Seguin CIO transforms city's network infrastructure for growth

Managing an organization's network infrastructure is a daunting prospect for CIOs these days, with increasing cybersecurity threats and rapidly evolving AI technology.

When Shane McDaniel became the first-ever CIO in the City of Seguin, Texas, eight years ago, he inherited three data centers that didn't talk to each other and a flat Layer 2 network held together by static routes and institutional memory. Modernizing the network infrastructure was McDaniel's first task as CIO.

Today, that network spans 40 miles of city-owned fiber, 40 interconnected facilities and a Layer 3 backbone built to handle the city's expanding needs.

Seguin is a fast-growing city, situated 35 miles northeast of San Antonio and 50 miles south of Austin.  The city serves as a manufacturing hub for the area and currently has approximately 41,000 residents, up nearly 40% since 2020.

McDaniel was brought into Seguin when the city leaders saw big changes on the horizon for technology and wanted to get the infrastructure in place to handle the surge in growth and the innovations that were changing the way the city was run.

Informa TechTarget spoke with McDaniel about the challenges and goals for a CIO in a growing city.

Editor's note: The following transcript was edited for length and clarity. 

How did you come into your role as CIO for the City of Seguin?

Shane McDaniel: [The City of Seguin] felt that change was on the horizon, so they wanted to get the technology, the innovation and the infrastructure ready for the surge that comes along with [growth].

I've been working in tech for 30 years, about 15 years at the federal government. I came out of the intelligence community and spent about five years in private industry. I chose to be in local government about 10 years ago, first with the city of McKinney for a couple years. CIO positions are few and far between, and you might see only a handful of CIO positions in local government become available throughout the year. So, I was fortunate that they chose me in 2018.

Shane McDaniel

What did the IT organization look like for the city when you came in, and how is it changing?

McDaniel: I inherited a small staff at the time that was supporting IT, but they needed that outside experience to take it to the next level. We have three data centers in the city that weren't interconnected when I first got here. But we own all the utilities, which means that we have electric distribution, water and wastewater, and we own the poles within the city limits. We work with the utility department and they run about 20 miles of fiber for us at this point. We're projected to have up to 40 miles of fiber, because we have a large ETJ (Extraterritorial Jurisdiction). We're also partnering with the state of Texas to build a Texas State Technical College a few miles from the furthest outreach of our network over on that side of town. So that's going to add quite a bit of miles to my fiber rate.

How are you managing that project?

McDaniel: We are working with [networking infrastructure provider] Extreme Networks on the project and have got the fiber ring situated, as we only had a Layer 2 network. It's flat, and you had to have intricate knowledge [about which] building was connected to which building. There were static routes everywhere -- there was no dynamic routing. So we blew up our network. It took us a year to prepare to incorporate Layer 3, which we did in conjunction with Extreme.

What are you doing now that the Layer 3 foundation is in place?

McDaniel: [To go forward] we had to have the network in place first to have the baseline and connectivity. We have 40 facilities that are interconnected over a span of 30 miles. We support a local government corporation for water management for facilities, water plants and water treatment 30 miles down the road, where we could pull that data and manage their resources and provide all their network connectivity.

We manage more than 250 applications across the city, have about 90 virtual servers, and deploy about 100 switches to 40 employees -- 26 of which are manned. My role as CIO isn't to get in the weeds. I have four divisions in IT -- Tier 1, Tier 2, cybersecurity and GIS -- and there's a manager for each one of those teams, which are more hands-on. My role here is around budgeting, partner management and council engagement -- things to a smaller scale that are the same as you would see from any local government director or CIO.

Are there differences between being a CIO in a private enterprise versus a public entity?

McDaniel: We don't necessarily operate with that government mindset. We're more, 'Let's get it done.' But I never got beyond middle management in private industry. In my last position in private industry, I worked for a Fortune 500 as the manager of their North American cybersecurity operations. I had about 25 people assigned to me worldwide. We had SLAs that supported our accounts and had contracts for the performance, and that things must be done in X amount of time and have no downtime. That doesn't really exist in local government. It is a slower pace, that's definitely a difference. I never had much to do with budgeting, but that's probably the most important part of my job -- managing the finances of that $5 billion that keeps IT running in the City of Seguin.

In local government, very rarely can you identify the problem and get $60,000 to go buy a tool that solves the problem.

What are your biggest challenges as the CIO of a relatively small city?

McDaniel: It's all [cybersecurity] and now AI governance. We're all at different stages with AI. We have some compliance that we have to keep in mind as far as criminal justice, HIPAA, payment card industry stuff and how our 600 employees are leveraging AI. What do we allow and what do we block?

In local government, very rarely can you identify the problem and get $60,000 to go buy a tool that solves the problem. I have to wait for next fiscal year's budget. We just submitted everything for next fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. So, in October, I'll be able to purchase an AI governance tool and implement it. We then hope that nothing crazy happens over the next few months because I have very limited to no visibility into how the city is leveraging AI outside of allowing access to these sites, other than just the informal conversations. We're figuring that out in real time.

How is the city using AI internally?

McDaniel: We're doing some cool stuff with it. We were working with Mimecast. [We were mentioned a couple years ago] in StateScoop magazine in an article about cybersecurity, where I provided a quote that mentioned Mimecast. Someone at Mimecast saw that, and they reached out to see if we wanted to beta a new thing that was rolling out. So we did and it was my first interaction with an AI-laced tool. AI is running behind the scenes within Mimecast -- which does all our email monitoring -- providing real-time awareness for tracking those marketing things like embedded trackers, and all that's been snuffed out.

Are you using AI to help improve city services?

McDaniel: We're doing a proof-of-concept with an AI tool, where you put a camera on brush trucks monitoring the PCI (pavement condition index) on roads. To maintain the roads in town, we have invested in a five-year rolling cycle of millions of dollars. You have to do the upgrades in different council districts to make sure everybody gets a little bit of something every year. You have to grade the roads to show what's in bad shape and needs to be put on the roadmap for the next couple of years.

This AI tool on the brush truck is taking in the video feed from the road, and a service that used to cost us $300,000 is now going to be embedded in this pilot program and will cost $8,000. Before it was a manual process by a professional services team driving every single road in town. It's now going to be done through AI by just slapping a dash-cam on a brush truck, and it's going to be done while those guys are just doing their everyday jobs.

Jim O'Donnell is a news director for TechTarget, where he covers IT strategy and enterprise ESG.