Open Letter to the incoming City of New York Administration
by Minerva Tantoco
As the new Mayor Eric Adams takes office tonight, and the next administration begins their work, I am hopeful that the intent to manage waste and cut out fraud extends to the City’s technology strategy. I offer my observations and recommendations on improving how the City manages its technology, reduces technology risk, and oversees its technology spending for the benefit of all New Yorkers. When I was appointed the first Chief Technology Officer of the City of New York in 2014, I had come from the private sector with experience in IT consulting and financial services, and a big part of being the first in the job was defining it. One of the key roles I took on already existed — Chair of the Board of the New York City Technology Development Corporation (NYCTDC).
Large-scale IT projects are complex to manage and prone to massive budget overruns and missed deadlines, even for the best-funded private sector companies. Government projects are even more difficult, and the results can be expensive, ineffective, and in some cases, disastrous. Many City agencies can’t do this work on their own and are risk-averse, so the City of New York spends a lot of money on external IT consulting engagements to work with agencies on these programs.
NYCTDC was the New York Technology Development Corporation, a non-profit established primarily as a Program and Project Management organization that provided consultative services to critical and complex information technology projects for the City of New York. It was founded the previous year, in July 2013, under Mayor Bloomberg, while Rahul Merchant was Commissioner of DOITT, and designed to be a non-profit IT consulting firm. It provided consulting for strategic projects in technology architecture, program management, and advisory services for key initiatives by supporting the agencies’ execution of these large transformational projects. NYCTDC hired highly experienced program managers, architects, and IT experts from the consulting industry to join the non-profit tech consulting firm. By the end, under Acting President Marge Ginsburg, NYCTDC employed about 22 full-time staff consultants who wanted to use their skills for good. The projects were impactful, and it was rated very highly as a great place to work.
Rather than exclusively hiring outside IT consulting firms, the City ran the NYCTDC with the City of New York as its only client. This has huge advantages by providing strong program and project management services to large and strategic tech projects. It provides oversight to these complex projects and lowers the cost to the City while retaining the institutional knowledge across agencies. Many large programs require the participation and coordination of multiple agencies, and there is no central capability for these larger IT programs.
Under my tenure from 2014–2016, the work which the NYCTDC supported included Advisory services to the Department of Finance, Department of Education, Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs, developing a City-Wide cloud strategy, Mobile First, and CIO Advisory services. NYCTDC provided skilled Program Management and QA support for the SBS Portal, DOB Inspections, and Universal Pre-K, as well as project initiation and planning for City Procurement tracking systems in the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services. The NYCTDC worked with the Department of Finance to replace its 30+-year-old Property Tax System, a large, complex, multi-agency program that required interfaces with more than 10 agencies for tax collection.
Another example of an impactful NYCTDC project provided Program and Risk Management support for upgrading New York City’s public hospital systems to electronic medical records. NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest public health system in the country, undertook a system-wide program which by 2015 was in danger of running over budget and behind schedule. A strong partnership between NYCTDC, with internal and external expertise, helped steer the program to a successful milestone, the first two hospitals going live, in April 2016. The rest of the program saw more delays and management changes after that, but the “rolling go-live” milestones in the years that followed were completed in March 2020. The new system connects hospitals, emergency departments, and home care for patients and clinicians, improving patient outcomes and patient access to their health records. Today, New York City’s public hospital system uses the same healthcare technology that is used by the top health care systems across the country. It demonstrates that applying technology where it is needed most can have an enormous impact.
However, the NYCTDC contract with the City of New York was not renewed in June 2017, when the original contract ended. (I had left City Hall and co-founded a challenger bank by then). I had truly hoped it would be renewed since it had been doing such important work and provided City Hall with cross-agency coordination on many major technology projects. Along with the Technology Steering Committee, which I also chaired, NYCTDC provided a City-wide view across technology projects.
Although the NYCTDC was founded before the federal-level United States Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, both have continued through two more administrations, yet the NYCTDC has not. The NYCTDC organization and funding model, different from its federal counterparts, can and should be restructured and reinvented to meet the needs of New Yorkers and City agencies today, but its core mission is vital.
So, why does New York City need a Tech Service like the NYCTDC or the USDS? There are institutional and political barriers to effective IT transformation and risk management, such as changing priorities, a politicized budgeting process, and agency silos, which prevent a single agency, including DOITT, from handling alone. While effective technology management may not grab the headlines, many key initiatives and their effective execution depend on a coordinated implementation strategy, strong program management, risk management, and oversight. A separate, transparent resource to all agencies, as the NYCTDC was tasked to be, is a critical component of bringing cost-effective, equitable, and impactful solutions to the people of New York City.
With the planned huge investments in infrastructure, the continuing digital divide, and the inequalities laid bare by the pandemic, management of City government technology is in dire need of transformation. Can we strive not only to improve the City’s technology but also leverage the latest technology to improve the lives of everyday New Yorkers? Bringing back an NYC Tech Service for agencies would be an important first step.
