State CIOs Recruited by Big Tech
Throughout last year, Amazon Web Services was on a hiring spree, but from a very limited talent pool. They were hiring state CIOs. They had hired one previously and added three more former state CIOs in 2020, signaling just how serious they were about the government space. AWS is a massive player in the cloud computing space and has offered government solutions for years, but this move certainly felt a bit more targeted. They’re currently employing former CIOs from Illinois, Kentucky, Arizona, and Mississippi.
Of course, just because AWS is the largest player in the cloud services space doesn’t mean they don’t have others hot on their tail. Microsoft’s Azure is in second place and has been gaining market share. Microsoft is also following Amazon’s lead in grabbing former state CIOs, and at an accelerated rate. In just the past four months, Microsoft has hired four former state CIOs and one city CIO. Their hires are made up of CIOs from Delaware, Illinois, Arkansas, New York and Austin, Texas.
Again, there just aren’t a plethora of state CIOs even available to hire since you can only have one per state, and on top of that, it’s not a position that’s existed in government for an extended period of time. To go even further, only half of state CIOs move to the private sector after being in the role, and even then, not all of them stay in tech.
This all adds up to make this string of hirings between just two firms a very unusual proposition. Then again, companies that are the size of Amazon or Microsoft are some of the few out there that have essentially limitless resources with which to lure the type of talent or subject matter expertise they need if they see an opening in the marketplace.
The pandemic has certainly highlighted a need for government to be able to rapidly share and collect accurate data. It’s hard to get a handle on any type of problem if we can’t look at the data, or if one state’s data is incompatible with another’s. We’ve seen it in our own business as well as governments and hospitals need to process COVID tests that aren’t interfaced with their systems so they use OCR and algorithms to automatically capture the data as opposed to running into a backlog with manual data entry. We’ve even seen documents like land or court records, that aren’t associated with the pandemic, have an urgency to be made digital as traditional in person visits to government offices are no longer viable.
While both Amazon and Microsoft have been serving government customers for years, it appears they’re trying to acquire the type of knowledge that can only be obtained with decades of experience or firsthand understanding of where governments are and aren’t struggling. None of this changes the way we do business at Extract though, as we believe our 20+ years of experience and the optimization of our software designed to help governments go digital serves an important purpose, whether these entities need to shield private information or retrieve important data points from their documents. If you’d like to learn more about us and our software, please reach out.
