My little brother and I used an Atari 400 computer when we were kids. I used an IBM PC once I entered the working world, though more as a word processor than anything else. In those days it was pretty limited, you know.

I majored in accounting and finance at the University of North Florida and did my internship at Coopers and Lybrand. The company was experimenting with something called the Computer Auditing Automation Group to look at how companies were processing their data. That was how I got engaged with the IT world. After leaving Coopers, I came to the City of Jacksonville IT Department, where I handled all of the billing for our mainframe.

Right now, many IT departments in local government are struggling to define their roles within the larger organization. I'm very proud that, as a department, we retain a strong focus on providing a high level of service to our citizens. At the end of the day, that's our role in government.

We have to be good at creating partnerships and building bridges. We are the experts in the technology, and they're the experts in applying those technologies. When you bring those two areas of expertise together, you can create the best product at the best price to do the right thing for our citizens. So we really do look at the other departments as partners who are ultimately responsible for how our technology is used to serve the public.

The pressure to reduce costs has become a key issue in Jacksonville because of ongoing property tax reforms. When our business partners look at cutting costs, one of the first things they look at is their IT spending. We have to be able to show them that what we bring to their processes is really integral to providing high-level services to our citizens. One way we can demonstrate value is by deploying technology that helps them maintain quality and consistency of services using fewer staff—meeting the "do more with less" challenge that's so prevalent today.

When we look at technology, integration is really key. We also take our long-term usage of the technology into account. Because we're very conscious of costs, we have to be sure that we're making the best technology investment for the city's future—not just choosing whatever the latest and greatest solution is right now.

Microsoft provides the backbone for our citywide e-government and e-commerce solutions. As a platform, it has been stable and highly available. It also integrates well with other systems and is customizable. We have been very pleased with the technology offered by Microsoft for application development

The Security Group uses Linux for vulnerability and penetration testing, system log event collection, and creating test systems.

I have a great relationship with our Gartner representative at the City of Jacksonville. Whenever I want to learn more about something, I can write him a quick e-mail message and he'll send me several good articles on the subject.

When you're in IT, people often assume that you know everything about every technology that's out there. I was in a meeting once with the mayor, and someone there couldn't figure out how to set his new BlackBerry on vibrate mode. They all said, "Oh, Kevin can handle it, he's our CIO." So he handed me this unfamiliar device with a tiny roller ball on it. I gave it my best shot, but I couldn't find the Profiles page to change the setting. They all kind of looked at me and said, "This is the guy we have running our IT department?"