Senior Enterprise Architect · Chief Technology Officer

Dates provisional. Recalled rather than sourced — to be confirmed against the record.

Four posts over nineteen years: Senior Network Engineer from April 2005, Network Infrastructure Manager from August 2006, Chief Technology Officer from January 2008, and Senior Enterprise Architect from March 2010 to January 2024. Four posts and five Chief Information Officers — the governance work outlasted every executive who commissioned it, which is the practical case for writing a thing down rather than holding it in a relationship.

Consolidated city-county government — the largest US city by area at 840 square miles — with 8,000 to 9,000 employees, 220-plus locations, 300-plus applications, two data centers, 6,500 endpoints, 6,000 telephones, 1,100-plus network devices and a 10,500-radio public safety fleet, on a $48M to $62M annual technology budget. Organizations of up to 89 staff.

Recruited out of the consultancy by the client: the City hired directly from Coleman Technologies in 2005, after several years delivering its projects as a consultant. Not a requisition filled off a job board — retaining the person who already knew the estate. What was being bought was the combination rather than any one part of it: the technical depth to make architecture decisions and defend them, the grasp of how the business processes underneath actually ran, and the ability to put both to an executive audience in terms a non-technical decision-maker could act on.

What made it demanding was the structure rather than the size. Consolidation merged the governments; it did not merge the technology.

Five countywide constitutional officers were elected independently of the Mayor: the Sheriff, the Clerk of the Circuit Court, the Property Appraiser, the Tax Collector and the Supervisor of Elections. The State Attorney and the Public Defender were elected for the Fourth Judicial Circuit and answered to the state. The courts were a separate branch again — a circuit judiciary whose chief judge is chosen by its own judges. Inside the City proper, Fire and Rescue, Public Works and the library system each held their own budget and their own IT staff.

Several ran substantial technology organizations of their own, the Sheriff’s Office among them. But the charter put the City’s technology division in a governance role across all of it — the independent authorities aside, which stood outside it: JEA, the aviation and transportation authorities, and the school board. And every one of the rest also had some part of its estate running on the City’s. That is the shape of the problem and the reason it was interesting: a charter remit over bodies nobody in this building could direct, and shared infrastructure underneath all of them.

Nothing published could be mandated to any of them.

Moving from the executive chair into the architecture group

The 2010 move was into a newly created enterprise architecture group, as its Senior Enterprise Architect, after three years in the Chief Technology Officer post and, before that, Network Infrastructure Manager and Senior Network Engineer. The group held technology governance for the City and its independent constitutional agencies, and the liaison relationships ran outward from it to the other public bodies in the region — the Sheriff’s Office, the electric utility, and the transportation, port and aviation authorities.

The instruction that shaped it came from the Chief Information Officer during the CTO tenure: manage by influence rather than by managing people. The line organization had already been run — up to 89 staff as Network Infrastructure Manager — so this was a decision about where the leverage sat, not a ceiling. In an estate where nothing could be mandated, it was also the only kind of leverage available.

Leaving an executive post for an architecture group reads as a step down on an org chart and was the opposite in practice. The CTO chair sets direction; the architecture group is where a standard either becomes real across seven independently governed organizations or quietly does not. Moving was a move toward the work.

On the division’s national recognition

Projects architected here featured in the submissions behind the technology division’s national recognition under the City’s Chief Information Officer: third in the United States in the 250,000-plus population category of the Center for Digital Government’s Digital Cities Survey in both 2013 and 2014, the 2014 Jacksonville Business Journal BizTech Innovation Award, selection for the 2015 CIO 100, and the 2012 Government Computer News award for JaxReady, the City’s public emergency preparedness application.

The CIO 100 was awarded for Comprehensive Performance Management, the business intelligence and performance management platform whose architecture direction and standards sat with the enterprise architecture group.

Stated with its limits, because the limits are the honest part. The recognition was the organization’s rather than any individual’s, and the CIO 100 submission was led from elsewhere in the department. What is claimable is narrower: the survey responses were built from the portfolio, and the work owned here was in them.

Whatever the title on the door, the escalation path for a hard problem ended here for nineteen years — the core network was led from this desk, and the troubleshooting call for any system came to it. The Enterprise Security Committee, chaired here from 2009 to 2012, functioned as the enterprise architecture review board in the years before the City had a Chief Security Officer. Alongside it, and outlasting it, the Architecture Technology Governance Committee ran from 2008 to 2021 — the body where architecture decisions were actually worked — succeeded in November 2021 by the Architecture Review Board, which carried capital planning and a budget as well as architecture. Every standard either issued was adopted voluntarily by people who were free to decline.