Pennsylvania Commonwealth Chief Information Officer Bry Pardoe has earned national recognition at the 2026 National Association of State Chief Information Officers Annual Conference in San Diego. The state’s contact center modernization project won a State IT Recognition Award after successfully transitioning 63 contact centers onto a modern cloud-based foundation in less than a year. The pivot saved the state $9 million by shifting the work in-house.
From a Three-Year Outside Contract to In-House Cloud Efficiency
The initial agreement for the project went to a new vendor tasked with migrating the contact centers to that company’s platform.
Yet, once officials realized the timeline would stretch to three years and carry a $9 million price tag, the administration opted to handle the migration internally.
Rather than using that outside option, the state partnered directly with an ongoing vendor to complete the migration onto its secure FedRAMP cloud platform.
Carrying out this initiative demanded inter-agency collaboration, staff training, thorough documentation of service flows, and a designated customer success manager to bridge business objectives with technical implementation.
Redesigning PA.gov and Preparing for the AI Search Era
The contact center migration was paired with another finalist entry: the PA.gov content optimization project. Rather than attempting to update all roughly 30,000 pages at once, the state prioritized high-traffic content to make progress on the large and complex undertaking. To execute this, staff focused on roughly 20% to 30% of each agency’s pages, giving precedence to high-traffic material and merging pages when it made sense.
They also made the web pages compatible with AI search engines. By setting up the content on the website so that it is easy to understand and crawl, Pennsylvania ensured residents could find information whether they used traditional search engines or AI providers.
Building a National Leader in Digital Government and AI Readiness
Pardoe’s leadership extends beyond the award. Secretary of Administration Neil Weaver noted that she has changed the trajectory of digital government in Pennsylvania.
Prior to taking on the CIO role in October 2025, Pardoe held the position of inaugural executive director for the Commonwealth Office of Digital Experience (CODE PA). The office was built under Governor Shapiro’s administration.
Under her guidance, CODE PA supported the Commonwealth’s first-in-the-nation pilot of ChatGPT Enterprise.
