Marcus Thornton

State IT Leadership of the Year

As the No. 2 data official in Virginia, Marcus Thornton is helping mature the commonwealth’s use of data from within a young agency: Though the Virginia Office of Data Governance and Analytics only codified last summer, Thornton says his team began with momentum from a strong interest from other agencies. “We’re extremely encouraged, especially now,” he says. “We have a new administration here and a lot of the focus has been on cybersecurity and specifically on data. And so we have a lot of agency heads and secretaries with data backgrounds, technology backgrounds.”