Nina D’Amato, a veteran of technology in government and the military, has been named chief information officer for Santa Clara County.D’Amato had been named acting CIO in February for the Silicon Valley county, where she had previously served as IT director for the Office of the CIO and, before that, as associate CIO for business services.
D’Amato announced her new role Sunday on LinkedIn.
Before joining Santa Clara County government in 2019, D’Amato spent almost four years as chief of staff for the San Francisco Department of Technology. According to her LinkedIn profile, she oversaw the development, implementation, synchronization and integration of a $140 million portfolio of projects, programs and operations. Also in that role, D’Amato built and implemented the IT Shared Services Customer Advisory Group for the enterprise and drafted and implemented the city/county’s policies on data management, cloud management and green technologies.
Before her tenure in San Francisco, D’Amato was deputy director of programs for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, where she orchestrated change efforts over a six-month user-driven redesign of the enterprise Learning Management System for a workforce of 43,000.
D’Amato’s previous experiences include having served as a U.S. Congressional Fellow for Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa.; as director of the education portfolio for the U.S. Marines Corps’ Southwest Regional Command, International Security Assistance Force Afghanistan; and as an Intelligence Program officer for the Marine Corps. According to her LinkedIn profile, she also served as a math teacher and department chair for a school in East Palo Alto as part of the Teach for America program.
Professionally, D’Amato has been a speaker at conferences and forums, including at the Bay Area Regional CIO Conference, an event presented by Industry Insider — California’s sister publication, Government Technology magazine. At the 2019 conference, she delivered an address called “Pardon the Interruption,” an examination of how disruption can begin as a ripple and then become a tsunami. D’Amato also discussed ways to better position one’s organization “to better approach, identify, evaluate and exploit emerging technologies.”
