Gina C. Tomlinson is CTO for San Francisco, CA

"As soon as I had the courage to be open and honest about my sexuality, that's when I began to personally and professionally flourish," she says.

“I am innately a fixer!” says Gina Tomlinson. “I seem to flourish in situations where I can come in and make it better.”

It's not easy to transform a clunky legacy system like the one used by the city and county of San Francisco, CA into a streamlined, state-of-the-art IT operation. And in addition to the complex IT transformation, San Francisco's CTO also has to make tough budget-cutting decisions and handle touchy issues.

But Gina C. Tomlinson sees the entire Everest-climbing task as a glorious challenge.

This April Tomlinson took over as CTO for San Francisco's Department of Technology. There are plenty of issues to tackle in the new job, and she thrives on them.

"I am innately a fixer!" Tomlinson declares. "I seem to flourish in situations where I can come in and make it better. It feeds something in me to turn something around. It drives me and challenges me!"

Thriving in the public sector
This isn't the first complex task Tomlinson has tackled. Some of her friends questioned her decision to enter the public sector at all, leaving behind a flourishing private-sector career at Clorox and HP. But in 2007 she became CIO of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). She took up that job with gusto, as it would give her the chance to "create an IT organization from scratch.

"Typically, you come in and make changes and make moves here and there, but both of these jobs involved a clean slate: the opportunity to build as I saw fit.

"It's been amazing!" she declares. "Both the opportunity at MTA and the broader one here at the city challenged me greatly.

"Of course this job also frustrates me greatly!" she adds. "I'm very tired at the end of the day. But I see the fruits of my labor, the benefit of the work we do and the beneficial ways it impacts the citizens of the city and county of San Francisco."

Leading the huge metamorphosis
The Department of Technology is currently undergoing a "huge metamorphosis," Tomlinson says. It's transforming outdated skill sets and legacy staff to newer technology, upgraded skill sets and some new staff while still respecting the legacy systems and staff. "It's a real delicate balance," Tomlinson declares.

In her work with the MTA, she says, "I cut my teeth in learning city ways and practices and understanding how to navigate in those waters. The work there helped to prepare me for this role.

"City officials understand we have to raise awareness and technical maturity. There was a call to bring in talent and a fresh perspective to carry out the strategies and objectives and goals." The talent and fresh perspective began with Tomlinson.

Consolidation
The city is also trying to trim budget fat by consolidating the IT ops of many departments and groups. One project involves pulling nearly 25,000 public employees using seven different email systems into a single system. Another is developing citywide enterprise licensing agreements with key partners like HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco. A third is to gradually consolidate two dozen centers into two.

Tomlinson and the Department of Technology team is doing all of this with a staff of just over a hundred IT pros, and with assistance from selected IT consultants and integrators.

Drawn to computers
When Tomlinson was eleven she built her own computer. "This talent is what the good Lord blessed me with, and I'm still doing what He always planned for me to do," she says.

Her father worked at a GM plant and her mom was an administrative assistant at an Air Force base. She is the fourth of five children, all of them now in different professions: IT for Tomlinson, HR and travel for her two sisters, art for one brother and the police force for the other.

Tomlinson attended the University of Cincinnati and later earned a BSCS. She holds various IT certifications in infrastructure, management and process.

Managing at Clorox
From 1996 to 2007 Tomlinson worked for the Clorox Co. She eventually became manager of data center ops for the company's primary data center in Pleasanton, CA, with additional responsibilities at a co-location site in Rockford, IL. She assisted in various infrastructure-related enterprise projects, including imple- mentation of an SAP/Siebel ERP and CRM solution.

"That was a huge implementation, with many people working on it," she remembers. "Clorox was going from an old mainframe to a distributed system, SAP and Siebel. We were taking services off the mainframe and moving to a Unix Sun environment." That was huge: a three- to four-year project.

"Those things were the foundation for me to springboard from and attain my viewpoint for today," she says.

At MTA
In 2007 she moved to San Francisco as CIO of the city's MTA. She led the implementation of several projects to improve overall transit ops, including Wi-Fi and NextBus implementations at various bus locations. She also led the design, build and relocation of a new tier II data center, considered one of the top data centers in the city and county of San Francisco.

She began her CTO job this year and is hard at work on the new challenge.

True to herself
Tomlinson, a lesbian, notes that San Francisco allows her an openness she didn't have in her hometown of Dayton, OH. "There are a large number of lesbian and gay constituents, some with high-level, powerful positions in the city," she says.

"As soon as I had the courage and the ability to be open and honest about my sexuality, that's when I began to personally and professionally flourish. Being true to yourself is the most important thing in the world. When you have to suppress something that is innately what you are, you suppress so many things," Tomlinson says.

Promoting IT
Tomlinson would definitely like to see more African Americans and more women in her field. She feels there's a "woefully inadequate" number of women and African Americans entering the IT profession, and looks forward to helping with an organization for mentoring teenage girls that her sister is developing. She also volunteers with the Boys and Girls Club and Habitat for Humanity.

On the professional level, Tomlinson leads technical discussions and speaks at various IT seminars and conferences. She was recently a panelist at the CA World conference in Las Vegas, NV, and is scheduled to speak at IT sessions at VMWorld 2010 and Oracle World 2010 in San Francisco this fall.

"I'm a 'people' person, and I think that's a God-given ability just as my IT expertise is," she says. "I attract people and draw them in. I get them engaged in the presentation, and that helps me be a better presenter. I enjoy not just presenting but listening. It helps make the presentation tangible and real to the audience."