Contact

About Steve

Twenty-five years as a California county CIO, doing the work in local government IT.

I took my first CIO role in local government in 1999, coming from the private sector. I was hired because I was good at the technical work and had good communication skills. I was not good at the leadership work yet. Nobody was teaching it.

I learned it the hard way. By making mistakes my team had to absorb. By sitting in meetings I didn't understand. By getting feedback from elected officials, department heads, and County Executives that was sometimes generous and sometimes brutal, and almost always right.

Twenty-five years later, I'm still learning. And I'm now in a position to make the work easier for the people coming up behind me.

This site is part of that.

THE WORK

I served as CIO and Agency Director for a California county. The work covers everything you'd expect: infrastructure, applications, cybersecurity, governance, the help desk, the data, the people. Twenty-five years of running IT for jurisdictions that don't have the budget or staff of a large enterprise but have to be just as good at the work. This included providing turn-key outsourced IT services to two local cities.

This is where the framework in the book came from. Not from a research project. Not from a consulting engagement. From the chair.

The Passion.

Building the leadership development pipeline.

In 2015 I started working on something the profession was missing: a real leadership development pathway for county IT leaders. That work led to a partnership between the California State Association of Counties (CSAC), Info~Tech Research Group, and the California County Information Services Directors Association (CCISDA).

Out of that partnership came the County Technology Credential Program, a ten-course certified curriculum built specifically for the people running IT in California's counties. More than four hundred county IT leaders have gone through it and the program is still going strong today.

I still teach in the CSAC Institute for Excellence in County Government. It's where many insights and ideas for the book came from.

The writing.

I started writing publicly about local government IT leadership in 2021. The book came out of that writing. The articles continue alongside it.

The reason is the same in every direction: nobody else was writing the version I needed when I took the chair.

CREDENTIALS AND RECOGNITION

RECOGNITION

California CIO of the Year

Top 25 Doers Dreamers and Drivers of Technology

Circle of Service Award - CSAC

President's Award - RCRC

Leadership & Legacy Awards - CISSDA

TEACHING