Jim Onalfo wears a badge. His office is at One Police Plaza in Manhattan. He works with guys who carry guns. And his job security is tied to the whim of New York City voters.

But all that aside, his job as deputy commissioner and CIO at the NYPD isn’t much different from yours.

Onalfo would know. Now 66, he spent most of his professional life in the heart of corporate America’s IT at the likes of General Foods, Kraft and The Stanley Works. Now he’s trying to take the corporate discipline he learned at his previous posts and apply it to the insular, bureaucratic, paramilitary culture that is the NYPD.

The organization was certainly in need of a technology overhaul. NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Onalfo’s boss, refers to the NYPD’s old IT infrastructure as murky, stovepiped and underfunded. "We’ve always been challenged as far as IT is concerned," he says. The ironic part is that the department, which is bursting with authority types, had never been able to find a strong leader for IT. "IT didn’t have that overarching authority," Kelly says, meaning someone who knew IT and who could vet projects and finish a job once it got started.

In May 2003, Onalfo came out of retirement to be the first-ever NYPD CIO. He was in for a shock. Upon arrival he discovered that the department lacked an adequate disaster recovery plan with redundancy and backup sites—20 months after 9/11. If, say, there had been a fire in one of the precincts and it torched the computers, officers wouldn’t have been able to process criminals within the 24-hour time frame established by state law. Consequently, those perps would have walked. "I almost left the same day I got here because I didn’t want to be responsible for that," Onalfo recalls.

But he decided to stick it out, and today Onalfo is both the emblem of the NYPD’s new IT strategy and an important cog in the revamped senior management machine assembled by Commissioner Kelly. "The department never reached out to non-law enforcement folks to man high positions in the department," Kelly says. "But it was clear, certainly post-9/11, that we needed some big-league help." To that end, Kelly consciously sought experienced leaders from outside the walls of One Police Plaza, and that led to Onalfo’s hiring.

Despite his lack of government and law enforcement knowledge, Onalfo has been able to transition to life inside the NYPD, fulfilling Kelly’s desire to infuse his IT department with private-sector practices. (See "A CIO Is a CIO Is a CIO," Page 56, for more on how CIOs move between industries.) Not that the change has been easy. Onalfo has had to adjust to the politics, vendor selection regulations and the generally slower pace of public-sector entities. But with the tribulations have come successes, most notably a new disaster recovery plan, a revamped communications system and the Real Time Crime Center, which launched in July. Through the center, detectives can now easily access what were once disparate databases filled with millions of criminal records; searchers now uncover in a matter of seconds records that previously would have taken weeks or months to find—if they were found at all. "It’s a real-world crime-fighting tool," Kelly says.