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Clark County, Nevada CIO Laura Fucci Receives CIO of Year Award

"I spent the first year building bridges and burning down walls."

Photo: Clark County, Nevada CIO Laura Fucci

Recently, Clark County, Nevada CIO Laura Fucci received the CIO of the Year Award from the Technology Business Alliance of Nevada.

In 2006, Fucci left her position as CTO of the MGM Mirage and, as she said in an August article in Government Technology's Emergency Management, "I spent the first year building bridges and burning down walls," Fucci said. "I started a technology-collaboration forum between distributed and centralized IT to work on issues and standards."

Fucci believed that before focusing on how new technologies could be applied to solve some of the county's problems, she had to shore up IT service delivery. "You have to walk before you can run," she said in a June article in Public CIO. She believes building credibility is the most important thing for a new CIO. "You have to prove that you will indeed do what you had said you would do," said Fucci.

Using the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, her team prioritized the top 10 actions it could take to improve customer service. "We brainstormed over what we needed to deliver and how to measure it," she said in the article. "Since then, we have made significant improvements. We study metrics each week and get feedback from the county manager and other executives.

"What tends to happen is that IT gets enamored with a tool, and you end up with it sitting on a shelf without a plan for how it solves any particular problem," she said. "I am working to change that mentality so that we understand the problem before we buy the tool."

Wayne E. Hanson served as a writer and editor with e.Republic from 1989 to 2013, having worked for several business units including Government Technology magazine, the Center for Digital Government, Governing, and Digital Communities. Hanson was a juror from 1999 to 2004 with the Stockholm Challenge and Global Junior Challenge competitions in information technology and education.