NASCIO recently released results to their latest survey of State CIOs asking to identify Top 10 IT priorities for 2010. For the past 5 years Consolidation, Shared Services, Information Security, Health IT and IT Governance have consistently made the top 10 list as strategic priorities of State CIOsIn 2009, 3 of the IT priorities were new to State CIOs including Budget and Cost Control, Green IT and Transparency. This year, it is no surprise that Broadband & Connectivity and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act made the list. Half of the list contains priorities being driven in some way shape or form by the Recovery Act.

Furthermore, NASCIO provides a list of top 10 priority technologies outlining to what extent each of these technologies, applications and tools are expected to be the next big trend.

The NASCIO chart (above) in comparison to strategic technologies identified by IT research firm, Gartner (below), shows a pretty vast difference in their ranking of priorities. While Gartner has had Cloud Computing on their list the past two years, this is the first year that State CIO's have identified this as priority technology. Storage, computing, data center and server Virtualization continues to rank #1 among technology solutions with State CIO's. Two other common priorities that appeared on both rankings include Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics applications/Advanced Analytics as well as Social Media and Networking (Web 2.0 services, wikis, blogs, collaboration technologies, and social networking)/ Social Computing.

The IT strategies, management processes and solutions identified by both NASCIO and Gartner are certainly shared by most states as are continuing IT challenges and IT drivers. The current economic downturn continues to be a major concern to state CIOs as State CIOs will look for creative options to "do more with less" and use ARRA funds to help inject an additional flow of money to help further their top priorities. As vendors align their IT solutions with government priorities, it is important to note the number of opportunities available to vendors by being creative and offering expertise. Therefore, teaming with businesses that already have strong relationships with states is highly recommended to better identify state's IT needs but to also optimize from brand recognition..