As a cabinet member of Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s administration, Hardik is the Secretary of Department of Innovation and Technology and the State CIO. Hardik leads 21st century digital transformation of Illinois, with a team of 2,500 employees and consultants, and with over $1B of budget, including a fiber services P&L with 6,000 customers.
Before joining Illinois, Hardik was a senior director with Cisco and led Global business development of Internet of Everything for public sector. He worked with global leaders in 40 cities (Barcelona, Rio, Copenhagen, Jakarta, Dubai, San Francisco, Chicago, Hamburg, etc.) across 19 countries to extract value by connecting public assets, with a $120M overlay sales responsibility.
Prior to that, Hardik was the CIO for the City of Chicago and Commissioner for Department of Innovation and Technology with a team of 300+ and a budget of over $200M. Apart from managing technology for the city, Hardik built and lead the Smart Chicago program, and founded two non-profits -Smart Chicago Collaborative and ChiTechAcademy, a 9-12 grade technology high school.
Prior to that, Hardik worked with Oracle Corporation in the US as a Senior Consultant and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in India as a Systems Analyst.
