Hardik Bhatt's success driving major, high-value transformation across large, complex organizations derives from his unique combination of thought leadership, strategic business vision, empowering leadership style, and superior communication abilities. Hardik has built global reputation in Smart Cities and IoT space and has built new paradigms to redefine this critical emerging technology space. He has worked in 40 cities across 19 countries to develop and deliver game-changing Smart cities solutions. Hardik is considered a pioneer of the Smarter State concept in the US with his work at the State of Illinois. Hardik has also provided IoT subject-matter expertise and technical / business due diligence for a wide range of PE and VC investment firms.
In his current role as the Chief Digital Officer and CIO for the State of Illinois, Hardik was directly recruited by the Governor to spearhead an end-to-end digital transformation of the State of Illinois. In less than two years, Hardik has driven innovation across all areas and brought the State from bottom 4th to top 3rd in 50 states, in national digital rankings. He has established a data practice building 360 views for customers and predictive analytics models for decision making. Under his leadership mobile interactions with state have gone up by 500%. He has transformed a loss-making, $14M / 6K-customer fiber services business (P&L) with total anticipated revenues of $70M-$100M over next five years. He has enabled Illinois to take leadership position in Smart State, blockchain and other key technology areas. Hardik is currently building Illinois’ first digital economy strategy to leverage newer disruptive technologies (AI, robotics, blockchain, AV, AR/VR, etc) to balance faster automation with upskilling of the workforce.
Concurrent with his CIO role, Hardik holds a number of Board Director and Investor roles. Xaptum is an IoT startup offers Internet "for" Things with edge network fabric providing a secure messaging layer between millions of sensors and the Cloud / application infrastructure. After leading due diligence for the seed round, Hardik joined Xaptum’s board. He joined the board of CIVIQ Smartscapes, a private equity owned IoT infrastructure company out of Boston, MA. He also serves as a board director for the Uno Charter School Network in Chicago, a ~$100M, 16-school non-profit charter school network founded to affect positive change in predominantly Hispanic communities. He provides investment advice to Illinois Treasurer’s $220M Illinois Growth and Innovation Fund (ILGIF). He is also an active Angel Investor with Hyde Park Angels, the largest and most active Angel Group in the Midwest.
In his previous roles with Cisco as Senior Director for Global BD for Smart and Connected Communities (S+CC), Managing Director of BD for the Americas, and Director of BD, Hardik established iconic customer reference accounts in global cities including Barcelona, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Jakarta, Dubai, Adelaide, Tokyo, Hangzhou, Rio, Sao Paulo, Recife, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Toronto and Nice, and grew Cisco’s reputation as a trusted partner and thought leader. Hardik enabled explosive market growth from $70M to $830M and consistently beat a >$120M overlay booking target. He played a key role in enabling Brazil to host 2014 FIFA World Cup, Toronto to host the 2015 PanAm Games, and Rio to host the 2016 Olympics and Paralympic Games.
In Hardik's earlier career as CIO for the City of Chicago, he introduced the Smart City concept and championed Smart Chicago program to win $25M in grant funding to grow sustainable, holistic technology penetration across multiple verticals. He also consolidated, streamlined, and rationalized ~90% of tech portfolio, delivering $34M / 46% savings over 7.5 years, and grew efficiency by 40% through elimination of legacy manual processes and delivered superior customer service with 10%-15% reduction in force via introduction of online services.
Previous roles include Oracle Corporation and Tata Consultancy Services.
Hardik has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Bachelor in Engineering (Computer Sceince) from India.