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Speaker: In addition to being the accidental CIO, I'm also the first CIO of the city and county of San Francisco. The city has about 150-year history of having individual departments, and those individual departments don't necessarily work well together, not unlike corporations with business units and departments. So in these departments, some of them are the poorest of poor departments when it comes to technology. They don't have technology. They're still using 46 computers. Then you have other departments that are wealthier departments. They may be earning income in other ways outside of the tax base. And so those departments have big IT shops. And so what I'm trying to do is take 60 different departments within the city, and varying degrees of technology, varying degrees of control, varying degrees of money, and trying to come up with a common plan for the city. And then based on that plan, come up with a rational way of identifying what we should be spending our money on, and how we're going to spend it.
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Speaker: So as I understand it, currently you have about 330 people, a budget of 95 million dollars. But that's just a fraction of what the city spends overall on technology.
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Speaker: Correct. The budget -- overall budget for the city and county of San Francisco is about 5.7 billion dollars. And so my 100 million dollars, roughly, is pretty small. And the challenge that I have, and that the city has, is that it's not clear where all the pockets of money are in the city, and it's not clear where all of those different departments are going. So my biggest challenge, first of all, is just identifying what we've got, and where everybody is going.
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Speaker: And then you have the political challenge of convincing all those other departments to go along with the plan.
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Speaker: Yes. The phrase is herding cats. And, you know, it gets used over and over and over again, but it really is true. How do you really go out and get all of these people who really don't want or need -- or feel they need me in order to move the city forward and achieve economies of scale and really make better use of the resources that we have.
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
