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.”

To what extent does our recreational use of technology drive innovation in business? Is business taking the lead or lagging behind?

“Everyone wants more and more mobile. Mobility really is important to us and we have a lot of real-time reporting devices out in the field now. The police have a very broad vision for a real-time crime type of environment. Every police vehicle is equipped with an air-driven mobile data terminal, and all of the information from those cop-smart vehicles is coming back to the Emergency Communication Center. We also have a lot of strategically placed cameras around the city bringing in real-time crime data to and from law enforcement. Our Public Services Department has a system called Zonar that routes all of our trash and snow plowing vehicles intelligently, so that we have eyes on where all those vehicles are in real time. In the next few months, our Fire Department will have a new mobile data system that will allow the MVC’s already in vehicles to transmit high speed data so that firefighters will have more intelligence with incident data in their vehicles. It will have automatic vehicle location, so we’ll know where every fire, EMS and ladder engine is in real-time, and we will dispatch off of that to send the nearest first. Our Water and Sewer Department workforce is mobile enabled. Our next big effort will be stabilizing our city business network – all of that out in the field now - to better support it with more bandwidth. We want to be a smart city with a smart workforce and more mobile intelligence and high-speed data in the field.”