Bureau of Technology Strategic Plan

Introduction

Technology serves as the foundation for effective, accountable government. When residents interact with Cook County — whether paying property taxes, accessing court records or seeking social services — they depend on systems that are secure, reliable and accessible. The Bureau of Technology's role is to coordinate with separately-elected official’s offices to ensure these systems meet the needs of the public while enabling County employees to serve residents efficiently.

Mission

The Bureau of Technology plans, develops and maintains enterprise technology services according to its guiding principles: life cycle management, cloud-smart, shared-first, sustainability, transparency, continuity, countywide standardization and reuse before buy, and buy before build.

Background

Cook County has a shared-services IT governance model, allowing elected offices to exercise autonomy over individual IT decisions while leveraging enterprise-wide contracts. The Bureau of Technology operates several centralized IT services supporting multiple elected offices and provides all IT services for Offices Under the President.

Policy Roadmap Alignment

The Bureau of Technology's initiatives align with President Preckwinkle's Policy Roadmap 2024-2027, particularly the Connected Communities and Open Communities pillars.

Connected Communities aims to provide innovative infrastructure that connects people and communities. BOT supports this through broadband expansion addressing digital equity gaps in the Southland area, network modernization and cloud adoption.

Open Communities aims to ensure responsive, transparent services. BOT supports this through data-driven decision-making infrastructure, the Information Security Office's continuous monitoring programs, modernized applications and publishing data on the Open Data Portal.

Infrastructure

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)

BOT will implement high-priority generative artificial intelligence use cases identified by Offices Under the President (OUP) business stakeholders by the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026 (FY26). Deploying these use cases will improve staff productivity, reduce manual workloads and enhance service delivery for residents — positioning Cook County as a responsible early adopter of AI in government.

Telecommunications and Network

The team will ensure more reliable telecommunication services and broader connectivity while improving customer self-service options. The team will complete Phase 2 of the wide area network (WAN) redesign project, upgrading network cores at the Jail Campus and Maywood from 10 Gigabits Per Second (Gbps) to fully redundant 100 Gbps capacity by the fourth quarter of FY26. The growing use of video evidence and other data-heavy technologies has necessitated additional network capacity and speed. The team will also continue improving Housing Authority of Cook County resident internet services. Upgrading supports the County's growing reliance on cloud services and ensures that mission-critical systems remain operational even during network disruptions.

Platform Computing and Hybrid Cloud

Platform Computing will extend the enterprise hybrid cloud to accommodate additional offices and strengthen integration between on-premises and cloud workloads, enabling the County to work efficiently between servers in our data centers and in the Cloud. This initiative will continue beyond 2026. Extending the hybrid cloud reduces dependence on aging on-premises infrastructure, enabling greater scalability, cost efficiency, and operational resilience across all participating offices.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

BOT will complete disaster recovery process implementation and begin a request for proposals process for business continuity services by the third quarter of FY26. These efforts ensure that critical County systems — from financial processing to court records — can be restored quickly following an outage or emergency, minimizing disruption to the residents who depend on them.

Enterprise Architecture

The Enterprise Architecture team will implement governance tools and processes to modernize enterprise technology architecture for OUP and other elected offices by the fourth quarter of FY26. A governed technology architecture reduces costly duplication, improves interoperability between systems and gives County leadership clearer visibility into the overall application and integration landscape.

IT Service Management

Enterprise Solutions will deploy a software-as-a-service-based IT service management ticketing system to replace the current end-of-life system by the fourth quarter of FY26. The new platform will include a configuration management database and IT service catalog. Modernizing this system enables faster issue resolution, provides staff with a self-service catalog to reduce routine support requests and gives BOT better data to prioritize and manage technology services Countywide.

Security

Election Security

ISO Operations will coordinate with the Cook County clerk's office to ensure the 2026 primary and general elections occur without any cyber-related incidents by the fourth quarter of FY26. Safeguarding election infrastructure protects public trust in the democratic process and ensures Cook County voters can participate in free and fair elections free from cyber interference.

Security Control Assessments

ISO Governance, Risk and Compliance will transition from contract-led security control assessments to a government-led continuous monitoring model in 2026, integrating the Generative Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework controls where applicable, ensuring countywide risk mitigation by the fourth quarter of FY26. Shifting to a government-led continuous monitoring model reduces long-term reliance on outside contractors, lowers costs and enables BOT to identify and respond to security risks more quickly than an assessment-only approach.

Quantum-Safe Cryptography

ISO Engineering will establish a countywide quantum-safe cryptography strategy collaborating with agency stakeholders to develop a baseline plan for transitioning to post-quantum cryptographic solutions that enhance long-term cyber resilience. This initiative will continue beyond 2026. Federal standards bodies have signaled that advances in quantum computing pose a credible near-term threat to current encryption methods, making it essential for the County to begin its cryptographic transition now in order to protect sensitive resident and government data in the years ahead.

Applications

Enterprise Applications

The Enterprise Applications division will complete the Integrated Tax Processing System project in 2026, bringing together the property tax processes of multiple elected offices into one modern system and finally eliminating Cook County’s reliance on 1970s-era mainframe technology.

Enterprise Applications will also continue efforts to make all public-facing websites and applications of Offices Under the President comply with accessibility standards. These efforts support both equity and legal compliance — new federal ADA Title II requirements mandate that all public-facing digital content meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards, with a compliance deadline of April 2026.

Geographic Information Systems

The GIS division will pilot cloud migration by standing up data services and web map applications in a cloud environment by the second quarter of FY26. Migrating GIS services to the cloud improves data availability, scalability, and cross-department access to spatial data, while laying the groundwork for integration with the County's new enterprise data analytics platform.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Through acquiring and implementing new tools, the ERP team will improve and streamline Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) creation and publishing for the comptroller's team by the fourth quarter of FY26. A more efficient ACFR process reduces the manual burden on the Comptroller's office and improves the accuracy and timeliness of financial reporting for an organization that manages billions in public funds.

Data Services

Data Warehousing & Analytics

Data Services will stand up a new enterprise data platform, complete pilot use cases and prepare for broader adoption within OUP by the end of 2026. The main goals of this endeavor are to improve data sharing, accuracy, and automation, allowing for a single source of truth for critical data sets. Also, Data Services will initiate researching and drafting an enterprise-wide data analytics strategy, including the selection of an enterprise data analytics platform. Ultimately, Data Services will support governed platform access and provide training to any analyst in OUP hoping to surface actionable insights from data and develop data visualizations. Data Services will also complete data engineering and analysis projects on behalf of OUP Bureaus and Departments in need of additional data personnel capacity. Establishing a single, governed data platform eliminates the fragmented, siloed data sources that currently slow decision-making, giving County leadership reliable access to consistent, timely information.

Data Transparency

In 2026, the Data Services team will focus on auditing and improving the backend of the Open Data Portal. This includes retiring out of date and irrelevant data sets, improving meta data, and prioritizing automation. A well-maintained Open Data Portal reduces FOIA requests and media inquiries while demonstrating Cook County's commitment to transparent, accountable government.

Data Policy and Enablement

In 2026, Data Services will develop and disseminate core data governance policies, creating clear guidelines and guardrails for all OUP employees. A network of Data Stewards will be established to increase collaboration and accountability. Clear data governance policies and accountable Data Stewards ensure that County data is used consistently, ethically, and in compliance with privacy requirements — building the foundation of trust needed to sustain a data-driven organization.

Administration

Vendor and Contract Management

BOT manages a portfolio of approximately 40 contracts, with a total value of approximately $1 billion. During FY26 BOT will continue and expand its effort to evaluate vendors in terms of their success reaching contractually agreed upon milestones, delivering contracted products and services, and meeting goals set for minority-owned business enterprises and women-owned business enterprises (MBE/WBE).

As part of this effort, in FY26 BOT will meet routinely with vendors to review their respective agendas and reiterate expectations for all deliverables. In addition, an expanded vendor and contract database will be created for internal tracking and future procurement processing purposes.

Staff Development

BOT continued to make considerable progress with staff development during 2025, with 83.7% of its positions filled. This percentage is expected to rise during FY2026 as more cybersecurity and data analytics professionals join BOT. Working in conjunction with the Bureau of Human Resources, BOT continues to make the job posting and interview process, as well as the onboarding process, more efficient.

During FY2026 the multi-year effort to replace the remaining legacy job descriptions with new or revised descriptions will continue with only a handful of the older descriptions still in use. Given how successful this effort has been, BOT expects the number of legacy job descriptions to decline to near zero.

BOT will also expand its efforts begun in FY2025 to strengthen collaboration among the different BOT teams. Taken together, BOT believes that these steps will not only lead to a higher percentage of filled positions but also contribute to building staff cohesiveness and retention.