In the last year, Bill Greeves has gone from being the IT director for Roanoke County, Va., to the head of a new Communications and Information Technology Department that has 80 employees and merges public safety and IT. He has taken on parts of three different positions, including CIO.
It started in early 2009 when the county decided to move public safety, which operates the Roanoke County Emergency Communications Center (ECC), from the police department. Just as the search began for a director of that new agency, CIO Elaine Carver announced her plan to retire.
With Carver leaving and the budget picture not improving, County Administrator Clay Goodman III decided to consolidate IT and the ECC under one position. "And he was looking right at me as he said it," the 36-year-old Greeves remembered with a laugh.
Greeves took charge of the merged departments in October 2009. "I was stressed out about it at first," he admitted. "In IT, you are in charge of crucial systems, but not life and death. But that is exactly what public safety is, so I was entering a whole new realm. But it has gone relatively smoothly so far."
There was some apprehension in the ECC about whether the center would get enough attention, or be absorbed into a larger group and be the redheaded stepchild, Greeves said. One reason that hasn't happened, he said, is that he was allowed to hire two assistant directors who act as lieutenants for each area. "I have daily interactions with them and get a balanced view," he said. "If anything, I have paid more attention to public safety because there is so much I need to learn about it and I wanted to earn their trust."
Occasionally someone asks Greeves why the county would put an IT person in charge of 911. He says it's actually not an odd pairing. "There is a misconception that people in the ECC only use phones and radio dispatch," he said. "Actually they are technologists using computer screens, mapping and wireless headsets."
The IT applications group already had a good relationship with the ECC staffers through supporting their computer-aided dispatch, so it wasn't a painful transition. Greeves is working to apply some of the approaches used in the IT department's project management office to fix business problems in the ECC. "We want them to have a consistent approach to fixing problems," he said.
Greeves said he enjoys working in the public sector and likes being exposed to all aspects of public safety, which is the No. 1 priority of local governments. "I don't see myself staying a CIO my whole career, so I see taking on this added responsibility as a positive thing."
Go to Government Technology to learn more about how CIOs are expanding their roles by managing consolidated departments.
