By Jim Welfley
July 14, 2008

For the fifth consecutive year, the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from cities around the country met in conjunction with the Annual Conference of Mayors. This year, city CIOs from cities ranging in size from Chicago and San Francisco to Macon (GA) and Cuyahoga Falls (OH) traveled to Miami to discuss a variety of issues affecting cities, including wireless technologies, the greening of technologies, technology innovation and disaster planning and recovery.

Peter Hambuch, a solutions architect from the session’s sponsor, Motorola, started the meeting by detailing how wireless technology would have an impact in cities. With the emergence of wireless-based technology in city operations such as vehicle identification, RFID tracking and asset management, among many others, a sound, secure wireless infrastructure will be essential.

Hambuch said that according to Ken Dulaney of Gartner, "Seventy percent of knowledge work will occur in locations where workers depend on a wireless and remote-access infrastructure that is outside the enterprise’s direct control by the year 2009."

Hardik Bhatt, Chicago’s CIO, spoke to the importance of innovation in order to keep a city flourishing and globally competitive. Bhatt said that even though cities don’t have competition and can’t go out of business, there remains competition for people, resources and organizations. Further, rising expectations, costs, complexity and constrained resources make it a necessity for a city to re-think how it does business. "If we don’t innovate, we won’t go out of business. The business will go out of us," said Bhatt.

To keep Chicago innovative, Bhatt worked with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to create the Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT), leveraging the experience and expertise of local businesses and collaborating with academic institutions to address common problems such as troubled buildings, human services and customer service. By streamlining the organization, improving coordination and communication and bringing citizens and businesses in to help find solutions, the city becomes more "user-centered" and more competitive.

Anthony Jones, Chief Technology Officer for New Orleans, detailed the lessons learned from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and how the city overhauled many of its procedures in anticipation of the next disaster. One example is a new Business Process Management (BPM) powered by cutting edge tools such as SharePoint and Metastorm. Under the new-look BPM, New Orleans has greatly reduced manual processes for previous business flow trouble spots. Now, with the all-digital contract management and tracking system, the approval process has been shortened by months, enabling New Orleans to move quickly and have the equipment necessary to prepare and withstand disaster.

Chris A. Vein, San Francisco’s CIO, detailed the city’s "Connected Urban Development" plan and its efforts to reduce the carbon footprint left by its information and communications technology (ICT) operations by 24 percent by 2012.

"Research shows that worldwide, information and communications technology accounts for approximately four percent of the world’s carbon emissions," said Vein. "Yet, technology has the power to solve many of the issues creating our environmental crisis. This paradox is at the heart of San Francisco’s aggressive green technology environmental program."

The aggressive program includes building a baseline of current energy use, then developing a Green ICT plan as part of San Francisco’s climate action plan. The plan will identify the eco-footprint of ICT for San Francisco and create opportunities for ICT to improve eco-efficiency and spearhead structural change. These opportunities and changes will include improved life-cycle management of equipment, online urban eco-maps to enable citizens to view their own eco-footprint and streamlining public transportation through the use of on-board technology. Once in place, these measures and technologies will then be connected to other communities with the same innovations in place around the globe and the common goal of the "connected" cities will be to reduce their carbon footprint.

If you are a city CIO and would like more information about future city CIO meetings contact Jim Welfley of the Conference staff at 202-861-6796 or jwelfley@usmayors.org.