San Diego County’s next permanent chief information officer will be David Smith, now a chief with the Office of County Counsel. The county announced the appointment Monday, Communications Manager Tegan Glasheen told Techwire via email.
The county, which serves more than 3.3 million residents, mounted a recruitment in February ahead of the retirement March 24 of CIO Susan Green, after 17 months in the role. Assistant CIO Eric Shiotsugu is currentlyacting CIO. All are longtime staffers at the local government.
Smith’s first day as CIO will be May 20, Glasheen told Techwire, at which time Shiotsugu will return to serving as assistant CIO. Smith has been with the county since 2001, and the majority of his work at the county counsel has been in IT, telecommunications, compliance and privacy. “He was lead counsel on the county’s current IT outsourcing contract,” Glasheen said via email. (In late 2016, the county spent $918 million to extend a contract by seven years, awarding the ongoing outsourcing of IT and telecommunications to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.)
Smith is a 1996 graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law. It’s not certain what his early priorities will be as CIO; however, the county indicated its technology office’s priorities are IT strategic initiatives, including “digital services, digital workplace, speed to deliver, application optimization, cloud migration and security.”
Before being named CIO in November 2020, Green had served as assistant CIO for 13 years, and before that, had been the county’s IT manager for five years. Her other roles were assistant director of the Bureau of Child Support Enforcement in the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, from August 1995-December 2002; and senior internal auditor for the county, from May 1990-August 1995. Her awards include being recognized with the 2013 CIO 100 Award by CIO magazine; and the 2013 California State Association of Counties achievement award, both for her work in developing and implementing the county’s Justice Electronic Library System, which took juvenile justice paperless. The county used Adobe Acrobat Pro in Microsoft SharePoint.
Shiotsugu has a 20-year career at the county that dates to 2002 when he joined the entity as a department IT coordinator, rising to chief enterprise resource planning manager in 2006, enterprise information architect in July 2012, and assistant CIO in December 2020. He has a bachelor’s of science in electrical engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; and a Master’s of Business Administration in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix.
