CIO: How Tech Reimagines City Government

Story by Carrie Pallardy

Key points:

·       Nick Lucius has spent his entire career in government service, putting his skills as an attorney and data scientist to work in several roles with the City of Chicago. Last year, he was confirmed as the city’s CIO, heading up the newly formed Department of Technology and Innovation.

·       “I’m proud of what we're doing in Chicago … saving significant amounts of money by being more efficient,” Lucius tells InformationWeek. “We’ve saved $6 million already in 2025, which is a significant part of our budget. But [we did] so without a reduction in the delivery of services to humans.”

·       As Lucius moved through each of these roles and now in his position as CIO, he increasingly took on leadership responsibilities.  As the head of the department of technology and innovation, Lucius and his team have responsibilities for a vast array of systems that support the third-most populous city in the country.  

Welcome to InformationWeek's Big Picture!

You already know that every day at InformationWeek brings expert insights and advice to help today’s IT leaders identify the best strategies and tools to drive their organizations forward.

That means original reporting from our team of journalists and unique commentary you won’t see anywhere else! But in case you missed them, here are some of our must-read favorites from this week:

From CTO to CEO

Story by Richard Pallardy

Snehal Antani worked for IBM and eventually served as CIO for GE Capital and CTO for Splunk. In 2018, he joined Joint Special Operations Command, a division of the United States Special Operations Command, as CTO. In 2019, he started Horizon3.ai, an AI pen testing company, with JSOC colleague Anthony Pillitiere. In this interview with InformationWeek, he describes his unusual career path and how he deploys the skills he learned along the way to facilitate innovation. 

Curiosity, Adaptation Boosts Innovation

Story by Lisa Morgan

Early PCs have laughable specifications by today’s standards, but they inspired a lot of creativity. Take Jacob Anderson, owner of Beyond Ordinary Software: He started programming a Commodore 64 as a tween and has let his curiosity drive his career ever since.

Story by John Edwards

AI-generated code may sound like a career-killer, yet a growing number of IT leaders are now turning to AI to generate various types of routine code. This frees human coders to focus on more complex and rewarding tasks.

Podcast of the Week

Podcast by Joao-Pierre Ruth

In this Breaking Bread session, Craig Martell, chief AI officer for Cohesity; and Matt McVaney, chief revenue office for BombBomb, discussed finding common ground between operations and tech to make data useful, and better understand the demands on either side of this dilemma.

Listen to the full episode here.

This is just a taste of what’s going on. If you want the whole scoop, then register for one of our email newsletters, but only if you’re going to read it. We want to improve the sustainability of editorial operations, so we don’t want to send you newsletters that are just going to sit there unopened. If you're a subscriber already, please make sure Mimecast and other inbox bouncers know that we’re cool and they should let us through.

And if you’re thinking about subscribing, then maybe start with the InformationWeek in Review; it only arrives on our new look Fridays.