Transformation in 1,000 Days

Finding 75 Park Place, the location of the offices for the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), can be a bit tricky if you're not familiar with Lower Manhattan. Once you get below 14th Street, the rhythmic grid of Midtown gives way to a less logical, more European warren of narrow streets. Names like Fulton, Vesey and Barclay replace the numbers that make up most of Manhattan's street system. Just a few blocks from Park Place resides the vast, gaping hole that was once the World Trade Center. One-way streets suddenly end, while other streets run at odd diagonals, creating short blocks where towering skyscrapers sit. At first, the effect is disorienting.

The building at Park Place is nondescript, unlike some of the more historic city buildings that sit not too far away. What it lacks in grandeur, 75 Park Place makes up for in IT. More specifically, it's where the brain trust for the nation's largest municipal IT operation resides.

Walk through the large office layout and you're likely to see many familiar faces, including longtime city IT staffer Ron Bergmann, who is now DoITT's first deputy commissioner.

But the new commissioner and CIO is an unfamiliar figure. Paul Cosgrave took over less than a year ago, shortly after Mayor Michael Bloomberg's successful re-election bid. He is new to New York City and to local government. From 1999 to 2001, Cosgrave was CIO of the IRS during its Y2K conversion and the introduction of online taxpayer services -- two rather challenging IT projects for an agency that received black marks in the past for its technology modernization efforts.

Cosgrave, who had extensive IT experience in the private sector before working for the federal government, returned to the private sector once again where he served 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 -- who built a financial and media empire partly on his acute understanding of IT's value -- he will help move New York closer to being the premier knowledge capital on the big-city global stage, which includes places like London, Paris and Shanghai.

He 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