At some point,Melissa Scott, the CIO for Philadelphia, was fed up with asking the city’s 25,000 employees to please complete their cybersecurity training.
“We gamified it, and the gamification did not work. We did little trophies and things,” she said during a panel Tuesday at the CoMotion Miami conference, walking through what seemed to be futile attempts at cybersecurity training compliance.
“So you know what I said, ‘I’m shutting down your Internet,’” Scott said, indicating she’d given the city’s workers a range of deadlines to complete the training. The ultimatum she offered — cutting the cord on Internet access — was viewed as a bit extreme. The city’s treasurer and finance offices had workers offsite. And officials there assumed Scott would relax her line in the sand. She didn’t.
“I said, ‘This was the date. You all should have listened to what the date was. We’re going to work with you to make the changes that you need to make your environment safe and secure. But you need to complete the training,’” Scott said.
It probably helped that she had the backing of the city’s new Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, who took office in 2024.
“Prior to this, if I would have taken that approach I would have been fired,” Scott said with a laugh.
But the anecdote illustrated the growing importance of cybersecurity safeguards virtually all public-sector organizations are all but forced to adopt. The CIO recalled a conversation she’d had with Philadelphia’s leaders that went along the lines of, “hey, would you rather pay ransom, or would you rather me just turn the Internet off until they complete their training so they will know what to do?”
Scott has been serving Philadelphia for 11 years. Prior to her tenure as CIO starting in April 2024, only about 65 percent of the city workforce had completed cybersecurity training, which was below industry standards. Last year, Philadelphia reached 91 percent compliance, Scott said.
It’s not just the new and constantly evolving risks around cybersecurity that seem to be flummoxing city technology leaders. The often opaque and byzantine rules around procurement can also stand in the way of innovation.
The Miami-Dade Innovation Authority, launched in 2023 with private-sector investors and philanthropist groups like the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has the goal of making it easier to pilot technology projects, Ana Chammas, director of innovation at Miami-Dade County, said.
The authority created “very specific rules” to let government circumvent some of the “very stringent rules” related to procurement, Chammas said during the panel, enabling technology pilots to happen more rapidly. Typically, she said, the authority will award a grant to a company to address a particular challenge.
“It allows us time to fast-track procurement, once we’ve been able to test bed them through this mechanism,” Chammas said.
Working with the private sector, Scott said, has not been easy, namely because of the guardrails around how tech officials can interact with vendors in ways that advance innovations without running afoul of procurement rules.
“We want to have conversations more freely,” she said, noting there are significant limitations on how much communication the city can have with vendors during a request for proposals (RFP) period.
“I’m always worried that we’re having conversations that leads to an RFP, that leads to me wearing orange. And I just don’t look good in orange,” she quipped.
More ideal, she said, would be a framework to “incubate” technology solutions early, outside of the city’s strict procurement systems.
“Work with the private sector. Work with startups. Identify what the problem is. Allow them to test ahead, and have access to some of our data, and actually see how our systems are, how they work, and how they’re integrated,” Scott said.
Too often, the CIO said, the city enters into a contract with a technology provider, and there’s still too much ambiguity around both what the city can support and what the vendor will provide.
“So now we’re in this RFP together, and we’re in this marriage, almost, and three months into the marriage we want a divorce,” she said. “I feel like the incubating outside gives us a chance to date, rather than getting married all at once.”
