When he took the helm as Boston CIO last fall, he shed some of that political baggage. He might have also assumed that the city’s plethora of universities would ensure a steady supply of IT talent to support his efforts. It turns out that Boston faces the same woes as many other cities.
“We are dealing with a brain drain here too. The technology investors want you to be next to them, so they want you to move to California. We lose a lot of talent over to the West Coast,” he said. The business schools meanwhile tend to export their graduates to New York, thus compounding the labor crunch.
A top priority, therefore, will be to court younger workers into public service. “They want to make a difference in the world, so there is an opportunity to take a collaborative approach, to really talk about the ways in which we can make an impact on the citizens,” he said.
Elges has long-term plans to address resiliency in the city’s IT infrastructure. “You talk about the environmental changes and things like rising tide,” he said. “If half our infrastructure is going to be underwater, how can we make that more resilient?”
In the short term, Elges is looking at cyber-resiliency, the ability to bring IT systems back to life after a major hacking event. “Our investment is not quite what it should be,” he said. “In the minutes after, the day after, the week after, what are the plans for what happens next? You can fortify the castle as best you can, but you still need a plan for what happens when a handful of them get inside the walls.”
This story is part of a series profiling new state and local government CIOs.
