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Miguel Gamino Appointed San Francisco's Permanent CIO

The city's acting CIO loses his "acting" title, and looks forward to developing more public Wi-Fi and changing the organization's service culture.

San Francisco liked what it saw from acting CIO Miguel Gamiño and decided to make the position permanent. Mayor Ed Lee announced Gamiño’s appointment on Dec. 4 in an internal memo, and made the news public on Dec. 8.

Through his leadership of the Department of Technology, Gamiño contributed both to the city’s Office 365 migration and public Wi-Fi projects. “I think we’ve proven that we’re able now to do things,” Gamiño said. “A lot of [what] we’ve done we’ve talked about for a long time, but the difference was that we actually made major, meaningful, measurable progress.”

Gamiño referenced the fact that the city’s email migration was stalled for years, but the organization today is different.

“We’ve taken a very pragmatic, collaborative approach, so we took the time to make sure that people are properly involved and that their stake in the game is properly considered," he said, noting that this pragmatic approach meant the department set out to accomplish projects in chunks, "and [we] bit them off in ways that we could make meaningful progress."

Public Wi-Fi remains at the top of the city’s technology priorities, he said, not just for the obvious benefit of Internet connectivity, but development will also continue as a means to support other projects. If people want to develop new apps, Gamiño said, it’s crucial to have infrastructure in place that can support those technologies.

Gamiño also noted that he wants to change his department’s culture around service delivery so it more closely resembles what he saw during his time in the entrepreneurial world.

Traditional government offices get a mandate from the legislature that they have to use the IT departments services, Gamiño said. “What I want to do differently is build up service culture in the department of technology that can compete with the alternatives and the other agencies see us as the best solution, not the imposed solution.”

Colin wrote for Government Technology and Emergency Management from 2010 through most of 2016.