Longtime Nashville CIO Keith Durbin retires
After 15 years as Nashville’s chief information officer, Keith Durbin recently announced in a LinkedIn post that he’s retired.
Durbin led Nashville’s Information Technology Services department as city CIO and director since 2009. He led the city’s IT strategy through four mayoral administrations and in 2010 established the Nashville’s information security program. He oversaw efforts to move city services into the cloud and helped to establish Nashville’s open data program.
At the 2016 at the Smart Cities Innovation Summit in Austin, Texas, Durbin said the open data program helped Nashville’s human resources department use employee and community demographic data to improve its hiring process.
“We put out the diversity statistics of our employees, and those showed that their diversity in no way matched the diversity of the community,” Durbin said at the summit. “Sharing this data didn’t come without some risk, but at the end of the day it was certainly the right thing to do.”
Durbin also helped establish the city’s fiber network, called Metro Public Wifi, and the hubNashville/311 system, which allows residents to find information and request non-emergency services online.
Durbin served as a board member of the Nashville Technology Council and led the Connected Nashville smart city strategy, coordinating recommendations made by its working group.
He established the Metro Employee Emergency Support Fund, which provides financial assistance to Nashville city employees in times of catastrophic need.
In 2023, Durbin received the StateScoop LocalSmart Award of City Executive of the Year for outstanding leadership in state and local government technology.
