Long before Nebraska's governor picked him to transform one of the state's most anonymous agencies, Matthew McCarville was already here — but on a path that seemed headed elsewhere.
McCarville, the salt-and-pepper-haired 38-year-old whom Gov. Jim Pillen tabbed in April to lead the state's technology department, first arrived in Nebraska when he was 2 years old after spending his earliest years in Miami.
Before he turned 11, his biological father had died, his mother was unable to care for him and his adoptive father — the man McCarville's mother had remarried before divorcing — had left him in the care of a children's home in Fremont, where the president of the orphanage helped McCarville land a short-lived full-ride scholarship at Mount Michael Benedictine High School in Elkhorn.
A change in leadership at the school left the 15-year-old McCarville in the care of his adoptive father for his sophomore year in O'Neill. Another twist of fate sent him back to Omaha to live with his unstable mother in a rundown apartment.
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He picked up shifts at Panera Bread and Burlington Coat Factory to pay the $550 monthly rent, supporting his mother, who was inflicted by a chronic mental illness, and his 1-year-old half-brother.
By the time he was 17, McCarville understood something had to change. He moved halfway through his senior year of high school to live with an uncle in Florida, which offered full college scholarships to the state's high-achieving high school graduates. McCarville saw it as his only way out.
But unbeknownst to McCarville, he had applied to Creighton University in Omaha. He suspects his mock trial coach at Skutt Catholic High School — another private school he attended on a scholarship thanks to a chance encounter with the school's president — filled out his application for him.
He got a full ride there, too.
"Which was great, because if I would have went to a big state school, I would have lost my scholarships," McCarville recalled in an interview last week. "Because I got diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma cancer my freshman year — stage three. It was right in between three and four.
"And Creighton worked with me for three years, going in and out of year-round treatment, chemo and radiation. Gave me my own dorm room and everything. And didn't make me drop out of school, which is what all of my doctors needed to do."
Instead, he graduated in nine semesters — one longer than the traditional four-year track. He's since earned four more degrees from the university, including a master's in business administration, another in business intelligence and analytics, a third in project management and a doctorate, too.
McCarville's resume is as rife with glowing accomplishments as his life story with personal tragedies.
Along with his wife Katie, he took custody of his 5-year-old half-brother — who died before he was 20 years old — not long after McCarville himself had finished undergrad.
He was named the chief data officer for the State of Florida before he was 35 years old.
"I'm an outlier if you look at the data," said McCarville, who seems to view his own life story with the same analytical lens he has brought to Nebraska as the state's chief information officer. "Most of the people I went to the orphanage with are working part-time jobs. They're at Valentino's or McDonald's. Some of them work construction."
He credits advocates — like the Mount Michael administrator and the Skutt Catholic mock trial coach — who took it upon themselves to change McCarville's trajectory.
And he points to the realization he came to at the orphanage, where he was a firsthand witness of "all the worst case examples in life," he said, referring to the absentee parents like his own who had left their children in care of the system.
"The commonality they had was a lack of education," he said. "That was the one thing I knew that would get me out of the low-income, orphanage-style life that I had come from."
Now, armed with an education forged out of his traumatic upbringing here, McCarville is back in Nebraska following stints leading IT departments at public institutions in Florida and Colorado.
On the surface, his new role atop the Office of the Chief Information Officer appears to be of little consequence. He is an IT professional heading a mundane state agency responsible for serving the tech needs of other state agencies, boards and commissions, as well as other political subdivisions across Nebraska.
In reality, McCarville may be among Pillen's chief allies in the governor's quest to "(run) state government like a business."
"I was hired to come in and be a change agent," McCarville said in an interview in the fourth-floor conference room of the unmarked downtown Lincoln building that houses the office he now leads.
That marks a sea change at the Office of the Chief Information Officer, where the last agency head, Ed Toner, led an effort to consolidate the state's IT infrastructure — a move that McCarville called "very much a 1980s IT play."
"There are no states that want to do that anymore. It's a 20- or 30-year-old play," McCarville said. "But that's what he was hired to do."
Reached by phone, Toner called McCarville's assessment of the consolidation project he led "a totally incorrect statement." He said the project had saved Nebraska $160 million and remains an aspiration for other states across the country.
"They would do it if it was easy," said Toner, who . "The problem is it's a very hard process. But the benefits far outweigh doing nothing."
Initially hired by then-Gov. Pete Ricketts and initially retained by Pillen when he took office in 2023, .
McCarville took over as the state's chief information officer in the waning days of April, bringing with him from Denver a wave of changes, including the agency's first reorganization in at least two decades, he said. He has almost twice as many direct reports as Toner did, he said — a move meant to "change the culture here into a culture of team dynamics."
He has created three departments within his office that didn't previously exist in the state: one focused on web services, another on cybersecurity and the third on data.
In the budget request his office sent to Pillen's staff last month, McCarville's agency asked for the authority to hire 70 new full-time employees — without asking for a budget increase.
McCarville and his team hope to offset the costs through reduced operating expenses, including a cut to the number of contractors the agency works with, which for now matches the number of full-time employees on staff. McCarville hopes to convert 70 contractors into full-time staff.
"We've had some of these contractors since the ’90s," he said, later adding: "I think it's no secret contractors cost probably double per hour — if not triple — than what a (full-time employee) typically costs, even with benefits."
Much of the money McCarville hopes to reallocate for new employees will come from newfound efficiencies, he said, pointing to unnecessary spending on data center and mainframe hardware.
Among spending McCarville hopes to slash: landline phones at every desk in every office in the state, which will be replaced by cellphones or "softphones" — web applications that allow employees to make and take calls from their computers.
"This is one of those where if you ran it as a business, you would have done this decades ago — well, let's say maybe a decade ago," he said. "Because we run like the state, we tend to push back on change. I think all states, all governments do that. You get set in ways."
McCarville is seeking to rethink that line of thinking. He created a web services team that could one day internally manage the state's website, , and the online transactions it hosts.
The state's website has been maintained and operated by the same private contractor since its inception in the 1990s. The vendor earns revenue from keeping 80% of the transaction fees charged every time someone makes an online purchase from , bringing in $1.4 million in profit in 2022, according to the state's auditor.
It isn't up to McCarville whether his office takes over the contract. That decision is in the hands of the State Records Board. But the forming of a team that could one day bring the state's online cash register in house is a step further than McCarville's predecessor was willing to go.
"It is a large undertaking, and it's something that is a risky proposition and could actually end up costing the state more money in the long run," Toner said, later adding: "If they don't complete the project efficiently, on time, on budget, it will affect the service ... so that Nebraskans won't have that option. They'll only have the option of going in person. Right now, they're guaranteed the option of going online."
Such assessments are what McCarville is up against as he tries to transform how the state does business.
"Aversion to change, I think, is the biggest problem that we have," he said.