Simona Rollinson

Simona Rollinson is the Chief Information Officer at the Cook County Bureau of Technology. Appointed to the position by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in April 2014, Rollinson oversees a team of more than 130 technologists and a capital budget of over $60 million.

The hallmarks of her tenure have been modernizing the County’s legacy platforms, increasing collaboration and shared services among the County’s agencies, and improving vendor and project management. Since taking the helm, Rollinson has overseen a 200 percent increase in broadband, and has embarked the County on substantial integration initiatives which will unite the four major areas of County business—justice, property, revenue, and finance—under modern, unified software solutions. 

Under Rollinson’s direction, Cook County rolled out a new website in June 2016 that Crain’s Chicago Business proclaimed “a thing of beauty”. In July 2016, the Center for Digital Government named Cook County one of America’s Top Digital Counties. Today, Rollinson’s Applications Development and Management Department has 216 unique applications in its purview, and the list is growing.

Before she became a public servant, Rollinson spent 17 years in the private sector. Rollinson joined the Follett Software Company in 1999 and held several leadership positions before being named President in 2011. During her tenure, Follett dramatically expanded its software and service offerings, while at the same time significantly improving operating efficiency. Before joining Follett, Rollinson worked for EDS in Charlotte and as a Software Development Consultant at BASF in her native Bulgaria.

Rollinson holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Technology from Technical University-Sofia in Bulgaria and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIU). She has pursued her PhD in Engineering from SIU and she is a graduate of the Chicago Management Institute at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.