From the Center for Digital Government:

Christopher O'Brien
Chief Information Officer
City of Chicago

Center: Please describe what in your career led you to becoming the CIO of the city of Chicago?

O'Brien: I went to get my MBA at North Western in the early 90s where I specialized in management strategy, and after I graduated I went to a management consulting firm and did work in oil and gas, retail, health care, etc. At the same time, the mayor was looking to recruit management consultants into government to bring some business process and strategic experience into the operations of city government. I got connected to him through some pro-bono work I was doing with the Chicago Public Schools -- and that is how I got interested in some projects he was working on and decided to make the switch. Then I moved into a couple of different positions and became the CIO in the year 2000.

Center: Are you collaborating with the public schools?

O'Brien: Chicago Public Schools is a $4.5 billion organization similar in size to the city, and the mayor oversees the schools. So, much of the work we do has implications for them, but also they have their own CIO who oversees the technology group and does a lot of applications specific to what the schools are doing. The CIO of the schools and I do interact regularly and we're involved in each other's projects.

Center: What major enterprise-wide projects do you have under way?

O'Brien: When I first arrived, technology wasn't centralized and mirrored the city's organizational structure with about 42 different departments running fairly independently of each other. What you had with technology was multiples of 42 different applications doing back-office processing and work that doesn't support management decision-making or customer interaction.

The approach we took is to say the city isn't 42 times X number of processes. It's really a handful of processes that are all interconnected -- things like customer service, administrative processes around budget and management; regulatory processes around inspecting and permitting; land management dealing with property and boundaries that change; and public safety.

We tried to look at applications as being much larger and encompassing all of those kinds of processes rather than trying to fit together hundreds of homegrown applications. So, the first thing we did was a CRM/311 project. We were also one of the first governments to implement ERP. We installed Oracle Financials in 2001, which handles all of the city's administrative processing. For all our code enforcing and regulatory processes, we use Hanson for an enterprise-wide solution that deals with tracking of inspections and permitting.

And what has underpinned all of those projects, but has been the most unnoticeable to citizen would be the work we've done in GIS -- and I think our GIS is as strong as anyone else's out there.

We basically modernized our entire application infrastructure by looking at core enterprise-wide processes. Now after five years, we've pretty much hit all of those major processes, and the results have been pretty dramatic for the city.

Center: What is the key lesson you've learned implementing these large-scale processes?

O'Brien: First and foremost, the most important thing is you have to a mandate from the mayor, and it's something that the mayor understands and is interested in. Obviously, Mayor Daly is technology-focused and is interested in improving how government operates. So, that's the first thing -- strong engagement from the mayor. And as the project goes on, his office has to be very engaged in driving it.

Second, equal or co-leadership from the IT