When City Hall Meets Mop Buckets: The VEO Conversation

From the moment Gilbert "Gil" Villegas and Karina Neff took the stage, the room leaned in. This was not a theory talk about technology. It was a working session on how cities and service companies can use tools, data, and common sense to serve people better.

Villegas arrived with the perspective of a Marine Corps veteran, infrastructure hand, and three-term alderman for Chicago's 36th Ward. He chairs the City Council's Committee on Economic, Capital and Technology Development and plays a central role on Contracting Oversight and Equity. His north star is opportunity. He has pushed skills-based hiring so frontline talent can move up on experience, not just degrees, and he has backed training and contracting programs that prepare minority and women-owned firms to compete.

Neff brought the operator's lens. She led cleaning firms before moving into product leadership at a technology company that builds tools for transparent, accountable cleaning operations. She has served on ISSA councils and helped shape VEO with a focus on Hispanic leadership and practical innovation that meets teams where they are.

And Neff set the agenda. She wanted the conversation to show how public and private leaders can turn technology into a service advantage. "I wanted you to set the stage for what you guys are doing, how you're doing it, and what's going to be the conversation today," she said.

Villegas traced the path that led him to build Chicago's Tech Task Force, a coalition designed to listen before prescribing.

"I created the Tech Task Force, which has about 20 to 25 large firms, you think of Amazon, Google, Oracle, Meta," he said. He emphasized that he was "very intentional about making sure that we also had local minority women" at the table and that the task force includes other cities-"LA, Miami, Atlanta, and Las Vegas." The meetings are simple by design: "We just geek out. We just talk about tech, how's it working in other cities, states, and countries."

For cleaning and facility leaders, the question under all of this is straightforward. How does technology help you deliver a better service today and help your people grow tomorrow. Neff offered a practical maturity model the industry has lived through. "It really starts with streamlining operations, moving away from the paper and pen, trying to digitize," she said. Then comes "accountability and transparency," a phase that accelerated during the pandemic. Next is "data influence," a phrase she prefers over data-driven because it "takes your education, it takes your experience and the data you make decisions." The horizon is a "single source of truth," what she called unified data integration strategies.

Where is Chicago on that? "I would say that we're really in the infancy stage," Villegas said. The urgency, he added, is real. "There's some cost savings that we can realize with tech." He gave an example that landed across the room. "We can save $40 million a year by using tech for time in the tech," a savings he said he had been highlighting "for the last four years."

Then he reframed technology as a utility.

"Tech is not like back in the day where it was a luxury to me by the utility," he said. "You need gas, you need light, and you need tech."

The room laughed when Neff asked him to explain his "cheeseburger" analogy. He did, and it worked. "You can order a cheeseburger from your favorite restaurant, see the time it's going to take to be made, follow the driver to your destination, have the driver take a photo of the food that's delivered, and then notify you minutes later," he said. "Why can't we have a permit process" with similar transparency so a business can see exactly where its paperwork sits and who needs what to move it.

Accountability came up again and again. For Villegas, it is clarity.

"Accountability goes both ways," he said. "It's incumbent upon me as a policy neighbor, as an appropriator, that when I'm asking people to invest in the city or the best of government, that we're making sure that we're good fiscal students of those dollars." He connected that responsibility to the people doing the work: "You have many women who work hard for your money."

Neff surfaced a truth many in the room know from experience. "Technology has a very funny way of revealing all your flaws," she said. You implement a system to solve one problem and discover your timekeeping or training or communication needs attention. The fix is not to shoehorn tech into old habits. It is to improve the process.

Villegas agreed. "The 12 steps it takes to solve this problem, we can do it in four," he said. What slows change is not capability. It is culture. "The bureaucrats feel comfortable in doing a process a certain way," he said. That is true in government and business. The antidote is leadership and the discipline to change the process to fit the solution, not the other way around.

Data privacy and security came up, and Villegas pointed to a first-of-its-kind ordinance Chicago passed to treat data as an asset while protecting residents. "It would require that our data be stored in one in the U.S.," he said, and it provides incentives when storage stays in Illinois or Chicago. He connected that policy to a broader push to attract investment and build a local tech ecosystem. Savings from smarter operations could seed programs that help local companies prove and scale solutions.

Then the conversation turned to people. Neff described what it takes to humanize technology, so frontline cleaners see it as a tool for success, not a threat.

"You have to humanize technology," she said. She shared a small shift with big impact from training days. "When I was training them in English, it was like I was telling them what to do. But when I was training them in Spanish, it was like I was asking them what to do." Meeting people where they are matters. "Most of our community, they don't have free data," she said. Asking workers to download another app with another password can be a real barrier. Using WhatsApp that people already have "is a game changer."

That theme-meet people where they are-ties back to Villegas' workforce priorities. Skills-based hiring makes sense in facilities because experience, certifications, and supervisor references are often better predictors of performance than a diploma. Contracting oversight, when it is done well, is not red tape. It is a strategy to widen access, build capacity, and keep dollars circulating in the communities that companies serve.

The audience pressed Villegas on speed. Why does government take so long to implement technology? He did not sugarcoat it. "Government, unfortunately, moves very slow," he said. Change often waits for crisis, and Chicago faces deficits that sharpen the need to act. His answer again came back to leadership and focus. "We want to reimagine how we deliver resources," he said. "We want to reimagine how we get businesses and constituents engaging with city government in order to create efficiency."

A question on custodial services in schools underscored the complexity of public decisions. Villegas acknowledged the politics and the separate governance structures at play. He also gave the room its due. "You guys are professionals for reason," he said.

Neff brought the conversation back to selection criteria. With so many tools in the market, what signals separate rock-solid partners from red flags. Villegas pointed to a hard look Chicago took at itself. "We were in the 25 percentile for paying for technology, and we were in the bottom 70 percentile for the results," he said. The fix begins with transparency about current state and a neutral project management function that can evaluate solutions on merit, not relationships. It also requires vendors who invest in training because adoption lives or dies on whether end users understand how the tool helps them.

Both speakers closed on the same note. Technology is an accelerant. It exposes what is working and what needs work. The job of leaders is to be honest about both, to change processes that no longer serve, and to choose tools that respect the people who use them.

"We want to make sure that we create as many efficiencies as possible," Villegas said. The motivation is not abstract. "That's how we're going to realize some savings in order to minimize any type of potential disruptions in services."

For VEO's cleaning and facility maintenance audience, the takeaways are clear. Treat tech like a utility that supports the mission. Build accountability you can see. Use data to influence decisions without forgetting judgment and experience. Humanize implementation so frontline workers feel included and respected. Hire for skill and potential and promote on performance. And keep one promise that both speakers made in their own way. Meet people where they are, then move forward together.

Interested in shaping the future of VEO?

Consider joining our ISSA VEO Committee to help guide programming and initiatives throughout the year.