San Francisco CIO Miguel Gamiño was a guest on this week's episode of The Future of Work podcast.
Gamiño discussed several topics during a one-hour conversation with host Jacob Morgan and provided several insights about the tech marketplace and the city-county government's push for innovation. Here are a few takeaways from the interview, available here.
1. Gamiño said very soon the San Francisco city-county will release a "playbook" for attracting and retaining tech talent within the government. Gamiño called it a game-changer that S.F. will share with governments around the world. The playbook uses a method similar to the boot-camp style onboarding that the Bay Area's biggest tech companies use. "We're finalizing that framework now and looking forward to launching it very soon, and I'm really confident that we're going to change the game and have a lot to offer other government jurisdictions, frankly," Gamiño said.
2. Gamiño said the S.F. city-county government is "pushing very hard" to offer high-quality, free Wi-Fi along Market Steet and at 34 public spaces. He said users can get download speeds of 50 Mps — speedier than some households. On the other hand, San Francisco is trying to get gig speeds to everyone and every household, Gamiño said. Instead, the larger goal for connectivity is to have choice and to make it equitable and accessible.
3. San Francisco is almost finished with an enterprise rollout of Office 365 to 28,000 government employees, and the last two big departments will be migrating to it very soon, he said. Gamiño said San Francisco is "maybe the first city completely in that cloud service."
4. Gamiño said he anticipates that fully autonomous vehicles will be operating in San Francisco within two years, and ride services like Uber and Lyft will be using them.
5. San Francisco continues to evolve its cloud architecture in its data center infrastructure, and Gamiño called it a "journey." He said S.F. is investing heavily in transforming its customer service culture, and is creating a retail service model they call the Service Lab. Gamiño compared it to an "internal version of a Genius Bar."
Miguel Gamiño Jr. was appointed the permanent CIO for the city and county of San Francisco in December 2014. The IT department he leads has about 220 staff and a budget of nearly $100 million.
