Nikhil Deshpande

As Chief Digital Officer for the state of Georgia, Nikhil Deshpande leads the Office of Digital Services Georgia under the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA).

Nikhil envisioned and led the state government’s transition to an enterprise web-publishing platform based on Drupal, an open-source content management system hosted in the cloud. The platform currently supports over 80 state agency websites. Under his direction, Georgia became the first state in the nation to use Drupal across it's enterprise and meet special needs of constituents with a range of disabilities affecting vision, hearing, motion and cognition making the platform Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 AA compliant.

Nikhil strongly advocated the use of social media for Georgia.gov when using social media for the government was not common, and established a presence for the state on Facebook and Twitter to quickly address citizens’ questions and concerns.