Capital challenge

SUZANNE PECK, CTO of the government of the District of Columbia sees opportunities where others might see headaches. A decade without adequate investment in technology by the city’s leaders had left Washington’s infrastructure in serious disrepair and woefully behind that of other municipalities.

“Everything was terrible across the city,” says Peck, who signed on to head the district’s Office of the CTO (OCTO) six months before the Y2K deadline and then successfully worked to bring the city through the millennium changeover.

With antiquated technology and an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure, Peck says there was nowhere to go but up. “The district then was 49th to 51st on every municipal list for any kind of service,” Peck says. “Now, [the OCTO] is merging into a group of best IT practices for state governments.”

Much of Peck’s work has gone into deploying IT offerings, with the ultimate objective of greatly improving city services. All of this must be done with an eye on the CTO’s role as a leader in an organization in which the CEO — Mayor Anthony A. Williams — is a publicly elected official.

In meeting this goal, Peck is charged with leveraging IT as an agent for change to make government work; accelerating economic development by including city services in the overall technical infrastructure; equalizing access to technology to support the city’s children and to rebuild the human services network; and enhancing public safety and emergency preparedness.

“[The OCTO] is charged with executing the vision,” Peck says. “Every basic business process must work. That takes 80 percent of our time — replacing awful, ugly work process. Each one of the agencies must operate in an efficient way.”

The main challenge for any CTO is to constantly have his or her eyes on the big picture, says Iraj Tavakoli, CTO of McLean, Va.-based Innovative Logistics Techniques, which recently completed deployment of an asset-management solution for the district’s Water and Sewer Authority.

“Every municipality has its own culture and doesn’t necessarily have a cohesive view of the entire operation,” Tavakoli explains. “A technology challenge is one thing, but overcoming cultural hurdles of getting people to agree to one integrated scheme becomes a bigger challenge. [A CTO of a municipality] really has to get used to the fact that he or she is not in control of the entire thing. That is a hard challenge.”

During her tenure, Peck and the OCTO have upped the city’s online profile; now, they get approximately one-half million e-mails a day, served through a 600-location WAN. The CTO is also taking advantage of available fiber bandwidth — brought into the district by a cable contract — to deploy a unified communication center managed by Verizon that will improve emergency communications capabilities.

By September 2003, Peck expects to have 157 sites lit within the district, with principal district buildings and schools first on the list. The District of Columbia also launched the online Business Resource Center (BRC) in August 2001 to provide businesses with a one-stop shop for business information, resources, and transactions, such as business licensing.

To date, estimated savings in reduced customer service positions, net of annual BRC costs, total $1.8 million. In fact, the district received for the project the Recognition Award for Digital Government in 2002 from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers.

“I am everywhere from strategic planner to marketer to IT cheerleader,” Peck says of her role as CTO. “If something is going wrong, I’m over it like a cheap suit.”