Texas, USA (CU) _ Two Indian-American technocrats, Texas’s Krishna Kumar Edathil and Georgia’s Nikhil Deshpande, have entered the most prestigious StateScoop Top 50 2022 list. The StateScoop 50 Awards annually recognize the brightest and greatest who improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state government. According to the announcement, Edathil has been crowned State IT Leader of the Year, while Deshpande has been recognized as State Leadership of the Year.
Edathil, who serves as the Director of Enterprise Solution Services for the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR), has taken Texas to the top of the US cloud rankings. He has also established the state’s center of excellence for artificial intelligence. His contribution to developing technologies made him eligible for the nomination.
Amanda Crawford, state chief information officer and executive director of the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR), expressed delight over Krishna’s victory. She said, “Krishna’s leadership has been pivotal in accelerating technology modernisation efforts here in Texas. He is a trusted partner for our customer agencies on their digital transformation journeys”.
Jake Williams, vice president of Community and Content at Scoop News Group, stated the following in the award notification letter sent to Krishna. He said, “These awards are community driven and are decided by who receives the most votes from across the state government IT community. This year, we received thousands of nominations and the StateScoop audience cast more than 3.5 million total votes to decide the top 50, and you were among those top leaders!”
Krishna expressed delight over the new recognition. He said, “This award is the recognition for all the technology adoption advances made in cloud and artificial intelligence through the Texas Tiger Team movement”. Krishna became one of the most influential and motivational State IT Leaders in the United States. He attributed this achievement to teamwork and a joint effort to expedite innovation in Texas. He added, “Texas leads public sector innovation and emerging technology adoption”.
The ninth annual awards were presented during a ceremony held in National Harbor, Maryland, in partnership with the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) midyear conference. The longtime chief digital officer of Georgia, Nikhil Deshpande, was instrumental in creating the state’s social media presence and spearheading the drive to an enterprise-wide open-source publishing system.
Recently, Deshpande’s group has collaborated with agencies to enhance their digital offerings. He said, “We cannot just be offering online services with technology in mind, we have to… (keep) users at the center and then build the services around user needs”. Deshpande stated that individuals must be able to look for and locate state services in order to utilize them.
