By John W. Verity
Winter 2007

It’s not for nothing that New York City is called the Big Apple. Every aspect of life in the country’s biggest city is measured in superlatives: More people, more cops, more fire trucks, more schools teaching more students, more dogs to catch, more trash to collect. And, unfortunately, more—and bigger— security threats to identify and protect against.

Despite such multitudes, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT, pronounced “do it”) has made huge strides in helping its 8.2 million citizens interact with the nearly 100 city agencies that shape, regulate and enhance their lives. For example, a single telephone call to Do ITT’s 311Citizen Service Center lets anyone—no matter which of New York’s 170 languages they speak—report a pothole, secure food stamps, locate a polling place or find out that yes, they really do have to move their car by 7 a.m. the next morning so the streets can be cleaned. The calls are answered by live operators 24 hours a day, seven days a week.Since 2003, when the 311 service was launched, New Yorkers have called the service 40 million times.

Behind this and other initiatives is the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, with a personal fortune estimated at $5 billion. Bloomberg also knows technology. He made his billions by selling IT services to Wall Street. “The mayor is very service-oriented,” says Paul J. Cosgrave, the city’s newly-appointed IT commissioner and its CIO. “To leave in place a standard of transparency and accountability”—that, Cosgrave says, is what Bloomberg wishes to be his lasting legacy. “That’s what he tells me,” says the commissioner, speaking in his offices located a few blocks from City Hall and even closer to Ground Zero at the World Trade Center. “And we’re gearing all that we do here at DoITT along those lines.”

Indeed, 311 is only the beginning of New York’s far-reaching IT vision. Cosgrave and his IT crew—1,000 strong, up from 350 five years ago—serve as the city’s internal IT consulting organization. They are spearheading a wide ranging set of initiatives that should further realize the mayor’s heavily IT-centric vision for making New York a more efficient and generally better place to live and do business in the 21st century.

Projects currently in motion include:

1. A citywide strategy for all aspects of information technology, with a strong focus on flexibility, efficiency, standardization and security;
2. Rolling out a wireless broadband network for use by the city’s first responders (police, fire and ambulance teams), as well as supporting the myriad inspectors and other field workers throughout the city’s five boroughs;
3. Rationalizing the planning of, and spending for, IT development projects across the city’s more-or-less decentralized agencies;
4. A significant expansion of the menu of 311 services and augmenting the mat the NYC.gov Web site;
5. Perhaps most visible to the public: thoroughly redesigning the way 911 emergency phone calls are handled.

DoITT is hardly the first government agency for which Cosgrave has managed IT over his 30-year career. From1998 to 2001, he served as the CIO of the Internal Revenue Service, where he led a major restructuring and centralization of that agency’s sprawling information systems and oversaw its massive Y2K conversion efforts. Subsequently, Cosgrave was executive vice president of Crown Consulting Inc., Washington, D.C., where he managed the design of the Next Generation Air Transportation System, a program to address critical safety and economic needs in civil aviation while integrating national defense and homeland security improvements, for the Federal Aviation Administration.

But Cosgrave says DoITT, with its $280million annual budget, is easily the most varied, colorful and high-profile IT organization he has run yet. In addition to 311 and the NYC.gov Web site, DoITT operates the city’s cable TV channels, several of whose productions have won Emmy awards. It runs the city’s internal phone system and manages the provision of pay-phone services, which are still heavily used in New York. (A separate IT organization, set up in response to the city’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, runs the city’s core financial accounting systems, such as general ledger and payroll.)Recently, DoITT also took over IT for the city’s Board of Education, handling school records for the more than 1 million students who attend the city’s 1,200 public schools. “We’ve become an agent of change for the mayor,” Cosgrave says.

Bigger Bite of the Apple
Like most large enterprises, New York City is constantly struggling to balance its voracious appetite for new and improved IT systems on the one hand, and its limited financial and technical resources on the other. However, the city has been somewhat late in adopting some of the latest IT governance and management tools and methods, in large part because of its size and its organization as a federation of independent agencies. But now Mayor Bloomberg has given Cosgrave the go-ahead to develop a citywide strategic IT plan. Working with consultants from Gartner Inc., DoITT has begun to run a series of workshops in which agency IT heads seek to identify what systems are needed to transform agencies.

Also like other large organizations, New York has gone through decades of decentralized, relatively uncoordinated IT development.

This has left the city with numerous systems that don’t “talk” to each other as they should—the proverbial silos of information that could, when integrated properly, yield big payoffs. “We’re looking for opportunities for synergy across multiple agencies, rather than having each agency go it alone,” Cosgrave says.

A prime example can be found in the numerous systems New York uses to determine the eligibility of both individuals and families for various types of government assistance and benefits. Until now, each agency has had its own processes, and it has been up to individuals to make the effort to find out what benefits they ought to apply for. In response, DoITT is working on an integrated case-management system that will provide a unified view into all benefits programs and help the city’s social services agencies quickly match clients to potential sources of assistance. Similarly, the city’s small business owners must navigate a bewildering array of agencies to get all the permits, licenses and inspections required by New York. A New York restaurant, for example, may need a liquor license, health and fire inspections, a sidewalk table permit, sanitation permits and, possibly, a cabaret license. DoITT is on the case with a setup called Business Express. In its first and current incarnation, this new front-end system explains the specific types of permissions and certificates different types of business require and offers Web links to the appropriate agencies. Coming soon will be online access to those agencies’ forms, which applicants will fill out, print and submit in the usual manner.

Eventually, Business Express will offer online submission of applications, with a single set of data feeding directly into each of the necessary systems. “What we’ve said is, ‘Let’s look at these processes from the point of view of the customer, the client, versus the agencies themselves,’” Cosgrave says, echoing the kind of thinking that Web-based e-commerce has been fostering throughout corporate America. There’s more to the strategic IT plan, however, than building front ends. How DoITT allocates its development budget and how it operates its facilities is another primary focus. “We want to develop a more sophisticated approach to running our data centers,” Cosgrave says. To do so, the agency is adopting the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, better known as ITIL®, an increasingly popular framework of best practices for managing all aspects of IT. “We’re looking for and eliminating redundancies,” Cosgrave says.

To help manage its portfolio of services and make the most efficient use of IT resources, including staff resources, DoITT has adopted the CA ClarityTM project portfolio management system. CA ClarityTM will provide DoITT with a unified view of all development activities and the financial, technical and operational resources they are consuming, now and in the future. “Before I got here, the city had grown a catalog of IT services that were available to each agency, and that was a major step forward,” Cosgrave explains. “But no one could tell me which agencies were availing themselves of which services. Now we’ll know which agencies we need to educate about additional services they can leverage.” The CA solution will also help DoITT better understand, plan and manage its allocation of dollars and specific technical talents to competing development projects, Cosgrave says. Should demand spike for the services a particular IT project is aiming to provide, resources can be shifted accordingly in a planned and financially responsible manner.

All this is part of Cosgrave’s plan to reposition DoITT so it can better support the mayor’s goal of improving service to city residents. “We’re trying to shift the role of the department to become a public outreach bureau,” Cosgrave says. “We’re trying to manage to very demanding service levels, and that calls for variable staffing in the 311 call centers, for instance.” Easily one of the biggest and most critical IT projects that DoITT is overseeing is a thorough transformation of communications facilities for the city’s emergency response agencies: police, fire and ambulance squads. The Bloomberg administration has made enhancing public safety a major focus, and improving communications for first responders in the field promises to be one of the most important components of that effort.

Radio One
As it is, each emergency service has depended on its own radio networks. In addition, each service runs wireless data links to terminals installed in their vehicles. But now, plans are afoot to create a single, city wide wireless broadband network that will serve all three services. In early September, DoITT signed a $500 million contract with Northrup-Grumman to implement the network. Relying on some 400 cell sites and beaming as much as 1megabit per second to any location in the city streets, the network is due to be fully operational by early 2008.

Using this setup, first responders will have much speedier access—they currentlydependon19.2 Kbps data links—to systems providing criminal records and information about radioactive and chemical threats. They will also be better able to coordinate their responses to emergencies.

Eventually, this same network should be of use to the city’s non emergency agencies, too. Today, a call to 311 about a pothole triggers a flood of paperwork. But with handheld terminals, pothole inspectors could file their reports directly from the field and get problems resolved much faster than is possible today. Even as he plans new systems and networks that will keep New York City secure, Cosgrave can’t ignore the mundane problems of city life. Certainly, Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t. Cosgrave’s boss often calls 311himself when he is traveling about town, even asking, on one recent call, for the Sanitation Department to pick up some trash at 83rd Street and Third Avenue. “He’s our institutional quality-assurance guy,” Cosgrave says of the mayor. “He really wants to make sure 311 works.”

John W. Verity is a freelance writer who covers technology and business from South Orange, N.J., though he would rather be living in New York.

ITIL® is a Registered Trademark of the UK Office of Government Commerce.