Features Government

It’s not as though Steve Ratliff wasn’t making inroads at one of Detroit’s oldest law firms. In the year since he’d become chief information officer at Butzel Long, he’d re-energized its IT structure and department, tweaking here and overhauling there, while bringing outsourced operations back in-house and adding some key personnel. “Those changes were timely. […]

It may seem a small county tucked away in New York along the Pennsylvania border, but Broome County government has pretty big tech needs, says CIO Jim Dutcher. “We have such a diverse set of customers and end users,” he says. “We need to be as nimble and as agile as any high-tech company you […]

While the systems were functioning quite capably when Peter Parsan assumed the role of director of information technology solutions at a Canadian municipality in April 2019, his bosses saw a growing need to use IT to foster more efficiencies and service improvements for the Region of Peel northwest of Toronto. Among other priorities, Parsan was […]

Chief Information Officer Joe Fousek is a pretty popular guy around the office these days. Such as when there’s no such thing as technical “downtime” anymore. Since coming to the national law firm of Bond, Schoeneck & King in 2018, Fousek has been spearheading a three-year master plan to implement $10 million in technological upgrades: […]

You might say Dan Raiha uses tech to help people see the forest for the trees. The CIO for the Idaho Department of Lands makes sure Idaho uses data to best manage 2.5 million acres of land. That’s a perfect role for an Idaho native with a degree in mathematics and a deep appreciation for […]

It takes a certain amount of absurdity, Shane McDaniel acknowledges, to purposely break technology that’s long worked reasonably well and commit to a complicated and costly upgrade. Especially in the public sector, which is where McDaniel has plied his infotech expertise and leadership the past two years as the first IT director of the south-central […]

In retrospect, it could have been worse for Newark, New Jersey, in the spring of 2017. Sure, the municipal computers were hacked and the Garden State’s most populous city held up for $30,000 in bitcoin by a couple of high-tech miscreants in the Middle East. But that same duo likely extorted even more in untraceable […]

For some, the term “innovation management” may seem like a sign on a Disney Studios office door. But Andrew Buss, Philadelphia’s Deputy Chief Information Officer for Innovation Management, sees his role as trying to change the way municipal government works. “There are a lot of ways to define innovation,” Buss says. “For us, innovation is […]

He doesn’t have to look far for a reminder of what can happen when a municipality lets down its cybersecurity safeguards. For just this past spring, Baltimore was held virtual hostage, its computer systems hacked by the ransomware RobinHood. While Maryland’s biggest city may be commended for refusing to pay the hackers $75,000 in untraceable […]

It’s not Tokyo or New York, but for Chief Information Officer Travis Cutright, the IT amenities currently being rolled out in Mesa, Arizona—the 35th largest city in the U.S.—are as cutting-edge as they come. There’s a mobile app that allows users to access and pay their utility bills from anywhere, high-speed networks in neighborhoods where reliable […]