Nutter gives Allan Frank greater control of city’s IT

Philly Rocket Man Allan Frank has gone from Philadelphia’s chief information officer to chief technology officer and the staff he oversees has more than tripled to 520.
The reorganization of the city’s Division of Technology comes with Mayor Michael Nutter’s ninth executive order of the year, as reported by Marcia Gelbert on the Inquirer’s Heard in the Hall city government blog.
Sure doesn’t seem like the city wanted anyone to know about it though.
No press release or media advisory was dispatched or placed on the mayor office’s sleek Web site for which your tax dollars paid. Frank wasn’t immediately available for comment.
The details are below.
In addition to changing Frank’s mayoral cabinet position title — and forcing the printing of a few thousand new business cards — the move will likely be heralded for centralizing the city’s entire IT system, from equipment to personnel. Because the servers, hardware and technical staff from all 33 city departments will now be housed under Frank’s technology division, an additional 360 more workers will ultimately report to the self-proclaimed Rocket Man, who started his job last September.
The Division of Technology’s predecessor Office of Information Services was launched in 1993, and Nutter rebranded it the DOT last year. Frank, who has gotten buzz for a vaguely detailed and broadly designed Digital Philadelphia, was brought into the city government after 35 years in the private sector.
Frank tweets as Philly Rocket Man for the city and, uhm, for some reason has a personal Twitter account that seems to have no difference whatsoever in content.