City of Mesa’s Scott Conn and Paul Poledna City of Mesa’s Scott Conn and Paul Poledna Third time’s a charm for CIO Scott Conn Scott Conn is the Chief Information Officer and IT Director for the City of Mesa, Arizona. “This is actually my third career. I started in the private sector climbing the corporate ladder at AT&T fresh out of college. “I later left them for the world of small company turnarounds. And yes, I was the mean, nasty guy that would walk in and go, ‘You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired.’” Scott also promoted employees and suggested changes within company structures to help make them profitable again. “I did seven of these very successfully. The last one was a company that I actually purchased – a medical software company up at Lake Tahoe.” Scott merged the company, Vantage Med, with six other firms, took it public and then retired. “That lasted all of six months,” he laughs. “I got bored – you can only do so much camping, fishing and playing golf. So I decided to start an executive technology consulting firm, which I did for 20 years while living at Lake Tahoe.” Scott’s clients included Barclays, Cisco, Disney, IBM, Kraft Foods, HP, and Motorola, and the job involved guiding C-level executives in improving their technology investments. “I then sold that company to a San Francisco firm and retired again. Six months in, the same thing happened again – I got bored out of my skull.” The city of Concord, California, happened to have his details from his previous consulting work and called on Scott for help with its network infrastructure. It’s from here that he headed the IT Division for Concord, where he ran managed IT for the Police Department. “Thus, I embarked on my third career