City of Lewisville

Chris Lee is CIO for the City of Lewisville, a TAGITM board director and CGCIO designee. He holds a BS in Business Computer Information Systems from the University of North Texas and is pursuing an MBT at Purdue University.

From Technologist to Coach

My career spans 25 years, and it started with a simple draw toward the mechanics of building technology solutions. That's what I studied, and it's still the part that excites me.

Around 2013, my role shifted from building technology to leading it. I moved from playing the position to coaching it. I had to learn how many stakeholders sit around a single decision, and managing those relationships became as much the work as the technology itself.

That shift taught me what I think of as adaptive leadership. We hold a social contract with our residents. That means paying attention to issues I'd never considered before, like information asymmetry and negative externalities. Residents deserve a clear explanation of what we collect, why we collect it and how long we keep it.

Adaptive leadership should also extend to our own teams. We're in the middle of a revolution with AI and robotics, reshaping skills people have spent years developing. A SQL developer today might need to learn agentic workflows tomorrow, effectively starting over as a mid-career novice. Leaders have to create a holding environment that gives employees enough psychological safety to make that transition.

Adaptation Over Transformation

Digital transformation is a buzzword in our industry.  I would push back and state that it is more of a digital adaptation. Butterflies transform, and what the government does is deliberately adapt around infrastructure that already works.

“Digital transformation is a buzzword in our industry, when it is actually digital adaptation. What the government does is deliberately adapt around infrastructure that already works.”

For instance, a COBOL stack has limited functionality, but it's highly secure. Stripping it out for something shinier ignores that trade. Every modernization decision has to put security first and match what users actually need.

When we ran an ERP refresh in 2014, we replaced siloed applications built for narrow tasks. In their place, one comprehensive system now lets everything talk to everything else. That move only pays off once you're planning around long-term trends, not one department's convenience.

I think about this work in horizons. Horizon 1 (H1) is for daily operations. It's the table stakes people expect the moment they turn on a computer, the way they expect water from a tap. Horizon 1 (H2) and Horizon 3 (H3) are where adaptation happens, and neither survives without freed capacity. Every year, I look for 10 percent of our operational load that we can divest. That might mean decommissioning a system, outsourcing something we used to run on-prem, or handling a function differently. New projects never stop arriving, so freeing that capacity every year is what makes room for the H2 and H3 work.

Freed capacity increasingly goes into AI, starting inside my own department. Developers fluent in foundational models now produce roughly five times the output. A web app that once took weeks now ships in days. That speed widens our attack surface, meaning more time spent red-teaming and stress-testing before anything goes live.

That risk shapes bigger decisions too. Every decision starts with buy, build or extend. Buying makes sense for roughly 70 percent of what a municipal government runs, and that puts the real work into the contract itself. Texas has already moved here. House Bill 149, the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act, requires us to disclose on our website whenever a resident interacts with an AI agent or when we're collecting biometric data. We have to let residents opt in and tell them how long we'll retain it.

We're also piloting a traffic system through a company called NoTraffic, with Miovision under consideration. NoTraffic uses AI at intersections to adjust signal timing in real time. It can also predict an ambulance's route from the fire station to an emergency and then to the hospital, coordinating traffic signals to improve response times.

We’re running more exciting projects. Our police department flies drones as a first responder, putting eyes on any scene within roughly three minutes. Those capabilities introduce new operational possibilities, while also creating new risk profiles that require careful oversight.

Our proximity to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport means electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft could become part of our local airspace within the next five to 10 years. Those developments mean municipalities must begin planning for airways alongside roadways. They are H3 investments that require long-term thinking well before the technology becomes commonplace.

What I'd Tell Budding CIOs

People drawn to this role tend to be highly technical, and that's the passion that brings most of us in. The path eventually forks. You either stay deeply technical or move toward a C-suite seat with reach across an organization. I'd point toward the second, and getting there depends more on empathy and soft skills than most technologists expect.

Understand what other stakeholders need. Don't treat the outcome as a fixed pie to divide. Build that thinking into a solution from the start, and it earns more buy-in than adding it later ever does. Continuing education matters, but so does building the muscles adaptive leadership requires—muscles that lean more toward the EQ than the IQ side.