Bill Schrier (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ)

Mike McGinn, Seattle's mayor-elect, has decided to retain Bill Schrier as the city's chief technology officer, McGinn's transition team said Thursday evening. Schrier is one of several department heads from the administration of outgoing Mayor Greg Nickels who will be sticking around under the new regime, including finance director Dwight Dively in an expanded role.

Via phone this morning, Schrier told us that he expects the operations of his department to remain essentially the same short term. However, McGinn has stressed the importance of consolidating city operations for efficiency. There are potential opportunities for those types of changes across the city's technology operations, although Schrier said he and McGinn haven't yet talked about plans.

Oh, and all that talk about McGinn switching the mayor's office from Windows PCs to Macs? Yeah, well, it ain't gonna happen.

"The mayor-elect is not interested in changing that standard," Schrier said, explaining that the city looked briefly at Macs for the office but didn't seriously consider a switch. "He is quite concerned about cost-containment, and what we've got now works. The new mayor's office will be using existing PC-based standards."

If anything, the city has been moving even more toward Microsoft technologies, having just shifted the Seattle Police Department from Novell Groupwise to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The city has standardized on Microsoft Office 2007, said Schrier, who has described himself in the past as "a serious supporter of Microsoft software and products."

Schrier's Department of Information Technology -- which calls itself the "DoIT" department -- will have 205 people going into 2010, and a budget of $57 million, including operating expenses and capital expenditures. That's down from $59 million and 217 people in 2009.

In terms of potential consolidation of the city's technology operations, Schrier noted that there are many other technology positions scattered across city government, in other departments, resulting in some duplication of functions. In addition, there may be additional opportunities for the city to standardize more of its technologies under single vendors to achieve better economies of scale. He cited the example of credit card processing, where some departments use a different processing company than most of the others.

As for other goals in 2010, Schrier pointed out that one plank in McGinn's platform is the improvement of broadband infrastructure in the city's neighborhoods. He said he expects the city to apply for federal stimulus money in the first part of the year to move toward that goal. In addition to improving broadband access in homes, the initiative could help Seattle City Light implement smart-grid infrastructure, and improve public safety communications.

Previously on TechFlash: Seattle CTO Bill Schrier talks budget cuts and blogging.