4 Reasons to Attend Tomorrow's Virtual Briefing

Techwire is hosting a virtual briefing at 2 p.m. Wednesday featuring San Jose’s CIO, Rob Lloyd, who will discuss the city and its goals and future as it improves its IT department and moves toward becoming a “smart city.” Here are four good reasons to be there: 

1. San Jose has an estimated population of 1 million, making it the 10th-largest city in the United States and the third-largest in California. The city has over 6,000 government employees and a total budget of $3.2 billion, of which nearly $20 million has been allocated to the IT department in the 2016-17 fiscal year

2. As the cultural and political center of Silicon Valley, it’s only fitting that San Jose is on its way to becoming a smart city. Mayor Sam Liccardo said, “Becoming a ‘smart city’ means that game-changing technologies and data-driven decision-making will drive continuous improvement in how City Hall serves our community, and to promote concrete benefits in safety, sustainability, economic opportunity and quality of life for our constituents.”

In the Center for Digital Government’s 2016 Digital City Survey, CIO Lloyd shared his top-five priorities to help meet San Jose’s big IT goals:

• Hire and Retain Competent IT Personnel 
• Cybersecurity 
• Governance
• Shared or Collaborative Services 
• Open Government/Transparency/Open Data

3. Lloyd shared the IT strategic plan to help push the idea of San Jose to being a smart city and to create the desired culture of innovation:

• Engage an exceptional team defined by our solutions, service and growth.
• Re-platform onto current and responsive technologies and services as our foundation.
• Secure to manage evolving cybersecurity risks and operation requirements.
• Maximize investments through project management and user-centric approaches.
• Accelerate the city’s ability to execute and sustain innovation.
• Focus on prioritized needs: customer relationship management, use of data for decision-making and business process automation.

4. Lloyd is putting this strategy into effect immediately. For a few years now, San Jose has been in the process of replacing amber streetlights with more efficient, white-light LED bulbs. Limited funding caused this project to be drawn out for longer than intended. City officials are looking for funding to complete the project, primarily from wireless companies in San Jose’s private sector. The incentive for these companies is that the lamp poles are a prime spot to place microsites, which lets the companies create an expansive data network throughout the city.

 

How to attend the briefing:

http://www.techwire.net/events/techwire-virtual-briefing-featuring-rob-lloyd-cio-city-of-san-jose.html

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