3 Things to Know About San Jose's IT Plan

3 Priorities from Rob Lloyd

Rob Lloyd, San Jose’s CIO, is responsible for IT strategy, projects that need to be approved, absorbing projects that go wrong and approving IT budget structures. He was the subject of an hourlong Techwire virtual briefing last week, hosted by Techwire's Joe Morris. If you didn’t have a chance to listen, here are some key takeaways from their conversation:

1. Cybersecurity

Emphasis has been placed on getting cybersecurity ahead of the curve, instead of reacting to incidents that have already happened. The intention is to get to the front end of cybersecurity where San Jose is sharing intelligence. San Jose is currently part of a cyberthreat response alliance with the FBI, the feds, local and state governments, among others. The partners share their top priorities monthly, but share intel about what they are seeing, daily. Some trends have already been seen to start in one sector and spreading into others. Resulting from this system, San Jose’s IT department has been able to find solutions for problems before any large cybersecurity issues occurred.

In the next fiscal year, San Jose’s IT department will be issuing an RFP for cybersecurity assessments, incident response, monitoring and training.

2. Customer Relationship Management

• For San Jose’s CRM, Lloyd didn’t want to create something “where there’s just a fake face of customer service that receives in an elegant way, but then just sprays around emails.” An RFP for about $300,000 was put out to create a CRM system that is a mobile, online portal that is also an integration engine that will be able to directly interface with the work management systems citywide, so that it won’t undo or interrupt the work process already organized.

With this system, when a person submits a request, it goes directly to the applicable department. This streamlines the process and leads to a much faster turnaround.

In this CRM, the priorities were set by what the community identified as its biggest concerns over the last year and a half.

3. Infrastructure refresh

• The IT department will be putting out an RFP in the next fiscal year to implement a cloud hub strategy for infrastructure refresh. It’s likely the government will always have at least some IT operations on premises, but more importantly, “There will never be one cloud provider to rule them all.” One cloud provider will be better and cheaper for dump storage, while another is better for video analytics and evidence storage with yet another provider.

Lloyd said: “What we need is a storage and infrastructure environment that can deploy and pull back, re-rationalize, optimize — whenever we need.”