What private-sector CIOs can learn from their municipal counterparts

In corporate IT, success is often measured in quarterly earnings, efficiency gains, or competitive advantage. For municipal CIOs, however, the stakes are very different. Their “customers” are residents whose lives are shaped every day by the reliability of, and access to, city services like broadband access and waste collection. When projects succeed, the applause is well earned, but when they fail, the backlash is immediate and highly charged.

Technology leaders from Santa Monica, California; Sydney, Australia; Sandy Springs, Georgia; and Stavanger, Norway, reveal how municipal CIOs balance innovation with accountability, and why their roles diverge sharply from that of their corporate peers. Their stories also serve as valuable lessons for private-sector IT leaders.

Visibility and accountability

For Feroz Merchhiya, CIO of Santa Monica, the distinction between corporate and municipal technology leadership is stark. “Solving a technology problem for city government is like performing on a stage,” he says. “If you deliver something that doesn’t sit right with citizens, you hear it right then and there.”

That public scrutiny is built into the job. “Every Tuesday, the mayor and the council meet with citizens,” he adds. “You get the claps, and the other kind of acknowledgements also.”

The immediacy of feedback makes mistakes highly visible. Four days into his tenure in Santa Monica, for instance, the global CrowdStrike outage knocked out city systems. Without knowing the full architecture, Merchhiya had to rely on his team. “They didn’t know me or my leadership style, but they showed up and asked what could they do,” he says. For a corporate CIO, downtime translates to lost revenue or reputational damage. For a city CIO, though, it can mean disrupted emergency services or compromised public safety.

Merchhiya learned a similar lesson earlier in Glendale, Arizona, where he also served as CIO. There, inefficiencies in tax compliance led to citizen frustration. His team developed a SaaS-like solution that eventually spread to 40% of Arizona’s municipalities. The true measure of success wasn’t adoption rate or revenue, but the fact that small businesses no longer felt blindsided by city paperwork.

This public-facing dynamic pushes city CIOs to communicate differently, too. Merchhiya describes standing up in front of disgruntled citizens when new systems didn’t immediately deliver. “You’re accountable in real time,” he says. “There’s no quarterly earnings call months later. It’s the person at the counter or in the council chamber telling you the system didn’t work for them yesterday.”

Governance before growth

In Sandy Springs, Georgia, Keith McMellen was appointed director of data strategy, analytics, and AI integration after city leaders realized departmental silos were hampering progress. Rather than racing into flashy pilots, his first priority was governance. “Without governance and structure, it’s destined to be death by a thousand cuts,” he says. Within weeks of arriving, he wrote a charter for a data and AI steering committee, and created a technical working group. Meeting monthly, these bodies formalize work intake and prioritize projects, ensuring decisions aren’t made ad hoc or driven by the loudest voice in the room.

McMellen embedded ethics into the city’s data strategy from the outset. Sandy Springs adopted a standalone data governance framework and an AI incident response plan — modeled on San Jose’s government AI coalition — to ensure accountability if things go wrong. He also moved quickly when new risks emerged. For example, after receiving an update about connectors that would allow OpenAI’s tools to analyze city data, he and the IT director immediately revised the city’s AI policy to prohibit use, secured executive approval the same day, and rolled it out to staff. “Ethics can’t be an afterthought,” McMellen says. “You have to be ready before issues arise.”

That readiness shaped other decisions, too. Sandy Springs deliberately avoided deploying a public-facing chatbot, even though the technical capability existed, because of the reputational risk of offensive or biased responses. With a significant Jewish population, leaders felt the harm of a single misstep would outweigh any efficiency gain. Instead, automation and AI are tested internally first, with humans verifying outputs at every step. “At this stage, a human in the loop is imperative,” he says.

For Sandy Springs, governance is more than bureaucracy. It’s the foundation for innovation. By establishing clear frameworks, ethical guardrails, and structured decision-making, the city is building digital services that aren’t just functional, but trustworthy.

Citizen-style co-creation

Over in Stavanger, Norway, former Smart City director Gunnar Edwin Crawford built his mandate around citizen co-creation. “Initially we did tech-driven top-down pilots, but citizens and media pushed back,” he says. “We realized projects have to be based on citizen needs, built together with them.”

The city experimented with participatory budgeting platforms such as Decidim, allowing residents to vote on neighborhood projects. Politicians were sometimes uneasy because they were losing their authority, but involving residents early proved essential for trust.

One successful case was the redesign of public transport shelters. Instead of outsourcing design entirely to vendors, the city asked commuters what mattered most. The surprising answer was not flashy displays but better lighting and more shelter from wind. The pilot program, co-created with residents, was modest but won public support.

Crawford contrasts this with corporate innovation labs, which can afford to fail quietly. “In a city, you can’t throw in technologies without purpose,” he says. “Citizens don’t want another app for the sake of it. They want relevance and simplicity.” This citizen-first model, which Crawford calls smart with a heart, reframes smart cities as more than technological showcases. They become platforms for inclusion, where technology is tested not only for functionality but social legitimacy.

Citizen co-creation also helped Stavanger defuse skepticism around new data initiatives. Crawford’s team piloted advanced counters measuring traffic and identifying types of vehicles, including bikes. Moreover, they tested sensors that measure vehicle speed around places like schools and kindergartens. “The privacy and GDPR concerns demanded close dialogue with citizens,” he says.

Another more radical project, according to Crawford, was the one where citizens were asked to map out their neighborhood using the tracking feature of sports watches. “Even though we had plenty signing up, GDPR and data privacy laws made us develop a whole new system to enable citizens to sign up, withdraw consent, and delete data at any given time,” he says.

According to Crawford, residents felt ownership of these projects instead of suspicion. “Co-creation isn’t just a buzzword,” he says. “It’s the difference between adoption and rejection.”

ROI with purpose

While corporations often chase technology trends for competitive advantage, city CIOs must ensure technology delivers real improvements to the lives of citizens. Tom Gao, chief technology and digital services officer of Sydney, Australia, warns against getting caught up in hype. “Everybody’s chasing AI because they want to be seen as in tune with the industry,” he says. “But many haven’t digitized end-to-end services yet.”

For Gao, ROI isn’t about proving that Sydney is innovative, it’s about freeing staff time, reducing citizen frustration, and creating services that are genuinely easier to use. The city’s 3D virtual venue tour is one example. Before it launched, residents wanting to book a community hall or wedding venue often spent hours traveling for an in-person visit with staff. Today, they can explore 80 venues online in detail, saving thousands of hours for both staff and residents.

The same principle guided Sydney’s City Connect platform, which now digitizes 85 services. Residents benefit from access any time of the day, and updates through email and SMS. “That’s the kind of ROI that matters,” Gao says. “It’s not about the technology, it’s about whether people can get what they need without unnecessary effort.”

He sees AI projects through the same lens. Sydney rejected a costly chatbot after analysis showed that most citizen questions were already answered upstream by digital services. Instead, Gao has focused on automation that reduces cognitive load for residents, like redesigning waste collection requests with simple icons instead of long instructions. Even internally, he views AI as useful only if it helps staff do their jobs faster, such as with a copilot bot that retrieves information more efficiently than enterprise searches.

For Gao, meaningful ROI is measured in time saved, clarity gained, and trust built. “AI is just a tool,” he says. “The question is always what problem are we solving, and who benefits.”

Meaning as motivation

Corporate CIOs often see their roles as steps toward executive leadership or boardroom influence. City CIOs describe a different kind of reward: job satisfaction rooted in community impact.

Merchhiya compares it to getting addicted to a stage performance in that every successful service rollout earns immediate plaudits from the people impacted. Crawford says his greatest satisfaction came from giving citizens a real voice in shaping their neighborhoods. McMellen takes pride in embedding ethics into systems that will serve the community for years. And Gao emphasizes the joy of seeing digitization free residents from bureaucracy and city staff from repetitive tasks.

The difference isn’t just philosophical. It’s emotional. Gao recalls watching an elderly Sydney resident use the City Connect portal to renew a permit without leaving home. “She said it saved her three bus rides,” Gao says. “That’s the kind of ROI that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, but it means everything.”

Crawford remembers the first time Stavanger’s participatory budgeting platform funded a neighborhood playground. “When kids came to the city office with drawings of what they wanted, it hit us. We weren’t just coding platforms, we were shaping lives.”

Lessons for the private sector

What private-sector IT leaders can learn from their municipal counterparts:

• Visibility and accountability – City CIOs operate in the open, with constant citizen feedback. Corporations could benefit from adopting more transparent communication about IT initiatives.
• Governance before growth – Sandy Springs’ early emphasis on ethics and AI incident response offers a model for responsible innovation.
• Citizen-style co-creation – Stavanger’s participatory budgeting mirrors the way corporations might engage users more deeply in product design.
• ROI with purpose – For cities, technology must prove its worth not only in dollars but in outcomes that matter to people’s daily lives.
• Meaning as motivation – Municipal CIOs are driven by the satisfaction of seeing their work improve the daily lives of citizens, a reminder that purpose is a powerful driver of performance.