Rifu Turns an NTT Adviser Into a CIO Deputy — A Small Town’s Test of Private-Sector Digital Governance

Digital government does not become transformation because one more form moves online. Resident certificates, tax, welfare, disaster response, internal approvals, cybersecurity and staff training can all be digitized separately and still leave a municipality with fragmented systems and no coherent priorities.

Rifu, a town of about 35,800 people in Miyagi Prefecture, is trying a different governance step. On Oct. 5 it appointed Daisuke Onoki, a manager in NTT East’s Miyagi branch, as its CIO deputy adviser. Onoki has already spent about four and a half years supporting Rifu as a DX promotion adviser. The new title gives the same private-sector specialist a broader role across the town government.

Why four and a half years of advice became a governance role

Rifu and NTT East did not begin working together this week. They signed a multi-field partnership agreement aimed at regional vitality in July 2021. In May 2022, an NTT East employee began working with town departments as a DX promotion adviser.

NTT East’s Oct. 5 announcement describes the transition clearly. Department-level use of digital tools progressed, but a new problem emerged: projects needed to be organized under a town-wide policy, prioritized and coordinated across departmental boundaries. The challenge had shifted from finding someone who understood technology to building a structure capable of deciding what the whole municipality should do first.

Rifu’s own plan already called for outside expertise

The town’s digital strategy explicitly combines external talent with internal capacity building. Rifu’s DX Promotion Plan says it supplements the broader town plan and administrative-reform program, and it calls for use of outside specialists, development of internal personnel and continuous review through a PDCA cycle.

Its priorities include standardizing core municipal systems, moving administrative procedures online, My Number Card services, AI and robotic process automation, telework, cybersecurity, measures for the digital divide, business-process reform and open data. Rifu adopted a new FY2026 DX plan in April, again positioning digital technology as a tool for better resident services and more efficient administration.

From the Mamorifu disaster app to generative AI

Rifu’s digital work is already visible to residents. In March 2025 the town launched the disaster app “Mamorifu,” which links with the municipal disaster radio system and can deliver tsunami information, earthquake alerts, J-Alert warnings and other emergency information by smartphone, including text and audio.

The town’s resilience planning calls for further use of Mamorifu, construction of a digital disaster platform, and stronger integration with national and prefectural information systems. The same planning document explicitly says outside expertise, including the DX promotion adviser, should be used to continue developing digital talent inside government.

Local broadcasters report that Onoki’s work has included generative-AI introduction and development of the disaster app. On the day of his new appointment, Rifu also installed an online terminal at town hall capable of issuing copies of residence records and other certificates. These are individual services; the CIO deputy role is meant to turn projects like them into a coherent portfolio.

What a municipal CIO deputy actually does

CIO stands for Chief Information Officer. In Japanese municipalities, a deputy mayor or other senior executive often occupies the CIO position, while a specialist adviser provides technical and strategic support. In Rifu, Onoki is expected to advise the deputy mayor/CIO, coordinate across departments and help organize digital projects according to town-wide priorities.

That is different from simply running an IT department. Many government digital projects fail to produce large gains because the old workflow remains underneath the new screen. If residents fill out an online form but staff then re-enter the information into another system, the process has been digitized without being redesigned.

Japan’s Digital Agency makes the same distinction

The Digital Agency’s municipal service-counter program aims for offices where residents do not have to repeatedly write the same information, wait unnecessarily or visit multiple counters. Its guidance says business-process re-engineering and system use have to be pursued together; BPR is treated as a prerequisite, not an optional extra.

The agency’s local-government DX dashboard separately tracks whether municipalities appoint CIOs and CIO advisers, establish cross-government structures, use outside digital specialists and train their own staff. National policy increasingly treats digital transformation as an institutional-capability problem rather than an IT-procurement problem.

Why private-sector talent helps

A town of 35,000 people cannot easily maintain deep in-house expertise across cloud platforms, AI, RPA, security, networks, data integration and digital procurement. A private-sector specialist can bring experience from other organizations, help frame technical requirements and support project management.

Continuity also matters. Onoki has spent years inside the relationship rather than arriving for a short consulting engagement. Municipal government operates through ordinances, budget cycles, councils, national standards and administrative procedures. Understanding who can decide what—and when—is often as important as understanding the technology itself.

The governance risk of bringing a vendor close to strategy

Outside expertise creates a second problem: governance. NTT East is not only a source of digital expertise; it is also a commercial supplier of ICT services to governments and businesses. When an adviser belongs to a company that could later bid for systems or services, procurement fairness, conflicts of interest and information controls matter.

The public materials reviewed by Japan.co.jp do not specify Onoki’s compensation, exact working schedule, formal decision rights, procurement-recusal rules or conflict-management framework. A CIO deputy adviser may not select vendors directly, but someone helping define priorities and requirements can still influence future procurement.

There is also a dependency risk. If a municipality’s digital capability resides mainly in one external adviser, progress can stop when that person leaves. That is why the explicit commitment by Rifu and NTT East to train municipal staff is more important than it first appears.

Maintaining administrative capacity as the workforce tightens

Rifu is a local example of a national structural problem. Municipalities cannot assume that staff numbers will keep growing, yet the demands placed on local government continue to expand: cybersecurity, disaster communication, online procedures, data standards, cloud migrations and increasingly AI.

The promise of municipal DX is not simply to cut headcount. It is to reduce repetitive administrative work so public employees can spend more time on consultation, judgment and field work that require people. Rifu’s earlier plan explicitly framed AI and RPA in terms of allowing employees to concentrate on tasks that only public officials can perform.

The goal should be a town that can make its own decisions

The logic of appointing a private-sector CIO deputy should not be to outsource digital government to NTT East. Its value should be the opposite: to use outside expertise so that the municipality itself becomes better able to decide what to buy, what not to buy and which problem should be solved first.

In local television coverage, Onoki said he wanted both staff and residents to receive the benefits of digital technology and to create an environment where services could be delivered with greater speed. The meaningful measures will not be the number of apps launched. They will be whether residents make fewer trips to town hall, whether emergency information reaches them faster, whether staff spend less time retyping data and whether people uncomfortable with digital tools are still served.

After four and a half years of departmental support, Rifu’s challenge has moved from starting digital projects to governing them. That makes a seemingly small personnel appointment part of a much larger question for Japan: how can local governments preserve administrative capability when technology grows more complex and skilled people become harder to hire?

Reporting cutoff: Oct. 6, 2026, 1:21 PM JST. Public materials reviewed do not establish the CIO deputy adviser’s compensation, working frequency, formal decision authority, conflict/recusal rules if NTT East bids on Rifu procurements, or quantified productivity gains from generative AI and related projects.