It has been a little over a year since we started Brownsville Connected. Over that time, I've shared many of the projects, partnerships, challenges, and lessons shaping Brownsville's technology journey.
This month, I want to bring those pieces together, not simply to look at what Brownsville has accomplished, but to share a roadmap that I believe other CIOs, technology leaders, city managers, and local governments can learn from.
Because Brownsville's transformation didn't begin with AI, smart-city technology, or an operations center.
It began with a foundation.
When we began this journey, Brownsville faced a significant connectivity challenge. Our technology infrastructure was decades behind where a growing city needed it to be.
So we started with something fundamental: connectivity.
Beginning in August 2022, Brownsville built approximately 100 miles of fiber across the city, with 576-strand capacity in key portions of the network. By March 2024, that infrastructure reached roughly 80 percent of Brownsville.
But the real story isn't the number of miles.
It's what those miles made possible.
The infrastructure helped create competition, expand broadband opportunities for residents, strengthen the city's ability to support economic development, and provide the connectivity required by major employers and developments investing in our region.
At the same time, we couldn't talk about becoming a connected city while leaving families behind. That's why digital inclusion had to be part of the strategy, including putting hundreds of computers directly into the hands of families who otherwise might not have had access.
One of the most important lessons from our journey is that transformation cannot be managed as a collection of unrelated technology projects.
Fiber isn't just a broadband project.
AI isn't just an IT project.
Cybersecurity isn't just a security project.
Private 5G isn't just a wireless project.
Resident services aren't just a customer-service project.
They are all connected.
That realization changed the way I looked at technology leadership. Instead of managing individual projects, we began thinking in terms of a technology portfolio, where infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, AI, communications, resident services, and smart-city capabilities all support a larger city strategy.
No city transforms alone.
Some of Brownsville's biggest technology initiatives became possible because we built relationships across government, industry, academia, and the community.
The role of the CIO is increasingly about creating that ecosystem.
Technology leaders need to be able to sit with engineers and discuss architecture, sit with department directors and understand operations, sit with executives and explain business outcomes, and sit with residents and understand whether technology is actually improving their lives.
That requires something more important than technical knowledge:
trust.
Trust with your team. Trust with departments. Trust with leadership. Trust with partners. And ultimately, trust with the community.
Once the foundation exists, the question changes.
Instead of asking, "How do we connect everything?" we can begin asking:
"What can we do now that everything is connected?"
That question helped lead us toward our AI Factory and the broader vision for the Brownsville Intelligent Operations Center.
The goal isn't AI for the sake of saying we use AI.
The goal is giving city leadership better information, faster.
Imagine bringing together information from public safety, infrastructure, traffic, cybersecurity, resident services, cameras, sensors, and other city systems into a unified operational view.
Instead of discovering a problem weeks later in a report, leaders can understand what's happening across the city closer to real time, and act.
That is where connectivity becomes intelligence.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned has nothing to do with technology.
You can purchase the best platform in the world and still fail.
Why?
Because transformation requires people to change how they work.
A new system can feel uncomfortable even to someone who has spent 20 years mastering their department. That's why CIOs sometimes have to think like psychologists as much as technologists.
We have to understand resistance.
We have to communicate the why.
We have to show people how technology helps them rather than replaces what they know.
And we have to bring them into the process.
That is also why our philosophy has consistently been One City.
A solution that makes IT successful but makes another department's job harder isn't transformation.
The technology has to work for the organization as a whole.
The roadmap
If I had to reduce Brownsville's journey to a roadmap for another city, it would look something like this:
1. CONNECT Build the infrastructure.
2. PROTECT Secure the infrastructure, systems, identities, and data.
3. INTEGRATE Break down technology and departmental silos.
4. UNDERSTAND Create visibility through data and analytics.
5. AUTOMATE Use AI and automation where they can remove friction and improve service.
6. OPERATE Give leadership a real-time view of the organization.
7. INCLUDE Make sure residents and employees benefit from the transformation.
8. MEASURE Focus on outcomes—not how much technology you deployed.
And surrounding every one of those steps are people, partnerships, and trust.
When we started building fiber, the objective was connectivity.
But connectivity turned out to be the beginning, not the destination.
It created the foundation for economic development, digital inclusion, smarter infrastructure, AI, better city operations, stronger partnerships, and entirely new possibilities for how local government can serve its community.
That's perhaps the biggest lesson from Brownsville's journey:
Start by asking:
Then build the infrastructure, team, partnerships, governance, and technology required to get there.
That is how technology stops being an IT strategy and becomes a city strategy.
And that is what being Brownsville Connected has always meant.
Editor's Note: The above commentary was penned by Jorge Cardenas, chief information officer for the City of Brownsville. The commentry first appeared in the City's Brownsville Connected publication. It appears in the RGG Business Journal with the permission of the author.
