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CIO's toughest challenge came after he retired

06.06.2006
After a long IT career in the private sector, including more than 30 years as CIO of Kraft Foods Inc., Jim Onalfo had already retired when he got a call from Nicholas M. Donofrio, IBM's executive vice president for innovation and technology, in 2003. Donofrio asked Onalfo to consider a job with the New York Police Department (NYPD) after he and former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner were contacted by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. Kelly "needed to upgrade what had been an underinvested area for many years," Onalfo said. "I agreed to come." And for the past three years, Onalfo has been deputy commissioner and CIO of the NYPD.

Monday night, the NYPD was recognized for its data warehouse at the Computerworld Honors ceremony in the government and nonprofit organization category.

What skills did you learn at Kraft that you were able to bring to the NYPD? CIO skills. If you are a CIO and understand how a CIO does his job, then you know how to bring all the right techniques of a business into programs to get them done successfully.

When you took this job, what were some of the initial tasks you had to do to get the NYPD's IT organization where you wanted it to be? It still has a long way to go. But the most important thing was to put together a strategic IT plan, and get that plan approved by Commissioner Kelly and Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg. That's the real key -- the program. However, we are a dramatically understaffed IT group, so we used a lot of outside companies to do the projects. We have 329 IT people, and by industry standards, we should have over 2,000. The police department is a 53,000-person organization, so supporting it with 329 [workers] is not necessarily the way it's done in the commercial world.

The data warehouse project that was honored tonight ... That is a vision of Commissioner Kelly's. That's important. His vision was to use technology to help detectives do their job better. So he said to me: "I need you to build me a real-time crime center." That encompassed an IBM crime computer warehouse that they built, the forensic detective tools built by Dimension Data. It [the crime center] has 18 Mitsubishi screens all networked together and 24 desks, and we have 40 detectives who work there 24/7 -- all with six to nine months of training in all the advanced data-mining tools that we have developed.

What do you think you accomplished for the city? First of all, it's been the most important thing I've ever done in my life. It's helped the police officers get their jobs done. It's helping the citizens of New York. We've done things like put laptops in cars for the first time, put a new hard-wired network throughout the city, provide disaster recovery for the data center, put in a videoconferencing network throughout the police departments, so Commissioner Kelly can simultaneously talk to every precinct. ... There are so many things. We brought the infrastructure up to date, and now we're trying to bring all the applications up to date.