On June 27, longtime Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle nominated the agency’s Deputy CIO Tom Lynch as its next CIO, according to Joel Inwood, public information officer at the Cook County Bureau of Technology. If confirmed by two county entities, Lynch would claim its top technology job — held through June 15 by Simona Rollinson, who stepped down as CIO to join Chicago-based design-build company Clayco.
With Rollinson as acting CIO, Cook County undertook a slate of multimillion-dollar agency system transformations, awarding IT contracts totaling $154 million for updates in integrated justice, property and revenue systems and for a multi-department enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. But the ERP and a modern biometric time and attendance system, Inwood said, had both been spearheaded by Lynch.
“He was named deputy CIO last year and the enterprise resource planning project — that’s his,” Inwood said, noting that the ERP replaced a variety of different county systems — some of which were still paper-based — in departments ranging from benefits to human resources. The modernization will cost $70 million over the life of the contract. The final wave of the ERP, expected to come as soon as later this month, will be a full integration of its new single sign-on function.
“There’s one version of the truth, which is really big for us. We have a lot of separately-elected offices with their own autonomous IT systems, so to have everybody on one system is really big for us,” Inwood said. Lynch’s nomination will be considered by the county’s Legislation and Intergovernmental Relations Committee later this month, and by the full Board of Commissioners on July 25.
