Former Austin CIO Stewart Shares Insights on City’s Tech Plans

After a 23-year career in city government, Austin’s former CIO, Chris Stewart, spoke with Industry Insider — Texas about his perspective of the city’s current IT plans and future career goals as a consultant.

Stewart served as the city’s chief information officer from September 2020 to July 2023. Before that, he held various IT-related positions with the city since 2000, including system support technician, IT systems and network administrator, IT manager and utility chief information officer.

Regarding the city’s IT plans, Stewart said “big transformational projects” are on the horizon.

“We’ve got a five-year plan, and it’s going to revamp pretty much everything,” Stewart said. “It changes the way we project manage and do procurement, where we have IT being much more central to those decisions.”

For example, listed in Austin’s strategic plan are the following IT and tech-related goals:

• Rapidly prototype potential solutions; improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce red tape
• Establish standards for secure data collection, storage and sharing while using open-source technologies, mobile-ready web applications and proven agile project methodologies to improve how the city manages projects and information 
• Use a transparent data-driven process to prioritize improvements to and management of the city’s buildings, facilities and information technology to maximize the experience of customers and employees
• Enhance partnerships with the community, other governmental organizations and the private sector to prepare for, respond to and recover from hazards such as flooding, wildfires, cyber breaches and terror attacks
• Collaboratively and comprehensively assess the vulnerabilities and interdependencies for critical city infrastructure
• Update and standardize how the city measures and monitors service and performance standards 
• Implement a standardized interdepartmental process to collect, analyze and share demographic participation and satisfaction levels with culture and lifelong learning offerings to evaluate and improve programs and facilities
• Maintain a mapped inventory of city and non-city cultural and historical assets to identify and address service gaps

As for changes to procurement, the city is asking for $3.8 million for its “MBE/WBE procurement program,” which, according to the interim city manager’s proposed budget, “provides information to the city of Austin to provide development opportunities to small, minority and women-owned businesses participating in city contracting.”

Other procurement-related requests include $12.4 million for Central Procurement, which provides procurement-related activities and services in a timely and cost-effective manner to city departments.

“My hope is that they just follow the plan,” Stewart said. “We’ve got a really good plan in place that we worked really hard on; if the plan is followed, they’re going to be in a much better place.”

As for future career goals, Stewart looks forward to working with government executives and technology leaders in a consulting capacity and mentoring new executives.

“A lot of folks, especially if you’re not in a large city or organization, it’s hard to get experience,” Stewart said. “At an executive level, you’re focused on your job; you’re keeping operations running, building applications, securing your environment. But when it’s your turn to move into a more executive role, they just haven’t had that experience. So, I would like the opportunity to work with some younger folks and folks moving into these types of roles.”