Carole Post

Carole Post is an Executive Vice President at New York Law School and serves as its first Chief Strategy Officer. She was formerly the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) and New York City's Chief Information Officer (CIO). She was appointed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on December 30, 2009 and assumed the official position on January 19, 2010. She is the first woman to have held this office at the City of New York. She resigned from DoITT to take the position at New York Law School in April 2012.

Background

Carole Post is a native of Bradenton, Florida. She received a B.S. from the University of Florida and a law degree from Seton Hall University. She is licensed to practice law in New York and Florida. In March 2011, Commissioner Post was recognized as one of the country's top 50 government CIOs by InformationWeek, which recognized her "technology vision" and "ability to show tangible measurable results."

Career

After graduating from the University of Florida, Post joined Plan Services, Inc. in Tampa, Florida—a division of Dun and Bradstreet. She rose to a national representative position and thereafter was appointed an executive director. Post remained at Plan Services, Inc. for five years.

Post left her corporate position to attend Seton Hall University Law School in Newark, New Jersey. Upon graduating, Post became the first female associate at a private law firm in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. She worked in the municipal law department where she represented local municipal governments in Palm Beach County.

In 1999, one of her clients, the City of Palm Beach Gardens, hired her as Acting City Manager. It was in this position that Post first started to deal with matters involving information technology, particularly concerning the operational and technical issues related to the new millennium. She served in this capacity until mid-2000.

In late 2001, Post joined the City of New York, initially as an attorney in the Enforcement Division at the New York City Department of Buildings. She spanned a number of roles at the Buildings Department (see New York City Career) before assuming responsibilities in the Mayor's Office of Operations, and later being appointed Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication.

New York City Career

As Commissioner of DoITT, Post was responsible for overseeing New York City’s use of existing and emerging technologies in government operations and its delivery of services to the public. Her office coordinated citywide IT policy and planning; designed, built, and maintained information systems that supported city operations; provided public access to city information through 311, NYC. Gov and NYC TV; and served in a regulatory capacity for telecommunications franchises.

Before her appointment as Commissioner of DoITT, Post served as Director of Agency Services in the New York City Mayor's Office of Operations. At the beginning of 2006, former Deputy Mayor for Operations Daniel L. Doctoroff selected Post to help undertake a restructuring of the Mayor's Office of Operations. She led a team of technical and policy advisors who oversaw City agency performance and coordinated strategic initiatives deemed vital to advancing Mayor Bloomberg's vision for New York City.

At the Mayor’s Office of Operations, Post led multiple teams that focused on making government more transparent, accessible and accountable. Among these was a Project Management team that developed and implemented innovative solutions to improve service delivery and efficiency for day-to-day government operations; a Performance Management team that monitored the performance of more than 40 city agencies, published the bi-annual Mayor's Management Report (MMR) and worked to make performance data readily available to the public; and an Audit Response team that worked with the Office of the New York City Comptroller to ensure timely and appropriate response to city agency oversight audits.

While at the Mayor’s Office of Operations, Post led the development and implementation of numerous initiatives that have been instrumental in improving transparency and accountability across New York City operations. Highlights of these initiatives include implementing several citywide, web-based reporting tools to provide more comprehensive and user-friendly access to critical agency and city performance data, shepherding three legislative bills (graffiti clean-up, administrative tribunal governance, and open data) that made City services more accessible and efficient, and streamlining certain operations and processes to improve the customer service experience for many of the most widely-used city services, including finance and bill payment, taxi cab transactions, and street surface repairs. Initiatives included the Mayor's Citywide Performance Reporting (CPR) system—a public web-based dashboard that provides a user-friendly view of overall Citywide performance over time, as well as critical performance measures for more than 40 City agencies, plus year-to-date comparisons and long-term trends; NYCStat—an online portal that provides a clearinghouse of dozens of performance and information-related tools about City agency operations; a modernized and electronic version of the Mayor's Management Report; and the award-winning NYC Stimulus Tracker tool which provides unprecedented visibility and transparency into how federal stimulus funds are being spent around New York City.

Before her role in the Mayor's Office of Operations, Post served as Executive Director of Strategic Planning at the New York City Department of Buildings. One of her chief accomplishments at the Department connects with her later work at DoITT: At the beginning of the decade, the Building Department's Staten Island office was still using typewriters to process certificates of occupancy. Post led the team that modernized the operation, creating a new "model" for production of certificates of occupancy. She then led the effort to implement the advancements made on Staten Island at each of the Building Department's borough offices.

When Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002, he named Patricia Lancaster as Buildings Commissioner. Post joined the New York City Department of Buildings by responding to a job posting in the New York Times for deputy director of a zoning enforcement unit. Lancaster tapped Post and others to lead a team to research and produce a 120-day report on the state of the agency. Afterward, the commissioner appointed Post to executive director of strategic planning to implement the recommendations she had developed for the 120-day report. Post rose to head of the zoning enforcement unit, which enforces zoning requirements for signs and for commercial and industrial businesses operating in New York City.

In 2002, she became the Director of Sign Enforcement for the Buildings Department, responsible to implement the mandates of a new outdoor advertising law intended to control the proliferation of large billboard advertising in residential areas and near bridges and tunnels. Thereafter, she assumed responsibility for the Padlock Unit, which was a team of attorneys and inspectors responsible for preventing illegal commercial activity and businesses in residential neighborhoods.

In 2003, Post assumed responsibility for the Operations Redesign team at the Department of Buildings, charged with reforming and modernizing the way the department operated and how it delivered its services to the public. Post assumed responsibility for the Department’s Office of Strategic Planning and Implementation in 2005.

On April 12, 2012, Post announced her resignation from DoITT to become Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for the incoming President and Dean of New York Law School, Anthony Crowell. In that position, she worked with Dean Crowell, and New York Law School faculty and staff, on the development of the Law School's new top-to-bottom Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan was informed by a full-scale operational review that she, along with Dean Crowell, oversaw to evaluate and implement new methods required for modern law school management.

Achievements

Some of Post's accomplishments include:

• Implemented the Mayor's Citywide Performance Reporting (CPR) system, a public web-based dashboard that provides, critical performance measures for more than 40 City agencies in an easy-to-use online snapshot format. Users can search for performance data on various city services, review summary statistics and detailed data, analyze long-term trends, and review specific outcome measures. The CPR tool features pie charts and color-coding to make positive or negative performance trends obvious; drill-down capability to enable users to review comparative trends over a five year period; aggregated data that reveal overall City government performance; a detailed explanation of each data measure, its reporting frequency and other useful details.

• Created NYCStat, an online clearinghouse of dozens of performance and information-related tools about City agency operations and a one-stop-shop for all essential data, reports, and statistics related to City services. NYCStat provides easy access to a wide array of performance-related, 311-related information, and interactive maps for selected performance data and quality of life conditions.

• Modernized the Mayor's Management Report (MMR), the long-standing NYC public report card on city agency performance, by working with each city agency to revamp its reporting data to ensure the most meaningful and effective measures are available for public scrutiny, as well as launching the first online interactive version of the MMR.

• Designed, developed, and implemented the NYC Stimulus Tracker, a comprehensive, interactive database that tracks the use of Federal stimulus funds allocated to New York City from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The system tracks the process from federal appropriation to distribution to City recipients, and includes reporting on jobs created by each program as well as mapping capability to review where stimulus dollars have been allocated across the City. The Stimulus Tracker has received national acclaim, including a Digital Government Achievement award from the Center for Digital Government.

• Implemented the Street Conditions Observation Unit (SCOUT), which identifies quality-of-life conditions on New York City's streets in real time so they can be quickly addressed. The SCOUT team inspects each of New York City's approximately 6,000 miles of streets once per month and reports on conditions such as potholes, broken street lights, and overturned wastebaskets using GPS-enabled devices that immediately transmit the information to 311, the City's Customer Service Center, for appropriate follow-up.

• Reformed the way the City addresses graffiti, by spearheading the passage of legislation to make it easier and more efficient for the City to clean graffiti sites and overhauling the complaint and dispatch process so as to double cleaning capacity with no additional resources.

• Led the development and adoption of legislation to reform the City's Environmental Control Board (ECB) and to restructure it as an entity within the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) rather than the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). By aligning ECB with OATH, the City's flagship administrative tribunal, ECB has been better positioned to modernize and professionalize its operation and improve the way it interacts with the public.

• Implemented the Citywide IT Services (CITIServ) program, which consolidates more than 50 separate data centers into a unified, shared services environment.

• Secured a landmark citywide licensing agreement with Microsoft, which leverages the City's buying power on behalf of all city agencies. This agreement consolidates dozens of disparate licensing agreements across the City into one and provides more than 100,000 City employees with state-of-the-art computing power. It was estimated to save New York City taxpayers nearly $50 million over five years.

• Led negotiations with McAfee to procure citywide enterprise security software and services estimated to save the City $18 million over a five-year period.

• Redesigned and upgraded My Neighborhood Statistics (MNS), which mapped comparative performance data at the neighborhood level for approximately 50 common performance measures, and the Scorecard Cleanliness Ratings, providing a scorecard rating for cleanliness and usability of specific streets and sidewalks throughout the five boroughs.

• Oversaw numerous advancements in data sharing and access to the city’s 311 Customer Service Center, including mobile-device functionality and text messaging capability.

• Developed and managed New York City’s first Citywide Customer Survey, which polled New Yorker’s across the City, from all walks of life, on their opinion about the quality of City services.

Open Government Advancements

Post was instrumental in leading New York City’s efforts around open government, which are widely regarded as trailblazing.

NYC Open Data, increases the accessibility of public data generated by the various New York City agencies. As part of an initiative to improve the accessibility, transparency, and accountability of City government, this catalog supplies access to a repository of government-produced, machine-readable data sets.

The Bloomberg Administration was at the forefront of making New York City government more open and transparent than ever. From the revolutionary Citywide Performance Reporting, 311 Service Request Map, and Enhanced 311 Reporting, to the award-winning NYCStat Stimulus Tracker, 311Online, and more, the amount of City information easily accessible via NYC.gov, today, far exceeds anything previously available in the City's long history—and compares favorably to that of any other city in the world.

Post was responsible to implement Mayor Bloomberg’s vision toward a new open government paradigm. In the past the practice for most governments, has been to keep information closed save for those few exceptions that were made public. Post’s charge was to turn that idea on its head—to develop an environment where data and information is open by default, unless there is a compelling reason to keep it closed.

NYC’s Open Data Legislation: A key element of open government is "open data." New York City’s open data legislation created a comprehensive citywide policy—a common set of standards and guidelines for the City’s ongoing open-government efforts.

Broadband: While at DoITT, Post also led New York City’s effort to confront the broadband adoption "gap." The multi-pronged approach focused on attaining grants and federal funding to offset costs for consumers in need; working with private partners, particularly cable franchisees, to increase access to broadband services; and designing and executing a comprehensive, citywide broadband strategy.

External links

• Seven city CIOs work together. American City and County. November 1, 2011. Retrieved January 8, 2012.
• What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York. Wired. November 1, 2010. Retrieved January 8, 2012.
• Now That Open Data Is Law in New York, Meet Carole Post, the Enforcer. Capital New York. March 21, 2012. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
• Mayor Bloomberg Announces DoITT Commissioner Carole Post to Join New York Law School After Leaving City Government. April 12, 2012. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
• Carole Post Interviewed at Strata Summit 2011. September 20, 2011. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
• New York City's IT Roadmap. CIO Insight. July 16, 2010. Retrieved September 12, 2012.