How Brownsville’s CIO Built A Smart City By Refusing To Stay In His Lane

Technology now moves fast enough that a CIO who has mastered only one corner of the technology stack is already behind. As industry benchmarks confirm, the expectation is no longer that IT leaders manage infrastructure and stay out of the way. Today, the job is to connect every part of the technology stack to the business initiatives driving the organization forward. That means working fluently across systems, networks, applications, security, and project management. CIOs who hand off the pieces they do not understand lose the ability to lead the whole.

Jorge Cardenas, Chief Information Officer for the City of Brownsville, Texas, has led technology operations across environments most CIOs never encounter in a single career: the U.S. Marine Corps, Department of Defense contracting, private-sector manufacturing, and municipal government. That range shaped how he thinks about the role. In Brownsville, he built the nation's only city-owned private 5G network, deployed a $100 million fiber backbone, and secured $27.8 million in external funding, while managing a $35 million budget across 22 departments. For Cardenas, each of those wins was less about the technology than about making IT legible to the organization funding it.

"As a CIO, you can't just stay technical anymore. You have to be on your toes across every domain and connect how everything in IT actually drives the mission of the organization," said Cardenas. The stakes behind that view are practical: technology is moving fast enough that a CIO without working fluency across every domain will struggle to connect the decisions that need to be connected.

For Cardenas, that single-lane expectation is the central failure mode of the modern CIO, showing up either as a reluctance to engage with unfamiliar technology domains or as a habit of offloading security to the CISO without providing the backing to make that work. As expectations around cyber resilience grow, security leaders already carry a disproportionate share of the load, and a CIO who treats that as someone else's problem only compounds it.

• Silos and servers: "Technology is technology," Cardenas said. "You use servers, you use the cloud, you use network devices, and you use applications. They connect the exact same way. Every time I moved from sector to sector, people always asked how I was going to adapt. I always tell them it is just technology." That consistency is also an argument against the assumption that sector experience is a prerequisite. The technology transfers. The politics and people do not.

• Passing the buck: "A CIO often believes the CISO should be solving all the problems on security, when in reality, the CIO should be the one setting the tone," Cardenas said. "They need to guide that CISO to make sure they have the right tools and knowledge to do better." In Brownsville, that ownership translated directly to outcomes. Cardenas models a shared-accountability approach and reduced network vulnerabilities by 95 percent by making sure the CIO sets the tone and backs the CISO with the right tools and attention.

Where a CIO sits on the org chart shapes what they can actually accomplish. Reporting into a CFO or HR function places IT in a position where its value has to be argued upward through a function that measures everything in cost terms. As executive expectations for technology rise, a direct line to the top makes a meaningful difference. So does the ability to translate technology strategy into terms the CEO already cares about.

• Bypassing the bean counters: "It is very important for a CIO to report to the CEO. If you report to the CFO or to the HR VP, you're just asking for trouble," he said. "You simply don't get the same support that you would get from the top." In Brownsville, Cardenas reports directly to the city manager, who functions as the municipal chief executive. That reporting line backed an ambitious modernization agenda: $27.8 million in external funding secured and more than $8 million in savings generated through public-private partnerships, helping reframe how colleagues see IT's role in the city.

• Burying the budget line: "IT was always seen as an expense. Now we're changing that. I'm changing that," Cardenas said. "See me as an enabler, don't see me as an expense. See us as the department that is going to make things run better for the organization." That shift in perception is also what the broader technology outlook points to as a defining challenge for IT leaders heading into 2026: making the case for IT as a strategic function, not a cost center.

Operating as an enabler starts with knowing what the organization is actually trying to do. In Cardenas's experience, CIOs who skip that step and deploy technology based on technical judgment alone find that even well-intentioned projects stall or backfire.

• Mission over machinery: "The worst thing you can do is start doing things that you think the organization needs. I made that mistake as a younger manager," he explained. "I started replacing tools or bringing in tools that I thought were necessary. They were not. I was not aligning to the vision and mission of the organization, and that got me in trouble." Early in his career, Cardenas learned that technical confidence without organizational alignment is a liability. Today he follows a more deliberate process: understand how each department contributes to the city's mission, build a technology roadmap that reflects those needs, and secure formal approval from senior leadership before moving.

Cardenas applies the same expectations to his own team. Connecting the dots is not just a C-suite responsibility. It is a skill he expects from technicians and engineers at every level, people who can explain what they are implementing in business terms and advocate for it with their peers.

• Selling the stack: He treats the IT department as a training ground for enterprise-wide influence, expecting his staff to translate technology into business outcomes rather than just configure systems. "During weekly leadership meetings, I challenge my team to explain exactly where they went, who they talked to, and how they advocated for our initiatives," Cardenas said. "If we are deploying a new tool, I expect them to act as the champion for that tool. They have to go out and sell it." That internal focus on communication is also a change management strategy. Technology leaders rarely have unlimited budgets or personnel to force a mandate, so they have to rely on empathy and distributed champions to pull change through the organization.

Consensus, Cardenas has found, is the wrong target. Some departments will resist and some staff will push back. That is a given. The goal is not unanimity but enough momentum that results can do the persuading. That calculation holds across every sector he has worked in: the technology is largely the same whether the organization is a Marine Corps unit, a defense contractor, or a municipal government. What changes, as other government CIOs have found, is whether the person leading it can make it legible to the board, to the department head, to the technician being asked to champion a tool they did not choose.

"There are always going to be departments and people that push back. But as long as you build a guiding coalition across the organization, if you have 60 people approving and 40 not approving, you're doing great," he noted. "You're still going to drive change, because those 60 will quickly become 80, and then 100 by the time you're done."