Paul Cosgrave, New York City's newest CIO has been on the job for barely a year, taking over as Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) shortly after Mayor Michael Bloomberg's successful re-election bid. 

Though new to New York City and to local government, Cosgrave is not new to the public sector. From 1999 to 2001, he was CIO of the IRS during its Y2K conversion and the introduction of online taxpayer services. Cosgrave, who had extensive experience in private sector IT before working for the federal government, returned to the private sector after 2001 as executive vice president of Crown Consulting Inc., an IT consulting firm. 

But in 2006, Bloomberg snatched Cosgrave to guide DoITT through strategic changes that would coincide with the mayor's own vision for New York during his second term. Some of those changes go to the very core of IT's role in the public sector today. If Cosgrave executes the plan for Bloomberg, he will help move New York closer to being the premier knowledge capital on the big-city global stage, which includes shining lights like London, Paris and Shanghai. 

Bloomberg's second-term themes include transparency, accountability and accessibility, which he wants to embed into the delivery of government services. "We're structuring everything we do to align IT with those themes and to deliver a much more customer service-oriented government," said Cosgrave, in an interview with Public CIO.

Such an alignment calls for change, and you can't make fundamental change without a strategic plan. So last year, after Cosgrave took over DoITT, he initiated a two-phase plan, starting with DoITT's structural and governance issues. 

"We did this because there wasn't any good governance processes in place as far as managing things on a more citywide basis," Cosgrave said. "We're a highly federated model here in the city. For a lot of reasons, however, we're moving toward a more centralized model." 

Those reasons include a civil service system that's out of step with IT needs, and the inability to attract and retain workers on a municipal salary when skilled personnel can easily move to Wall Street and make lots of money. As a result, city agencies battle each other for IT talent. But where others see a problem, Cosgrave sees an opportunity. 

DoITT has always been a utility for the city, running wired and now wireless networks for the city, but now the agency is adding more services to its utility bucket, such as help desk services, e-mail services and more, Cosgrave said. "On the operations side, you are seeing more and more agencies having us do these things for them." 

With a greater emphasis on IT management, Cosgrave has initiated a portfolio-management process for the first time. Using his experience working in the federal sector where streamlined IT approaches are common, DoITT is closely engaged with New York's Office of Management and Budget to align applications with what the mayor wants to accomplish. 

The second phase of the strategic plan is to build a road map for DoITT over the next 1,000 days. As Cosgrave pointed out, tight deadlines for IT projects aren't new in New York City. Bloomberg's first mayoral campaign focused on a centralized hotline for the city's more than 7.5 million residents. 

Cosgrave has his work cut out for him, however. And time is literally ticking. A clock in the mayor's office is counting down the days remaining in Bloomberg's administration. Cosgrave and others only have until the clock strikes "1" to execute the mayor's strategic vision. 

Look for the full profile of Paul Cosgrave in the June issue of Public CIO.