and U.S. territories, Liz and Russell discuss how priorities are evolving, with modernization, accessibility, and AI rising to the top alongside longstanding concerns like cybersecurity and budget management. They explain how these priorities reflect the dual focus of state technology leaders: balancing innovation and efficiency with risk management and security, all while delivering better outcomes for residents.
The conversation highlights the challenges that aging systems, fragmented workflows, and legislative changes create for agencies, and how modernization initiatives—from cloud adoption to more flexible, integrated platforms—can reduce administrative burdens, improve citizen experiences, and empower teams to work more effectively. Liz and Russell also explore how engaging employees and stakeholders early in the modernization journey can accelerate adoption and drive meaningful change.
This episode offers a practical look at the trends and priorities guiding state technology in 2026, providing insights for CIOs, technology leaders, and anyone interested in how modernization, innovation, and strategic planning are shaping government services. It underscores Tyler’s commitment to helping states deliver secure, efficient, and modern solutions that meet the needs of their communities.
This episode also highlights National Cities, Towns & Villages Month, celebrated each May to honor the unique spirit and vibrancy of communities across the country. It’s a time to recognize local leaders, showcase the people and places that make your city, town, or village extraordinary, and celebrate the unity and diversity that bring communities together. From issuing proclamations and sharing love letters to creating short videos and posting on your municipality’s social channels, there are many ways to participate and shine a spotlight on what makes your community special.
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Russell Gainford: Cybersecurity has consistently been the top priority when we look across CIOs in this organization. And so, AI has moved to the top, that’s just a testament about how we hear so much about it in the world and how it’s changing people’s lives and how it’s changing technology and budgets and procurements.
Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, this is the Tyler Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Henderson. Thanks so much for joining us.
Today’s episode is part one of a two part series exploring what the latest state CIO priorities reveal about where government technology is headed.
National Association of State CIOs or NASCIO has revealed its 2026 top ten priorities, marking 20 years of the report and drawing insight from CIOs across all 50 states and U.S. territories.
This year, artificial intelligence takes the number one spot for the first time, overtaking cybersecurity after more than a decade at the top, alongside notable movement in areas like accessibility and budget and cost control. I’m joined by Liz Thomas, president of Tyler’s State and Federal Group, and Russell Gainford, chief technology officer. Together, they break down the trends shaping state technology today, the realities agencies are navigating behind the scenes, and what it all means for delivering better outcomes for residents. There’s a lot to unpack, so let’s get into it.
Alright. Liz and Russell, welcome to the Tyler Tech Podcast. Thank you both so much for being here.
Now to start things off, you know, when you look across the NASCIO 2026 CIO priorities, what story do they tell about where state technology leadership is focused right now?
Liz Thomas: I can start on that one, Josh. I think that for me, one of the things that struck me is it’s this blend of what’s happening, topics that are on everyone’s mind, AI and modernization, but also traditional, the things that we have been seeing for years that are critical, that are table stakes for our CIOs like cybersecurity, like budget constraints. We know that that has been an issue in government for as long as I’ve been working in government. I think, to me, it’s really this blend of traditional challenges and priorities that CIOs are faced with and how to deal with the emerging technology in the room, AI, and how that can help us. I think it’s an interesting blend of those historical and new challenges.
Russell Gainford: A couple things kind of stood out to me and, you know, I’ve monitored this quite a few years. When this one came out, a few things that kind of rose the top is AI coming in as number one. So, you know, if you go back, I even took a quick look trying to like, what’s the last five years? And cybersecurity has consistently been the top priority when we look across CIOs in this organization.
And so, AI has moved to the top and that’s just a testament about how we hear so much about it in the world and how it’s changing people’s lives and how changing technology and budgets and procurements. And it’s also because there’s two factors when you think about a CIO and their duties and how they serve their constituents. It’s the opportunity.
So, how can they make citizen service more seamless? And the second, though, is that that’s an opportunity. On the on the converse side of that, there’s risk and that they’re all struggling with. So are people using tools that models can train on data they’re not supposed to, are agents making decisions that don’t have a human or employee in the loop.
So, you could see why that’s rise so quickly over the last two years. And the other one that stood out to me is every year for the last three years, you’ve seen the rise of accessibility as a top item. We know that DOJ’s ruling coming in, enforcement starting in April, it’s a priority for all these agencies. We’re talking about technology that’s been around in some cases for 20-plus years and the requirements from web tag and web content accessibility are something they’re all paying attention to.
Josh Henderson: That’s some great context setting there, for the rest of the conversation. But I wanted to start kind of looking at the priorities as a whole. These priorities definitely reflect the reality of operating in complex environments – workforce constraints, rising expectations from residents, increasingly interconnected systems. But how do you how do those pressures shape the way agencies think about strengthening their technology and those technology foundations?
Russell Gainford: So, I think when I talk to CIOs, the first thing they think of is what are the top risks to the organization, right? There’s only so much workforce, there’s only so much budget. So, they’re thinking about what can present risk to us as we look to serve constituents? What could cause downtime?
What could impact services? So, when I think about the priorities this year, you start with accessibility. You start with that. There’s legislation and that requires that there’s action that’s being done.
Look at that first as an opportunity to prioritize the top needs of your organization. What are you going to invest in? The second one is really prioritizing, and some agencies do this better than others, but what is the most value you can deliver? Not going from historical means of we had a budgeted line item, it just carries over, but also can we take that holistically, look at what we’ve done previously and relook at what the top values are for the year and what can provide most value to our employees and our constituents.
Liz Thomas: I think that’s a that’s a really good takeaway, Russell, and something that that I thought about a lot too. It’s really there’s a new focus on not just providing, you know, the system that works. Right? It’s the system that residents want to use that provides the resident experience that everyone’s used to, whether they’re using a shopping website or something else. It’s blending those priorities of what vendor or what system can provide the table stakes things that I need, which are security, which are a modern solution, and data integrity, accessibility, all the things Russell just touched on. So, I need to first eliminate risk or reduce risk. We can’t eliminate it.
But then, what solution can actually also bring the nice to haves, the resident engagement, the experience, leveraging AI to the extent that we can. I think there’s a much higher bar for solutions than there were. It’s not just about does it work and does it have the security certifications and features that I need. So, I think that’s what we’re all rising to the challenge of as a company dedicated to providing solutions to government is how can we bring the most value for these very precious limited dollars that the government can spend on these solutions.
Russell Gainford: And just adding on, those are great points. And going back to that trust, there’s the bar of security, and then there’s the direction of the organization. And the one thing about AI is there’s so much rapid emergence in that market. So, we look at priorities.
It’s about balancing priorities, but also with partnership and who you can trust from a vendor relationship perspective. Because when we see markets rise up like this, then then companies move in direct different directions. Products may not make it. Some may make it. So, trying to balance the priorities with the long term safety of the agency is really important.
Josh Henderson: You both touched on this this idea of a modernization journey. It’s not necessarily, you know, a one and done.
It’s a journey most definitely.
So, and to that point, you know, across many states, leaders are still working through aging systems, fragmented workflows, technical debt, things like that. What would you both say tends to create the most friction in day-to-day government operations today?
Russell Gainford: Well, from my perspective on aging system, what I hear a lot is as these systems are built up, there’s a lot of technical debt that comes with that. And with that comes resource knowledge of those systems to keep them operational. So, you see a lot of day-to-day friction on support. When you when you find yourself in a situation, and we see this a lot in some of the market segments where a lot of employees are nearing retirement, supporting those systems can be very difficult. And if people aren’t available or you have a limited number of them that know how to maintain them, support is a big piece of that from a friction day to day. The second I would say is just constituent self-service.
When you have these aging systems, they typically don’t integrate very well.
The systems are not designed to be user-friendly. And so, these older systems cause a lot of call-ins for assistance or walk-ins for assistance that typically could be done online, but the technology doesn’t allow it. So day-to-day, that creates a lot more burden on staff, and most of our organizations that we partner with are aware of that on those systems, knows that that’s a reason for the modernization that they look to put forward. I would say the last one is just that if you have legislative changes and you have new things that you want to introduce to improve services online, changes can be very slow. So, when you take these aging systems, they’re very hard to modify. And so that makes it harder for you to get those legislative systems into requirements, into a system that can be fully automated.
Liz Thomas: Russell hit on exactly what I would too. And I think that, you know, I can give real world examples. We run a lot of the state licensing systems and maybe that’s some of the newer laws around cannabis licensing, for example, and the rapid changes we’re seeing in that area. Nearly every legislative cycle, there is something that needs to get in very quickly.
Another one is regulating electric vehicles. A lot of our states depend on fuel taxes that came in from different mechanisms. And we’ve had to roll out very quickly changes to actually collect from EV users, for example. So that’s just government, right?
And we understand that. But being able to quickly deliver upgrades versus creating manual workarounds that require labor, that do require the customer service burden, I think that’s something that’s really hard unless you have flexible system. And in some cases, we can even offer solutions that are self a service from an agency perspective so that simple changes they can make themselves and they can kind of control that journey. I think that’s something that everyone’s dealing with.
And I think just the amount of customization over the years that some of those legacy systems have experienced, as we modernize, that becomes really difficult to actually blend into a system that’s flexible, that it’s nimble for the future.
And so, I think that that’s why a lot of folks are going down the modernization path but looking at it through a different lens. It’s not always, how do we do everything the same way we’ve done it? It’s more about where we can lean into new processes, new technologies to not only enhance our process flow, reduce the call center burdens, reduce the agency lift. Maybe we can lean into new document automation tools that can be embedded in a modern solution so that the limited resources I have are focused on decision making and the things that we don’t want to turn over to our tools.
So, I think it’s just a new way, right? The other thing that I’m really seeing as a shift in our modernization, whether it’s the RFIs or RFPs that we’re seeing or what the journey is, is this need for a seamless end to end transaction for a user. It’s not just about one component, the front end system and then a payment. We’re seeing a desire to have this seamless connected technology from the very first experience that a user has, whether it’s a resident or a business that’s engaging with that through the agency workflow all the way to potentially a payment that’s involved and the ability to reconcile that and get it back to where it needs to go.
So, I think that full circle modernization is something that I’m seeing as a shift over the last few years.
Russell Gainford: A great point that Liz made is she used the word customization. That’s where we see a lot of those aging systems. When you don’t have the partner and the capability in these technologies to extend them, to configure them, to add on the additional changes, then your reliance on somebody else that, in many cases, on these older systems, may not even be company anymore. Maybe one person supporting it, I’ve seen in some cases. So that’s the downsides of relying on those types of customized systems too long.
Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.
The places we call home, our cities, towns, and villages are more than just where we live. They’re where life happens.
Jade Champion: They’re built by the people who lead, serve, and show up every day to make their communities stronger.
Josh Henderson: This May, we’re celebrating National Cities, Towns, and Villages month, a time to recognize the spirit, resilience, and uniqueness of communities across the country.
Jade Champion: From local leaders driving progress to residents creating connection, it’s all about what makes each community special.
Josh Henderson: At Tyler, we’re proud to support the technology behind those communities, helping local governments deliver services, build trust, and keep things running smoothly.
Jade Champion: Join us in celebrating these places that bring us together and the people who make them thrive.
Josh Henderson: Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Josh Henderson: We’ve taken kind of a wide angle look at, you know, this idea of modernization and everything sort of involved in that. But kind of homing in a little bit and trying to understand the totality of the modernization journey, when agencies begin improving their environments, whether through updated platforms or better integration or cloud adoption or things like that, how does that start to change the way teams work and collaborate? How have you seen those changes in your day-to-day?
Liz Thomas: I think, you know, we have seen a tremendous I don’t know whether I call it job satisfaction, but I think when agencies if we think about the way that teams work together within an agency. And again, we know that one of the very top priorities that remains that’s been on that list almost as long as cybersecurity has, has been budget constraints and resource constraints. I think that first of all, the beginning of the modernization journey, I think when a vendor really understands the challenges that an agency is trying to overcome through modernization, I think that engagement in the very beginning on what do we want the solution to accomplish in the end, right? It’s not just, here’s the technology, we’ll give you an instruction guide on how to use it, right? It’s really engaging, especially at the state level. We know every state has slightly different processes.
It’s engaging on what are we trying to accomplish through this modernization effort.
Having those users engaged on the front end and understand the direction we’re going and then through every step of the process, building consensus and buy in in what we’re doing, the benefits that are going to be at the end of it. And then at the very end, we see a much more satisfied agency and team because they not only were bought in from the beginning, but any concerns were discussed. I just think that’s a different approach. I think it’s really important. We’ve seen that be tremendously successful in achieving the outcomes that everyone wanted from the modernization project and then come to fruition at the end.
Russell Gainford: Yeah. I think those modern systems provide a lot of those capabilities to get a lot more value quicker. It reminds me, like last year, I was on this call with a CIO that actually had a Fortune 50 company international. And she had talked about when they went through the modernization of their two major systems, and they had moved to the cloud, but they also modernized the systems on the technology.
She said it was the first year that she was able to go out to their employees, the stakeholders, the business. And instead of saying, we can’t get that done because we’re ending up being a bottleneck. We have to go through these large procurements. We can’t change the system.
She was going out proactively and saying, hey, how can we help you go faster? What can we do to make it easier for our customers and for you to be more successful? And that’s what a modern system allows you to do. You can work – I’ll use the term agile.
We use that a lot in product development where you’re working in in shorter increments. When I’m in a modern system or I’ve moved our internal systems to the cloud, now I can actually spin things up in in a matter of minutes that that costs very little to run for prototypes. I can actually configure things. And many of the solutions that that we build at Tyler, for example, you configure and prototype and show very quickly to clients.
And when that partnership is there, we’re able to go fast. We’re able to iterate and not just see something when it’s about to go live but actually see it when it’s in the original design phase. So, modern systems allow you to get more interaction, partnership, and feedback, and also allow you to get to production a lot quicker.
Liz Thomas: I love that concept. It’s iteration. It’s not the Big Bang theory.
Nobody wants to have to go through weeks of testing only to find out it wasn’t designed how we wanted it to be and then go back to the beginning. And so that’s the great thing about modern cloud native solutions is that we can’t iterate so fast. And I think Russell made a great comment. Seeing those benefits quicker and then candidly being able to fail fast, if that’s not the feature that’s bringing the benefit, I think is just a huge component of modernization.
And I think on the ongoing front too, when we move to true cloud living, cloud adoption, the impact of any new releases, maybe that’s security patching, maybe that’s feature functionality, that becomes less impactful and less burdensome for an agency. And because a lot of times, especially at the state level, they’re testing. We have teams there having to test these new releases or make sure from a user acceptance. And when you can move to this true cloud native technology, those become much less intensive and there’s less risk associated with every release. So, it truly becomes about, hey, what new features are going to be released soon versus, oh, man, what are our impacts that we need to brace for when a release is coming?
Russell Gainford: And where we see a lot of great value in that, Josh, is even if those, features are at a point where they’re distributed everywhere, they’re also able to be shown individually to clients. So, we call those private previews, public previews. So, someone that may be interested in something can try a feature before it’s even gone out and work in partnership to improve it. Going back to what Liz said, if you’re going to have a failure on a feature or capability, fail fast. Understand as early as possible. It’s better to understand as soon as you finish developing something or configuring or look to meet that legislative requirement versus when you’ve actually within weeks of getting out to the public.
Josh Henderson: As we heard today, the NASCIO top ten isn’t just a snapshot of priorities. It’s a reflection of how state technology leadership is evolving in real time. From AI rising to the top for the first time to the continued importance of cybersecurity, accessibility, and cost control, these priorities highlight both the urgency of today’s challenges and the pace of change ahead.
For agencies, the focus isn’t just on what’s new, it’s on how to balance innovation with stability, modernizing systems while continuing to deliver secure, reliable services every day. In part two, we’ll take a closer look at how these priorities are being put into practice from driving efficiency and reducing administrative burden to leveraging cloud and AI in more meaningful responsible ways. If you’d like to learn more about the topics discussed in this episode, check out the show notes for additional resources, and we’d love to hear your feedback. Fill out the listener survey linked in the notes or reach out anytime at podcast@tylertech.com, and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the show so you never miss an episode.
For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson. Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.