Jayson Dunn, CIO for the City of Cincinnati

WHAT WE DO:

“The City’s Enterprise Technology Solutions Division is County Levy funded, but City managed, so it’s a unique balancing act in terms of recognizing boundaries and limitations. The beauty of it is that most of those things are code, ordinance and charter driven. The key is to know the structures that you have to operate within, and aligning your strategies to work within those structures. Sometimes they come across as limitations, but they are just the boundaries and constructs and every business has them. We are still able to strategize and innovate.”

What are the top 2 challenges facing IT organizations this year? What are the top 2 opportunities?

“We have to do a lot around cybersecurity in the government space. It’s interesting to me that some people seem to think that everything is open to the public as pubic record, and it is when requested formally and legally, but that doesn’t mean that our security can be weak because our data is all public information. We have high-visibility, high-priority issues with elected officials and civic leaders. At one time, it seemed that hackers had a targeted objected, some specific information they wanted to steal, but now it seems that many hackers just want to cause chaos and there are any number of ways they can be disruptive. We have to make sure from a cybersecurity standpoint that all of our mission critical systems are protected, that all of our data is classified and encrypted and that all of the intrusion points to our business network are secured and locked down. Unfortunately, even organizations with much more sensitive data and much more security resources are being hacked – large financial institutions with armies of security analysts. And cybersecurity isn’t just about information; sometimes it’s about finding an entry point to do further damage. Cincinnati is a large port with bridges and roadways, a world-class water purification system; we have our emergency communications system and other infrastructure systems that citizens depend on, so we must be mindful that someone out there could be motivated to do damage to any of that. It is a lot to be mindful of, so we employ our countermeasures to be sure we have all those potential entry points locked down and hardened.

This is one of things that I think is so important about events like comSpark – getting financial institutions, businesses, universities and government together to share notes about how we are each securing things; to be aware of what threats are hitting one institution that may be impactful to another; we can only help one another in that regard. So public-private partnerships, networking, communicating and collaborating – from my perspective you can’t do enough of that on the leadership level.”