Nick Lucius has spent his entire career in government service. He has put his skills as an attorney and data scientist to work in several roles with the City of Chicago. Last year, he was confirmed as the city’s CIO, heading up the newly formed Department of Technology and Innovation.
“I’m proud of what we’re doing in Chicago … saving significant amounts of money by being more efficient,” Lucius tells InformationWeek. “We’ve saved $6 million already in 2025, which is a significant part of our budget. But [we did] so without a reduction in the delivery of services to humans.”
He talks about how he built his career and how he is aiming to increase both efficiency and access to services for Chicagoans.
Law and Computer Science
Lucius plays guitar and piano. His early career ambitions focused on music but shifted to politics and government. During his undergraduate years at Ohio State University, he worked for the Ohio Statehouse.
“I was just really interested in the power of the justice system and how just how much having an advocate can really make a difference in that,” Lucius shares.
That interest led him to law school. He attended DePaul University, a choice that was driven by its location. “Chicago, I chose for the city. I absolutely love the city,” he recalls.
Lucius earned joint degrees in law and computer science. His original intention was to pursue patent law with an interest in technology issues.
Nick Lucius
While his career took a different path, his skills in computer science and law have served him well. “If I learned anything in the law, it was that having someone articulating as an advocate on behalf of a cause can do so much to move us toward progress,” he says.
Armed with the ability to shape a narrative and champion a cause, Lucius has seen how technology can breathe life into those visions.
“On the technology side, I can then build and say, ‘OK, now we’re going to implement a system … We’re going to create something. We’re going to put something out there that wasn’t out there before to move this cause forward,’” he says.
A Career in Government
Lucius had those plans for patent law, but he graduated around the time of the Great Recession that began in 2007. Law firms weren’t hiring. But, as it turns out, the City of Chicago was. He got his start as assistant corporation counsel in the city’s Department of Law, focusing on foreclosures and abandoned buildings.
“As soon as I started doing that, I forgot about everything I went to school for, and I spent about 10 years in litigation trying to help out the people of Chicago,” he says.
After all those years of litigation, Lucius’s interest in technology began to resurface. “I also noticed that in my legal cases I had to do a lot of digging into city data systems and city technology systems in order to get my evidence,” he recalls.
He saw how modernizing city systems and connecting those systems across departments could make a big difference in the lives of residents. That spark got him back to his technology roots. He started taking on community projects and volunteer coding classes to hone his skills.
That reinvigorated interest in technology lead to roles as a data scientist with the city and then chief data officer and CTO with the office of the mayor.
Spearheading a New Department
As Lucius moved through each of these roles and now in his position as CIO, he increasingly took on leadership responsibilities.
“I’m a builder by nature. And so I always love to roll up my sleeves and get into a problem,” says Lucius. “I find myself in the role now more often of … people [looking] to me for inspiration … leadership and vision.”
As the head of the department of technology and innovation, Lucius and his team have responsibilities for a vast array of systems that support the third-most populous city in the country.
“We do so much: everything from supply the drinking water, pumping billions of gallons to not just Chicago but 125 cities in the area coming from Lake Michigan. Two major airports, international airports, 250 square miles of roads and sewers,” Lucius notes. “What we do is so massive, and one of the first orders of business when we got started was, we have a lot to just maintain and support.”
Lucius leads a team of 75 people, which is slated to grow to 150 by the end of the year. In addition, he works with a large network of vendors and consultants that support the city’s IT systems.
The team is organized into different groups: planning, delivery, support, and cybersecurity. “When someone comes and says, ‘Hey, Nick, I need some help. I need a new website. I need a new app. I need you to solve this problem for me.’ We’re going to plan it. We’re going to build it. We’re going to deliver it. After that, we’ll support it, and we’ll make it’s safe and secure.”
Lucius spends the majority of a typical day, up to 75% of it, in collaboration spaces. He is talking to team members, attending events, working to ideate. The remainder of his day is spent thinking about the future.
“What’s happening with AI? Where are we going with quantum computing here in Chicago? What’s our innovation play right now?” he asks.
As any CIO knows, not every day is a typical one. Systems go down. Fires have to be put out. Lucius was just a few months into the CIO role when the CrowdStrike global IT outage hit last year, impacting Windows machines across the city.
“Those kinds of days, when they come … it could be the only thing I do from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep,” says Lucius.
While days like this are inevitable, Lucius and his team still have a bigger picture and goals in sight. The more time it takes to access a benefit, the harder it is for the people who need that benefit the most to get it. He is hoping to use technology to increase equity and accessibility to government services.
“I want to see a decrease in the difficulty that it takes a person with a disability to apply for everything from a disability sticker for the car so that they can park close to their home, to apply for social benefits programs, whether that’s financial assistance or assistance with something in their home or something necessary for their life,” he offers as an example.
Challenges in Government
CIOs across industries share many of the same responsibilities and challenges, but there are sector-specific nuances, too. Lucius notes how much scrutiny public sector CIOs face compared to their private sector peers.
“Even publicly traded organizations don’t quite have the amount of scrutiny and attention that that a major government institution gets,” he contends.
And there is a reason for that pressure. Transparency is important. Delivering government services to citizens is essential. That responsibility is one of the biggest worries on Lucius’s mind.
Major government technology projects often get a lot of time and money, and yet they might fail. “You don’t have to look too far to see examples,” says Lucius. “When Healthcare.gov launched, it didn’t work.”
He believes that it isn’t enough to have a great idea, get it funded, and get it launched. He sees the need to constantly evaluate projects to ensure they are actually successful.
“Success is when something works better for Chicagoans and something works better for a human being on the other end, and they get that benefit,” he emphasizes.
How should young people with ambitions in technology and government be thinking about these challenges, particularly during such a turbulent time? Lucius still wants to see people chase their dreams, but he cautions that they need something to latch onto in such a high-pressure field.
“Maybe [you] have family or [you] have personal experience where what we do here helped or maybe … you’ve just seen the benefit play out for human beings out there in the world,” says Lucius. “If you can latch on to that, that’s something you need in order to get through some of these experiences.”
A Reimagined Future
Lucius sees people in the government technology space at a crossroads. They are faced with the major pressures of today’s societal and financial upheaval and the promises of delivering on new technology, like AI.
“All these things … have the potential to make things faster and more efficient, but then also bring the dangers of widening inequities and creating divides in society,” says Lucius. “We sit at the cusp of the reimagination of what it is to govern and what it is to oversee the provision of benefits in this society. And I want government technologists to recognize that … we can own that.”
Lucius wants to bring services and benefits to the people of Chicago more efficiently without reducing those services. “We talk a lot about government efficiency these days,” he says. “I think Chicago is a great example.”