Two Indian-American technocrats among top 50 IT leaders of the year

Two Indian-American technocrats, Krishna Kumar Edathil from Texas and Nikhil Deshpande from Georgia, have made it to the coveted StateScoop Top 50 2022 l.
The StateScoop 50 Awards annually honour the best and brightest who make state government more efficient and effective. While Edathil has been named State IT Leader of the Year, Deshpande has been declared the State Leadership of the Year, according to an announcement made this week.
Edathil, who is the Director of Enterprise Solution Services for the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR), has led Texas ahead in cloud ranking in the US. He has also launched the state’s Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence.
His contribution to emerging technologies qualified him to be nominated.
“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,” said Amanda Crawford, state chief information officer and executive director of Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR).
In the award notification letter to Krishna, Jake Williams, vice-president, Community and Content, Scoop News Group said, “These awards are community driven and are decided 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!” “This award is the recognition for all the technology adoption advances made in cloud and artificial intelligence through the Texas Tiger Team movement,” said Krishna who has emerged as one of the most influential and inspirational State IT Leaders in the USA, attributing the recognition to teamwork and a collaborative movement to accelerate innovation in Texas.
“Texas leads public sector innovation and emerging technology adoption,” he added.
The ninth annual awards were presented at a reception in conjunction with the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) midyear conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
Nikhil Deshpande, Georgia’s longtime chief digital officer, has played key roles in establishing the state’s social media presence and leading the move to an enterprise wide open-source publishing system.
Recently, Deshpande’s team has been working with agencies to improve their digital services.
“We cannot just be offering online services with technology in mind, we have to… (keep) users at the centre and then build the servicesaround user needs,” he said.
Deshpande said that a part of ensuring citizens can use state services is being able to search and find them.