Adelaide City Council on the hunt for a new CIO

Adelaide City Council is scouting for a new CIO to drive its push to become Australia’s business and innovation hub, as it prepares to farewell veteran IT chief Luu Nguyen.

It started advertising the vacancy this week to fill a role soon to be vacated by Nguyen, who will retire after more than 13 years heading IT for the council.

General manager Jane Booth spruiked the role as offering “really rich and rewarding opportunities”.

“We are looking for someone who can be a thought leader - who can help us embrace the opportunities that the internet of things, our wi-fi and our digital strategy offer the city,” she said in a video promo for the job.

The council is after candidates who can “really look at the opportunities for the organisation to respond differently to support our key strategies like placemaking, our economic strategy, our early evening economy strategy,” Booth said.

One of Nguyen’s last achievements at the council was the establishment of free wi-fi around the city, a $1.5 million project completed in partnership with the South Australian government.

The ‘AdelaideFree’ network, built by Internode and made up of 300 Cisco access points, was switched on in June.

The council also successfully stood up the UPark real-time parking space finder, which allows residents and visitors to view live parking availability figures online for any of the 6000 car spaces inside nine council-operated facilities.