I am always bugging my friends in the tech industry about innovative vertical CIOs and their projects. Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, recently highlighted one – City of Corpus Christi, TX.
Starting around the 10 minute mark in this webinar, CIO Michael Armstrong describes the colorful history of the city and some of its innovations including a early wifi mesh network to track over 100,000 gas and water meters. Most of his talk focuses on the attractiveness of Infor as their ERP solution – the cloud option, its ION for integrating multiple feeders, a very wide footprint across their apps portfolio (see graph below) etc.
While much of what he says is becoming mainstream in the private sector, it is pretty innovative for a city government - and very sensitive to economics in a fiscally sensitive time for most public entities
Listening to Michael, I was taken back to James Michener’s classic Texas. In that 1984 book (as in most of his books), he traces the ancestry of modern day Texans and Mexicans. If he had written it today, he would have written about the current generation of young Texans. In his talk, Michael describes the changing social and mobile computing habits of his kids and growing base of citizens – another factor in his Infor decision
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