As former metropolis Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman displays on her time with town, she says a job the place she will use the Internet of Things to enhance metropolis life was too good to move up.
Though no longer working in city government, former Chicago chief data officer Brenna Berman stated her work will proceed on a parallel path from a brand new place at city innovation nonprofit UI Labs.
Berman left Chicago after six years of serving to town improve its enterprise intelligence and analytics skills, quietly bolstering town’s IT sustainability, and aiding on a long-term challenge to automate town’s predictive analytics capabilities — a challenge that is scheduled for launch someday in June. The IT chief additionally helped town within the early phases of its Array of Things challenge, a city-scale sensor community designed to assist a burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) house perceive its capabilities. With an curiosity in doing extra work in IoT, Berman left town to guide the City Digital initiative on the Chicago-based UI Labs.
“There will still be a partnership with the mayor’s office, and I think the only reason he was supportive of me moving on was because of where I was going, because I’m still very much aligned with his vision for Chicago being a tech-enabled city and that includes our community,” Berman informed StateScoop.
The “UI” in UI Labs stands for “university” and “industry,” and Berman’s work will largely focus on constructing connections between the idealistic analysis occurring across the nation’s instructional establishments and the sensible one-off gadgets being launched by personal trade.
Berman may even assist convene a bigger group of cities round issues like municipal water provide. Chicago and Los Angeles, for instance, have reverse issues with regards to water, and so it is useful to have various viewpoints when fixing these sorts of issues, she stated.
“When you think about smart cities, often the focus is on how city government can use IoT to solve their problems, but cities are much bigger than city government. You’ve got nonprofits, you’ve got the private sector,” she stated. “Looking for partnerships to bring these types of solutions to the rest of Chicago will make that transformation much more robust.”
As a CIO, Berman managed a variety of applied sciences for town, however the alternative to do extra work with IoT was one she stated she could not move up.
“I think IoT is actually extraordinarily disruptive,” she stated. “I think it’s going to be as disruptive to whatever industry you happen to be in — for me, it’s cities — as the internet in general was 15 years ago. Being on the forefront of that kind of change is very exciting. And at the same time, especially in the public sector, it introduces some really interesting challenges in the realm of security and privacy and also the potential to increase the accessibility and [reduce the] digital divide for some people in the city.”
Looking again on the previous few years, Berman pointed to town’s elevated competence round using knowledge as certainly one of her workplace’s banner achievements.
“What Chicago has done to make data and analytics a common operating principle for our departments [is impressive],” she stated. “It achieves the mayor’s vision of using data and analytics as an information-driving principle for how our departments operate.”
The former CIO additionally assisted with the creation of an open data portal that makes an attempt to achieve a wider viewers, and a predictive analytics automation challenge to launch in June that’s supposed to ease the pressure on town’s restricted knowledge personnel.
One of the perfect issues that occurred throughout Berman’s tenure did not get a lot discover, she stated, and that was an inside transformation that included a restructuring of town’s telecom operations, the creation of a brand new knowledge heart, and migrating functions to the cloud. Things like that make every thing extra secure and guarantee IT will proceed to be accessible to the companies that rely on it, she stated.
“I’m personally really proud of because I had a pretty small but highly talented and dedicated team and year on year we ran a really tight ship that was able to drive strong, innovative operations that saved the city money every year,” she stated. “I loved being there. I’ll miss the team and there is nothing quite like serving the residents of your city.”
