Virtual Briefing: LADWP CIO Predicts Need for More Tech

The tech leader for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) signaled Tuesday that opportunities abound for vendors in the coming months, as the sprawling municipal utility sets an ambitious agenda for growth and change.

Louis Carr Jr. has been CIO for about 11 months at the nation’s largest municipal utility — one that serves 1.2 million power customers and 800,000 water customers and has nearly 10,000 employees and about $5 billion in annual revenue. He was the subject of Tuesday’s hour-long Techwire Virtual Briefing, for which he also made a PowerPoint presentation available for Techwire Insiders.

He has spent almost his whole career in the public sector, including planning, developing and implementing information business solutions and supporting innovation. He comes to LADWP from Clark County, Nev., where he had been CIO since 2013. Before that, he was CIO for the Texas Department of Transportation, CIO of Arlington, Texas, and deputy CIO of Las Vegas.

Carr’s expertise includes IT strategy, enterprise content management, enterprise resource planning, cloud management, financial and vendor management, and IT operations.

Like many other entities in the private and public sectors, Carr noted, LADWP is focusing on two main challenges: cyber/IT security and business enablement. The latter includes projects related to an Office 365 pilot, data governance, a data center move and mobile device management.

But there are a host of other functions that may afford opportunities for vendors: financial (budget and payroll); geographic information systems (GIS); retirement system; asset and work management; real estate; purchasing, receiving, invoice processing and accounts payable; timekeeping; intranet, IT service requests, document and records management; business intelligence (reports and analytics); and workers’ comp, OSHA and related regulations. Those seeking to email the department about purchasing may write here.

LADWP’s ITS Strategic Plan, which is to be reviewed and updated twice a year, includes four key goals for the next four years:

• Secure, protect and maintain IT infrastructure and data;
• Align technology road map processes, people and resources to help LADWP divisions achieve their goals;
• Attract, develop and retain a professional, high-quality IT workforce; and
• Adopt new technologies to improve business services.

Because a utility tries to function in many ways as a business, LADWP also is driving a series of “business-driven initiatives,” which include smart meters, a financial ERP, the energy-imbalance market, customer service/engagement/management; safety and safety training; queue management system for customer service; and an upgrade of audio-visual tech for the board room.

Carr said the IT public sector faces a growing challenge to recruit and retain a vital workforce in the face of a wave of baby boomer retirements — a problem that’s also been repeatedly noted by California state government IT leaders. Carr said the agency does some recruiting at universities, and he plans to step up his use of social media and networking sites such as LinkedIn to get the word out.

With a budget of about $156 million for fiscal year 2017-18, Carr’s agency spends about $69 million a year for capital expenditures and about $70.6 million on operations, maintenance and services.

Infrastructure accounts for a lot of the department’s budget, with systems and communications accounting for many vendor opportunities. Under the heading of systems, LADWP uses, buys and needs workstations and laptops, servers, storage, database management, a print center (LADWP prints 50,000 utility bills every day), and a main data and disaster data recovery center.

Under the communications category, LADWP must feed, maintain and grow its own department telephone network, its own network of 900 MHz radios, low band/VHF radios, fiber-optic enterprise, microwave networks, video surveillance and access control, and a call center infrastructure with IVR, voice recognition and call recording — all of which can handle about 12,000 phone calls every day.

Carr said he’s open to hearing from qualified vendors — he said he gets a dozen or more calls or emails from vendors every day — but he cautioned that given the mammoth size of his department, vendors should be experienced in dealing with large jobs. He also said that given how busy his department is, it can sometimes take a month or more to set up a meeting with a vendor, and he asked for patience.

For those who want to follow LADWP more closely, Carr also recommended downloading the department’s Supply Line magazine.  

If you missed the briefing, you can hear it here.

 



 

 

 The presentation can be seen here.