The executive upgrade
Information technology is no longer a back-office function in local government. In the past few years, chief information officers (CIOs) have moved out of the shadowy world of bits and bytes into the executive spotlight, where public speaking, leadership and political finesse are more important job functions than understanding networks and machines.
Most cities and counties now want a polished, experienced IT businessperson who walks and talks like a private-sector executive, understands the complexities of local government and has a passion for public service, which often comes without a princely salary or generous stock options. At present, no degree programs or advanced training exists with the sole purpose of merging those previously divergent skill sets, so local government CIOs share a variety of professional backgrounds. While many have grown up in local government, some are moving in from the business world. But, all are adapting to a changing landscape where public-sector service and private-sector efficiency are becoming equally important.
CIOs go public
As technology powers nearly every government project and program, CIOs today have more responsibility and must be more accountable than their predecessors. “A decade ago, about 85 percent of CIOs wouldn’t have even had the title of CIO, they would be more like a [chief technology officer] CTO,” says Alan Shark executive director of the Washington-based Public Technology Institute (PTI). “They would be working on automating things that had never been automated before or going through a second generation of automation. They also would be working in a more decentralized environment, so your transportation people might have their own CIO. It wouldn’t be uncommon for a city to have four or five CIOs. Today’s CIO requires more of a visionary; someone with more political skills than might have been expected before.”
CIOs are looking beyond their local government borders and forming collaborations in their community, making their jobs more public and more political. “Resources are becoming very scarce in some areas, so we have to make sure we spend our dollars as effectively and efficiently as possible,” says Washtenaw County, Mich., CIO David Behen, who is leading Wireless Washtenaw, a public-private partnership to build a wireless network for the county. The project is in the pilot phase and will be fully deployed next year. “The CIO has to be very politically savvy, very personable. It’s absolutely imperative that they can communicate, and they have to have relationship-building skills, or they will not be successful.”
They are also looking for the best technologies used in the private sector that keep customers happy and help businesses operate efficiently. In Chicago, CIO Hardik Bhatt, a former private-sector executive, co-chairs the Mayor’s Technology Council, a board that investigates new technologies that are helping the city’s leading companies be more efficient and attentive to customers. As a result, Bhatt plans to implement a customer relationship management system in the city’s public works department that will use the same tracking systems FedEx uses for its packages.
Municipal wireless projects, like Wireless Washtenaw, have been major catalysts in bringing CIOs into the public eye and requiring them to interact directly with constituents. San Francisco and Philadelphia have brought free wireless Internet to their residents, and others, like Chicago, are following the lead. “We hold public hearings where citizens come in and talk to us, and we define how this is going to help them — how it’s going to change their lives,” Bhatt says. “The municipal wireless project is the most citizen-facing thing that CIOs in the United States cities are doing now.”
Municipal wireless, however, is not the only function getting IT personnel into the field. In Seattle, CTO Bill Schrier, who notes his title is a holdover from the mid-1990s, negotiates franchises with the area’s two cable providers. When one franchise is up, a three-year-long public process begins that involves asking the community how well the cable service provider is performing. “To make sure the provider is acting in the best interest of constituents, we go through a lot of public processes with elected officials, a lot of listening to constituents, public meetings, etc. That’s something an IT director wouldn’t have done 10 years ago,” he says.
Seeking return on investment
Although governments in the 1990s had larger budgets for technology, fewer projects were on the table. Today, technology is not only on desktops, but in police cars, sanitation trucks and in the hands of permit inspectors in the field. With more projects to choose from, CIOs must explain their expenses to budget directors and the mayor’s chief of staff. “The CIO has to learn the language of the [chief financial officer] CFO, because every IT project now has to be justified in terms of the return on investment (ROI),” Bhatt says.
Many CIOs say that getting the best ROI comes from adopting the technologies used in the private sector. While some CIOs are eager to learn from the corporate world, others take a more cautious approach when following business. “Private companies often lead in technology, and public agencies don’t adopt it quite so fast, and there’s a good reason for that,” Schrier says. “We’re playing with taxpayer dollars here, and we can’t afford to waste them. We want to use proven technology.”
Going one step further, some local governments are seeking CIOs with private-sector experience. According to PTI’s Shark, 75 percent of CIOs in the 10 largest cities — including Chicago, Boston and Denver — have come from the private sector. Although most governments cannot offer salaries and benefits comparable to large companies, they manage to attract former executives who are looking to apply their skills to more than a bottom line. In addition to the appeal of public service, governments can promise job security. “In the dot-com era, government tried to recruit technicians from private companies,” says Dale Bowen, PTI’s director for professional development. “Fairfax County, Va., had a nice hook. They told prospective recruits, ‘We’ve been here since 1742. We’re not going away.’”
While Shark says that a private-sector executive would execute well the new skill sets for CIOs, the skills are not exclusive to those with corporate experience. “Clearly the IT enterprise is getting far more complex and in many ways similar to the private sector,” Shark says. “But [the trend] is something that we have to watch very carefully because while there’s some good in that, you don’t want to disenfranchise those people who have a sense of history.”
Public sector CIOs, however, often face bureaucracy when it comes to implementing new technologies. Chicago, for example, has 45 departments, and a big challenge for its CIO is convincing commissioners from different departments who have been using the same processes for many years to buy into a new enterprise resource management (ERP) system. “[The city’s] ERP solutions are built from best practices around many big companies in the world,” Bhatt says. “But you may have five different stakeholders in the room, and each wants the technology built their way.”
Yet Bhatt maintains governments cannot afford to ignore the private sector. “[Emulating the private sector] increases our productivity; it decreases the time that we take to serve citizens,” he says.
However, governments must ensure that profit and ROI are not the only focus, Schrier says. “In city government, we obviously consider return on investment, but what’s the return on investment for an earthquake of 8.0? You can’t weigh making technology investments to prepare for those situations on a return on investment,” he says.
Finding tomorrow’s CIO
As today’s CIOs plan for succession, they evaluate how their roles have changed and how IT executives should prepare for the future. They also seek resources for the ideal combination of education and training.
Most agree CIOs should understand business before technology, particularly because they can hire staff solely for their technical expertise. “You need to know enough to be dangerous, of course,” Behen says. “But IT is really a foundation now for everything we do, and not to have a CIO who can be a leader, manager and coach, [undercuts] your organization’s capabilities.”
Whether local government CIOs need corporate experience is still debatable. “When I became a chief technology officer, I reached out and talked to CTOs and CIOs in the private sector here, and those conversations are interesting, but the thrust of our jobs is radically different,” Schrier says. “No CIO in a private sector company needs to worry that if their technology goes down, somebody’s going to die.”
Behen stresses the importance of joining with colleges to build the public sector CIO skill set. PTI is collaborating with the Florida Institute of Government, a division of Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla., to create a CIO curriculum, which, when made national, will have three certification options.
Until candidates emerge who are groomed for city and county CIO jobs, local leaders might want to keep their options open to rising talent from unconventional corners. “Cities and counties ought to look to promote CIOs from the business side of their house,” Schrier says. “They ought to look for someone who has grown up managing a street or water utility — a job that required them to work directly with constituents — because the business of city government is taking care of constituents.”
Lynn Peisner is an Atlanta-based freelance writer.