Effective Monday, D’Amato will join Santa Clara County as the director of its Office of the Chief Information Officer, the county’s Chief Information Officer Ann Dunkin confirmed to Techwire. D’Amato replaces Paul Constantino, who will retire at year’s end, Dunkin said via email. Her responsibilities will include “typical OCIO responsibilities, including managing the immediate office staff (admin, comms, development), strategic planning and other activities,” Dunkin said.
“I have a new deputy starting on Monday as well. Consequently Nina’s responsibilities are a little in flux, as the three of us will be working together to review our organization structure and decide if we want to make changes,” Dunkin added.
The county’s new deputy CIO will be Donald Lemma, CIO and associate dean for technology at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University, Dunkin said. Lemma, the CIO said, “has also worked on the west coast.” Previous to his time at Columbia, Lemma was CIO and director of computing at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University.
Lemma's “(doctoral-level) technology skills and keen business acumen” have earned him “a seat at the table” as corporate officer and operating committee member of two Fortune 1000 companies; and “the respect of the operations and technical staff while serving as head of technology/CIO,” he said on LinkedIn.
In three years, nine months at San Francisco, D’Amato drove “the success of (a) $140 million organizational portfolio of projects, programs, and operations across five strategic initiatives,” she said on LinkedIn. She also served as liaison “with senior leadership and various other personnel and teams” to ensure the city/county’s support structure conducted its business “with minimal expenditures.”
“Colleagues describe me as a progressive, driven, down-to-earth, innovative, energetic, precise, dynamic, technical, and managerial expert who can be relied on to offer superior solutions that deliver profitable results on time and under budget,” she wrote on LinkedIn.
D’Amato, who covered topics including disruption and IT threat-awareness strategy at the Bay Area Regional CIO Conference in August, will join an agency with several potentially disruptive projects lined up this year, including streamlining internal tech processes and modernizing its public safety and justice programs.
