Mayor Adams Consolidates all City’s Technology Agencies into One Efficient Office

By Yehudit Garmaise

 Mayor Eric Adams signed today an executive order that consolidated New York City’s countless technology-related agencies and transformed them into one: the Office of Technology and Innovation, which will be led by Matt Fraser, who is serving as the city’s chief technology officer (CTO).  

 After calling Fraser, “a brilliant contribution to this amazing team that I am building,” the mayor said that he hired the CTO because “he understood what I want to do in running a smarter city that delivers for the people.”

 “New York City has been living in the 20th century, instead of the 21st century,” said Mayor Adams. “We have been so afraid of technology, so afraid of transforming our city.

 “It is almost embarrassing how this city is behind so many other cities in technology.”

 What is embarrassing, the mayor explained, is the inefficiency of the city’s current system.

 “We have all of these different technology offices,” Mayor Adams said with a laugh about the comically repetitively named agencies, such as "the Department of Innovation, Technology, and Telecommunication; the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, and the Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer."

 “The new office of will unify all those agencies, which all now all disjointed,” the mayor said. “The different [tech agencies] are not communicating with each other. Everyone has a different vision, a different operation. Those days are over. We are moving forward as one.”

 Not only are agencies redundant, but city jobs are as well, which wastes taxpayers’ money, the mayor said.

 "I am blown away when I look at the duplication of managerial employees in this city," said Mayor Adams, “Taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth. We are reassessing jobs, and we are only keeping the jobs we need."

 The mayor added that his new streamlined technology agency will help to city to become much more efficient and “cut the red tape and the bureaucracy,” said Adams, who said, for example, “It should not take the fire department three years to put a sprinkler inspection into place."

 Not only will Adams use technology to better deliver services for New Yorkers, but he wants to use technology to productively analyze the city’s wealth of data, which goes unexamined.

 “We should be taking all of the rich data that comes in from 311 and bring it together to identify problems and come up with real ways of solving them, said Adams, who also wants to use technology to increase the city’s protection against cyber threats.

 “Mayor de Blasio, when I met with him in Gracie Mansion, upon his departure, said, ‘COVID is a problem, but the real problem we are now facing in cyber security,’” Mayor Adams shared. “[Cyber threats] can bring our city to a halt, if we do not get prepared for attacks to our infrastructure.”

 Other cities, such as Atlanta and dozens of cities in New Jersey, Mayor Adams said, have had to pay ransoms to those who launch major cyber threats.

 “Cyber threats have been ignored,” Mayor Adams said. “But they are real threats to our environment.”

 “We are putting technology at the center of running our city,” said Adams, who described himself as a “self-professed computer geek from my [NYPD] days at CompStat and my early computer days.

 “I knew when we turned around crime using technology, that we can use it in running agencies [more effectively].”

 Photo: Flickr