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
the clock strikes "1" to execute Bloomberg's strategic vision.
Two-Phased PlanBloomberg'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,"
Cosgrave said.
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 weren't any good governance processes
in place as far as managing things on a more citywide basis," he 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 are battling 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 menu, 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
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. "DoITT has never
looked across the city in terms of a portfolio of things we're doing," he
said. "So we're trying to put a process in place."
The second phase of the strategic plan is to build a road
map for what DoITT will do 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 311 hotline for the city's more than 7.5
million residents. "[Bloomberg] had that up and running within a year of
his being elected," Cosgrave said, "and it completely changed how the
city operates."
Connecting with Community BoardsThe impact of 311 on
New York City's services and IT management
has been profound. It centralized the city's customer service and call-taking
functions. In turn, the city now makes public the types of calls it receives
and how it responds to those calls. It fully reflects the mayor's themes of
transparency, accountability and accessibility.
But IT centralization has its limits in government. Few
jurisdictions at the state and local levels have achieved true centralization.
In states such as
Virginia and
Michigan, where the
governors practically mandated centralization, success has never been outright.
Small agencies with little or no IT staff are willing partners in a
centralization effort. That's not so with the big agencies, which typically
have their own IT staffs that sometimes rival the size and scope of the
jurisdiction's IT department.
Still, Cosgrave is betting on a citywide strategy using
IT to deliver on the mayor's vision. "I'm working on a lot of committees
and trying to manage things on a more citywide basis," he said. DoITT has
also added the position of chief technology officer to provide senior
leadership for enterprise architecture, strategic planning and portfolio
management.
One of the places where Cosgrave has been spending more
time is the City Council chambers. So far, Cosgrave has had a positive impact
there, and with one council member in particular. Gale Brewer, a Democrat who
represents the Upper West Side of Manhattan and has been a critic of past IT
policies, had nothing but praise for the freshman CIO, especially for his work
in making 311 data reports available to community groups.
"Cosgrave closed the loop regarding 311 follow-up,"
Brewer said. "Nobody did that before. And that's a lot of work because it
involves 59 public community boards."
Rise of the Networked CityNew York City's
311 service has had a major impact on city government. "It has changed the
way agencies have to deal with the public, and it has cast the CIO into a role
most don't ever face," Cosgrave said. The call center service, which is
run by DoITT, has thrust the CIO into a much more public-facing position than
most government IT executives are used to.
As Brewer pointed out, Cosgrave meets with the community
boards to discuss how these groups can reach out to citizens based on the
queries and complaints received by 311. For example, anyone who has a heating
problem calls the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Each year, the department receives 500,000 calls relating to heating
emergencies. Thanks to 311, that number has grown. Because so many of the calls
are made by immigrants, many of whom don't speak English, Cosgrave must ensure
his callers can field calls in 170 different languages -- not your typical IT
issue.
And starting this year, 311 becomes enhanced 311 (E311)
in
New York City,
when 211 human service calls are integrated into the call-center structure.
Working with groups like the United Way and DoITT, the city's health and human
services agency is now partnering with the nonprofit community to deliver
services. The unique partnership is the beginning of a new trend in how
government works, according to experts.
In Governing by Network, authors William Eggers and
Stephen Goldsmith discuss how the rise of IT is enabling local governments to
weave together solutions involving agencies and nonprofits, and then deliver
the solutions to community groups, as
New
York is beginning to do. The challenge, according to
Eggers and Goldsmith, is managing these networks because governmental systems
are designed to work in a hierarchal -- and not a networked -- model of
government.
Cosgrave said he realizes the enormity of what lies ahead
for E311. "It's incredible how many different agencies get involved in
these processes," he said, "so trying to streamline these things into
an electronic format versus a paper process is a big challenge."
Yet Cosgrave's most time-consuming work involves public
safety. At the top of the list: replacing the city's 911 system. This requires
collocating police and fire in one building so calls can be handled uniformly.
As the technology provider, DoITT runs the program, which means acting as
facilitator, resolving various structural, process and cultural issues between
the two agencies.
The city is also installing a significant public safety
wireless network. The plan calls for a service-oriented architecture, so that
services can ride on the network in a logical way. One example will let the
fire department retrieve images of a building located at the address of the
fire.
As Cosgrave points out, the feature sounds great. The
challenge, however, is how to structure and process those requests so the data
moves logically and doesn't complicate the delivery of other types of emergency
information over the wireless network.
Leaving Tradition BehindCosgrave says his philosophy as a CIO is simple.
"It's about people and processes. Technology is
last. Dealing with people is paramount."
But as
New York
moves from its traditional hierarchical system of distributing services to one
where services are assembled horizontally and delivered at the community level,
the business process rises in importance.
"I spend a lot of time on business process change,"
he admitted. "How do we take a bureaucracy that has traditionally thought
of things in terms of agency-by-agency and change that model and think about it
in terms of the constituent?"
It's a question many CIOs are pondering these days. Not
surprisingly, many eyes will be on
New
York City to see how it handles this question over the
next 1,000 days.
Tod Newcombe is the editor of Government Technology's Public CIO.