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Former retiree walks IT beat

12.06.2006
After a long IT career in the private sector, including more than 30 years as CIO at Kraft Foods, Jim Onalfo retired. Then, in 2003, Onalfo got a call from IBM executive Nicholas Donofrio, who asked him to consider taking a job as head of IT at the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Donofrio and former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner had both been contacted by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who "needed to upgrade what had been an underinvested area for many years," Onalfo said last week. He took the job, and he has been deputy commissioner and CIO of the NYPD for the past three years.

Last week, the efforts of Onalfo and his IT staff paid off when the NYPD won a 21st Century Achievement Award in the government and nonprofit organizations category of the 2006 Computerworld Honors Program for its Crime Data Warehouse project. After the awards ceremony, Onalfo spoke with Computerworld about the project and general IT issues at the NYPD.

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 [IT] programs to get them done successfully.

When you took the CIO 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. Supporting it with 329 [IT workers] is not necessarily the way it's done in the commercial world.

The data warehouse project that was honored tonight... That was a vision of Commissioner Kelly's. 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." It has 18 Mitsubishi [TV] 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 on all the advanced data mining tools that we have developed.

What do you think you have accomplished for the city as CIO? 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 [and] put in a videoconferencing network throughout the department 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.