Data is the building block of every decision. Cities rely on meaningful data to make all kinds of decisions from where to spend money on road repairs to the deployment of law enforcement resources.

In theory, cities hire Chief Information Officers (CIO) to be their leaders in providing their decision makers this data. In practice, this isn’t happening as planned. As witnessed in various city strategic technology initiatives, municipal CIOs struggle to devote meaningful and strategic resources towards the development and management of meaningful data. Instead, they often spend their time being the Chief “Infrastructure” Officer; spending significant resources on the maintenance and upgrade of basic technology infrastructure, rather than new and better data resources to assist city leaders and citizens in making informed decisions.

Much of this issue can be traced to the rise of the client-server model. The role of the CIO was formulated during this rise, forcing CIOs to take on significant duties to maintain and refresh all kinds of different clients and servers necessary for the client-server data exchange to work. This trend continues today. A quick scan of cities’ strategic technology initiatives reveals many infrastructure projects, such as server virtualization or Windows 7 rollouts, but few in the collection of better, more meaningful data.

Some cities attempt to rectify this by appointing a Chief Digital Officer or Chief Innovation Officers. This is a good first step because it recognizes the value of data. But it does beg the question “What’s the CIO’s job if not to provide information (data)?” Care will need to be taken to avoid fracturing a city’s technology dollars and strategic plans between a CIO and the newly minted digital or innovation officer.

Clearly, we need the “I” part of the CIO title to meaningfully relate to the provision of information services. We need municipal CIOs to spend less time on upgrading operating systems and deploying “thick” client software and more on the business of cities. This is not to say that municipal CIOs aren’t trying hard to do this. They are, but the infrastructure projects seem to be getting in the way. Jack Donahue, the faculty chairman at Harvard’s Masters in Public Policy program, described this conundrum well in an April 2011 New York Times article found here. Governments hold on to the commodity (another word for infrastructure) jobs but, have been unable to build the higher level “data analysis” and strategic consulting jobs. Information technology is no different.

Given the budget pressures within city governments, it’s not likely that CIOs grow their way out of this problem. Something has to give and the only short term mechanism to accomplish this is to move some of the infrastructure to the “cloud.” The cloud has been well discussed over the last couple of years, but it’s less clear what municipal CIOs’ overall plans are for leveraging the cloud to recapture the mantle of being the cities’ information leader. A city’s journey to the cloud is just beginning. However, the real move towards realigning the CIOs role won’t happen until we realize that providing better data is inextricably linked with moving away from IT infrastructure management. That is the challenge of today’s CIO.

Logan is the Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Portland. You can follow him at @PortlandInfoSec or email him at logan.kleier[@]portlandoregon.gov.

Disclaimer: These opinions are my own and do not represent the views of the City of Portland.