City CIOs can be powerful forces in city government. They help cities harness the power of technology to do business in a more cost effective and more transparent manner. However, progress can be hard to define. Technologies come and go. Failed innovations can be branded as wasted money. The list of roadblocks can be long.

In general, few seem to know what the standards are of a high performing municipal IT organization. The Federal IT Dashboard was one of the first steps in providing data necessary to understand whether IT is high performing. Obviously, there’s more to high performance than whether IT is delivering on time and on budget projects, but it is part of the equation. City CIOs need a set of organizational standards that define what high performing IT looks like.

Standards define and establish expectations and provide a common base for planning. In the browser world, benchmarks such as the Acid3 test provide a progress report for browsers to understand their compliance with various web standards. A set of government IT standards is no different. Standards that measures high performance provides a north star by which CIOs and even Mayors can measure their organization’s effectiveness.

We implicitly know what some municipal IT standards look like, but haven’t committed to making them a reality. For example, we know that every city should have a technology strategic plan. It’s a basic document that tells citizens what the IT is doing, when they will do it, and how they will measure their progress. Oddly enough though, only two of the 20 largest cities in the U.S. have a technology strategic plan (or one that can be found through a search engine). While it’s clear that this standard of high performing government IT is lacking, it’s less clear why.

Some effort towards the creation of these standards has been made through informal “best practices” sharing. This isn’t enough though. Best practices sharing has suffered from a lack of centralization and a lack of mutual agreement. In many cases, CIOs share their best practices through informal channels, such as conferences, to highlight their successes with a given issue.

These successes are often posted on myriad websites with the intention of attracting a critical mass of viewers. Instead, the lessons learned often remain hidden from view or, even worse, lost in the flood of information available on the Internet. Citizens have no clear way of knowing whether their CIOs are following other cities’ best practices or even whether something truly is a best practice. Also, best practice sharing lacks a mutual and binding agreement amongst cities. Without this agreement, cities can not create standards and therefore can’t be measured against a benchmark of high performing municipal IT.

Certainly, there’s been lots of discussions about best practices on topics such as open data initiatives or codifying innovation into an IT organization’s DNA. However, it’s less clear these discussions are leading to a consensus about whether these are part of a set of standards that high-performing municipal IT organizations hold themselves to. For example, some cities have made great progress in making “data as a service” a pillar of government IT. There are two questions that arise out of this: do other cities agree that this is a pillar of government IT and what comprises this commitment? The basic shape of cities’ commitment can be seen in their work with organizations like Code for America. A clearer set of standards for high performing government IT would help reinforce and clarify cities’ commitment to open data and innovation.

So what’s holding cities back? And what will it take to move this discussion forward amongst cities?

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.