Interview with San Francisco CTO: Architecture and cloud behind Open data projects

The federal government should be the first government in the world to establish the post of National Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Accordingly, as the most cutting-edge technology and innovation base in the United States, as well as the Silicon Valley gateway of San Francisco, is also the first city hall to set up the chief technical officer of the town. A few days ago, San Francisco, chief technology officer, Gina C. Tomlinson, received an interview with Pingwest founder Ai Yi (Thomas Luo) at the city Hall. The interview covered topics such as the role and responsibilities of San Francisco's chief technology officer, the cloud of municipal it architecture, how government technology innovation has served the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and business organizations in San Francisco, the progress of Open data programs and the value of data transparency.

Q: Please tell me about your job and responsibilities as CTO of the city of San Francisco.

Gina C. Tomlinson: As CTO of San Francisco, my job is simply to design the city's technical direction, drive technology, infrastructure, and systems that make it work in every corner of the city, covering the servers of government data, the wireless WiFi environment of the entire city, Satellite communication signals, virtualization, cloud services and optical transmission, etc. My technical team is primarily responsible for providing these basic urban technical standards and services, which ultimately allows everyone in the city, government affairs and business organizations to operate on these technologies.

San Francisco's Mail service system and business tax management have migrated to the cloud

Q: Speaking of cloud computing or cloud services, what will cloud services do to improve and improve municipal management and city operations in San Francisco?

Gina C. Tomlinson: Of course, San Francisco has a heavy historical legacy in IT facilities and the environment. So we need to innovate the IT environment, make it more flexible, and attract companies, startups and smart people to move their companies and teams to San Francisco. The traditional approach is to invest heavily in the hardware infrastructure, such as buying a large number of servers, and now that's not a sensible thing to do. Our recent approach is to host a large part of San Francisco's municipal administration in data centers in third parties, making it more efficient and responsive to the needs of city managers and the public through managed and virtualized environments.

We have recently moved the entire city to the cloud, using Microsoft's Cloud mail service, whether it is government, public agencies or enterprise-class e-mail systems. In other words, we don't have to spend millions of dollars a year to maintain the entire San Francisco government and agency email servers. We've also moved some of the core functions of municipal operations to the clouds--such as the whole business tax system, the business tax for hotels, restaurants, businesses and companies, the most important cash flow in San Francisco, the tax collection and management system we put on the cloud.

The city of San Francisco has been attracting a growing number of immigrants and people, the relocation of the company, so we have to let its technology system better respond to these surging demand. Including cloud service environment, city management online website, and mobile Internet experience on smartphone.

Q: Why are your mail systems and tax systems on the cloud of Microsoft, not Google or Amazon?

Gina C. Tomlinson: When we decided to put the municipal administration structure in the cloud, we weighed and considered a number of options. We considered Microsoft, Google, and IBM's solutions. Ultimately, we feel that Microsoft's offering is more suitable for us at this stage than Google and IBM because it is more portable (portability). After two years, for some reason, we need to migrate some of the mail content hosted on the cloud back to the government's own servers, and Microsoft's solution will allow us to do so, but Google's solution is not. We still need this flexibility and more options for us.

The innovation of IT technology architecture should protect the urban humanistic tradition and historical heritage

Q: You just highlighted the IT environmental legacy and the burden of the San Francisco City (Legacy), but it seems like you have to face up to the city's CTO and have to embrace and acknowledge and transcend. What are the specific things that these legacies represent in terms of the IT environment? How do you end up dealing with these legacies?

Gina c. Tomlinson: San Francisco is a very attractive city, and we have kept track of public transport, Victorian history, and many old churches and traditional buildings, and there is a very old and traditional technical framework behind it that supports their current operations, These are our legacies, and we do not want to destroy them, and they deserve to be cherished and preserved by each and every one of us.

But beyond preserving these historical accumulations and the technological architecture behind them, we need to think more about how, as the world's Innovation center and gateway to Silicon Valley, we can take advantage of our technological talents and resources to upgrade our municipal management through technological innovation, At the same time serve the business institutions and innovators here.

A new generation of San Francisco residents is rising, and foreign entrepreneurs move into the city, in addition to trams, food trucks and the cultural heritage here, they need more convenient services, higher efficiency, increased demand for mobile services, greater transparency and speed to access government data, all their spending, Communication and public services rely on cloud environments and Internet tools. How governments and city managers adapt to such new values and lifestyles must be considered in terms of technology direction and it innovation.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)