NASCIO's Doug Robinson On The State Of State Government

Is it because state budgets are limited to what they can allocate to IT that important areas like security don't see enough of that budget?

I think it is part of funding, but the other thing you've got to recognize is that states are not going to compensate at the prevailing market rate. It's extremely difficult for them to do that. They do have tight budgets, but they have to compete for that talent. So how do they do that? Well, they usually get them in as interns and many states are going after veterans. They have to be a little more innovative in terms of how they bring in their talent, particularly young talent. States have very few employees. There are states that in their entire IT workforce, they have very small numbers of workers under the age of 30. I would say about 30 percent of the IT workforce is eligible to retire in the next year or two, so that is going to have an impact. What some states are doing is saying, 'we can't replace those positions. We're not backfilling those positions by design.' They're moving to managed services, by consolidating the IT environment they don't need as many system admins as they did before. We've got some states that are doing some exciting things in that personnel area.