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Which California Counties Won Plaudits in Digital Counties Awards?

In the Digital Counties Survey, California counties took 12 of the 58 honors. Here, we break down each of the honorees within the state and provide a glimpse into what put them in the spotlight.

County-level technology leaders get it from all sides: Headlines spur cries for tighter cybersecurity. Lean budgets mean the IT buck has to stretch further. Competing business needs put pressure on the CIO to prioritize effectively. 

The nation's winners of the 17th annual Digital Counties Survey, conducted by the Center for Digital Government,* have successfully navigated these shifting currents. They’ve juggled competing interests, implemented innovative solutions and found creative ways to keep the budget in line. 

The full results are available from Government Technology, Techwire's sister publication. For our California readers, here are the Golden State's honorees, ranked within population groups. California counties claimed 12 of the 58 awards given nationally. 

Population up to 150,000

Nevada County – 1st Place

Smaller counties can sometimes face bigger IT challenges. But Nevada County has once again finished first for the up-to-150,000 population category, doing so for the third time in the past four years. In the past, Nevada County — which is home to roughly 98,000 and located north of both Lake Tahoe and Sacramento — has been lauded for doing tech work that would be right at home in a larger jurisdiction. This year is no different. 

“We are a smaller shop, but we still have to deliver the same breadth of services that a larger organization has to deliver,” said county Chief Information Officer Steve Monaghan. “Instead of doing 10,000 permits a year, we might only do 2,000 permits, but we still have to support the same permit system.”

Monaghan makes it work by empowering his customers to take ownership of their IT systems.

“Instead of IT having to do all the care and feeding, the customer really owns their own business processes,” he said. “They work directly with their vendors to solve problems and support new functionality. We’re there to support them, but we aren’t carrying all the water on that.” 

He points for example to the county’s recently expanded human resource system: “They’ve added an onboarding module, and HR did that with the vendor directly. Next up is a performance management module, and HR will do the rollout without any help from Information Services.” To make it work, the IT team labors on the back end to guide a thoughtful selection of products and services.

“We’re picking platforms where the customer can really be empowered to build them up and roll them out,” Monaghan said. 

That strategy has paid off as new business needs have emerged. Cannabis legalization, for instance, has created whole new workflows around land use. At the same time, a rising risk of wildfires has likewise brought land management to the fore. The countywide adoption of Accela’s land management software has made it easy for end users to get their needs met without having to overly burden the IT shop.

“It’s the letters you send out, the fines and fees,” Monaghan said. “Everyone is able to process all the documentation for all those different inspections and other activities.” 

IT also has supported a wide-ranging deployment of GIS, including enhanced functionality to better track the local homeless population. IT effectively leveraged existing data to enable social services to better address the need. 

“By mapping the locations from the annual point-in-time count of homelessness, we are able to identify where clusters of people were,” he said. Overlaying transportation routes, health services and other key GIS information enabled the team to identify the optimal location for a new intake center in support of a new low-income housing initiative. 

By giving various business lines within the county access to these diverse technologies, Monaghan’s team has been able to extend the impact of its limited resources.

Indeed, Nevada County continues to build on its forward-facing tech work, including its Participate Nevada County crowdsourcing website, which it uses to spur constituent feedback and comments on government business. This established culture of using online platforms to better serve residents has helped the county respond to ongoing public concerns, namely wildfires that have in recent years afflicted the region.

The IT team in Nevada County this year developed a new website specifically for fire preparedness and related emergency information. Part of what made this natural work for the team there is that the CIO also serves as the county’s emergency services officer. The preparedness site is part of a more comprehensive digital effort to keep residents safe from wildfires — one that includes online surveys, dead-tree assessment tools for mobile devices, and GIS maps of things like green waste drop zones, all of which were developed for public use. This is just one example of the type of responsive, agile and impressive work being done in Nevada County, and many larger jurisdictions would surely love to be on this level.

Population 250,000-499,999

Placer County – 3rd Place

Placer County took a citizen-first stance with the 2019 deployment of a new website, using an interface developed by CivicPlus, and featuring a revamped design that provides residents with service-based navigation instead of a department-oriented website. Each department is responsible for managing its content on the website, and the Placer County Information Technology Division will expand the self-service functions throughout 2019. Traffic for the county website is about 152,200 users per month with 150 programs accessible to residents.  

The website launch aligns with the Placer County Board of Supervisors’ strategic goal of “Innovation, Implementation-focused, Integrated County Services,” which aims to improve people’s interactions with the local government. To support its goal of a better overall service delivery experience, Placer County made the Information Technology Division its own department and created the role of chief information officer to lead new countywide technology solutions, and oversee investments and telecommunications.  

Also, Placer County became the first local government in California to deploy an AI chatbot for the Google Cloud Platform and Amazon’s Alexa. The chatbot has been programmed with more than 100 question-and-answer scenarios and is integrated with the county’s GIS, which can provide residents with zone and parcel information. The chatbot is limited to Community Development Resource Agency information, but Placer IT is working to expand its knowledge base to other agencies while continuing to integrate county systems.

Marin County – 4th Place

Marin County placed well in this year’s Digital Counties Survey, propelled by thoughtful IT and strategic planning, community engagement via well-designed tools and apps, and execution of a comprehensive cybersecurity program connected across the enterprise. The agency hired new CIO Liza Massey in 2018 as it focused on deploying COMPASS, a new organizational performance management program, which uses data to drive performance, with the goal of displaying it in dashboards built atop the agency’s existing data tools from Socrata Public and Tableau. This year, departments are honing their mission, strategies, tools and processes to engage employees, with the goal of showing data for all strategies via internal- and external-facing dashboards by April 2020. 

Five-year county business and Department of Information Services and Technology (IST) strategic plans will guide Marin through 2020, but tech-forward business processes are also helping connect officials to the residents they serve. The county has worked since 2017 to make engagements mobile, paperless and citizen-centric, deploying court calendar texting alerts and electronic signature for county contracts to support internal digital document workflows. IST will be totally paperless this year for recruitment.

IST’s five-year plan centers on security, and the agency — reorganized last year — has tripled its security resources and updated its information security manager position to CISO. With county HR, IST has stood up the KnowBe4 cybersecurity awareness and training platform and made annual information security training mandatory for all employees. Internal monthly mock “phishing” campaigns continue, and staffers can now report suspected phishing via a tool implemented last year. An update to the county’s cybersecurity, incident and ransomware response plans will be complete by the end of 2019.

Santa Cruz County – 8th Place  

The county crafted a new mission in 2018 — to create an open and responsive government that delivers quality, data-driven services. To that end, the county adopted a strategic plan that focused on six strategic areas and IT plays a major role in the operational excellence of each: comprehensive health and safety; attainable housing; reliable transportation; dynamic economy; sustainable environment; and county operational excellence.

Four priorities drive the strategic areas: customer experience; county workforce; county infrastructure; and continuous improvement. IT’s role will be online accessibility to county services, paperless processing, open government and business processing. County IT has developed tools and links, including a mobile app for issue reporting and information and a portal for commercial projects and building permits to be submitted.

The IT department is also updating its project management toolkit, which features new innovations and improvements in the documents used for tracking IT projects. Public communication is a key component of the county’s strategies and has increased the use of social media, including more than a dozen Facebook pages, several Twitter accounts and Instagram. For employee recruitment, the county has expanded the use of LinkedIn and Twitter. Santa Cruz continues to use Nextdoor to communicate with residents.

Population 500,000-999,999

Sonoma County – 2nd Place (tie)

In October 2017, wildfires consumed thousands of acres in Sonoma County, destroying homes and killing dozens of people. In March 2019, the county was hit by devastating floods, resulting in an estimated $155 million in property damage. These two disasters forced county officials to put a priority on recovery and resilience policies that are having a major impact on Sonoma’s technology resources, strategies and overall planning. Hoping to accelerate its priorities, the county has established Local Assistance Centers throughout the jurisdiction to provide residents access to Wi-Fi, computers and printers. The county has also expanded its online resources to include GIS maps and data, expedited online permitting for rebuilding, debris removal, health and safety resources, alerts and warning information, and financial and legal assistance.

Sonoma’s other major policy concern that impacts IT is its homeless problem. Almost 3,000 people are homeless in the county on any given night. After years of decline, the number of homeless grew 6 percent last year, triggered in large part by the thousands of homes wiped out by the wildfires. To mitigate the problem, Sonoma’s IT department is managing a multi-agency data sharing effort to identify target populations at risk and in need of services and to measure metrics to see if the county is having success in helping this demographic. Sonoma is partnering with IBM and state entities to use big data, artificial intelligence and analytics in finding solutions to the county’s homeless problem. Given how much of its population has been impacted by floods and fires, the county’s safety-net services have become crucial and that has made IT’s role more important than ever.

Ventura County – 2nd Place (tie)

This year, Ventura County moved up two spots in its population category despite experiencing hardship at the end of 2018, including a mass shooting at a bar in November, followed shortly by the devastating Hill and Woolsey fires. The county Board of Supervisors has made recovery from the incidents, particularly the wildfires, a top priority, and the IT department has been integral both during and after times of emergency. Throughout the fires, the county’s emergency mobile communications trailer allowed staff to quickly distribute support where it was needed; emergency communications saw no outages during that time. IT also launched one-stop websites that assisted recovery for those impacted by the fires, such as with housing, food, financial assistance, health services and more. 

Ventura County continues to make strong tech gains on all fronts. This includes its participation in the Broadband Consortium of the Pacific Coast, along with Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, a regional effort to bring broadband to underserved areas. The consortium has also established a playbook of best practices for local government broadband efforts and is now working with housing developments to bring higher speeds to new construction areas. Citizen engagement is also a strong suit for Ventura, and includes a new website featuring Amazon Alexa skills as well as a chatbot, and the ability to use text messaging to register to vote, find a polling place, get election results and more.

To attract a younger and tech-savvy workforce, Ventura County’s IT agency operates in a modern office, which along with its new website is designed to attract millennials to county work. They also offer LinkedIn Learning opportunities for workers across the county, which they’re using as an incentive to lure and ultimately retain talent.

San Mateo County – 5th Place

San Mateo County, which ranked third by population in its category in 2018, holds strong in fifth place this year. Its Information Services Department (ISD) meets the growing needs of around 7,600 county employees and 884,000 residents by focusing on its mission of enabling connections between residents and government, amid an IT reorganization to improve customer response. 

The agency has connected priority, policy and IT initiatives, using technology to meet citizens digitally where they are. A disaster response plan underway will empower the goal of a healthy, safe community; an Internet platform for job searches and services information, and an open data initiative will help support a prosperous community. An open government initiative fosters collaboration, and online reporting features let residents report streetscape issues like potholes and full storm drains. 

Since the debut of innovation center SMC Labs in May 2018, the county has rolled out an air quality monitoring network to document particulate levels following the 2018 Camp Fire; and stood up an Esri GeoEvent Server to provide alerts, analytics, big data storage and business intelligence. A recently redesigned website and Alexa skills help the county reach residents, connecting them to services through initiatives like Get Food San Mateo, a new anonymous screening site for food assistance. The portal also offers regional data on groundwater and GISelectric vehicle charging and a community vulnerability index.

Officials are also enhancing cybersecurity, mandating multifactor authentication on county resources, 60-day password resets and department head approval for changes to admin and auditor accounts. Implementation of a secure county texting platform is underway, as are in-depth reviews of networks to spot unauthorized connections, unsecured servers and unprotected PCs.

San Joaquin County – 8th Place

This year, San Joaquin County — home to cities like Stockton and Lodi — has moved up to eighth place in its population category, making progress in the past year with a wide range of work, from expanding its open data efforts to digitizing its county budgeting procedures, just in time for the fiscal year 2019-2020 process. Modernizing the budget in this way enabled the county to replace several labor-intensive manual processes. There are the usual cost and efficiency benefits of workflow automation as a result, including a new normal in which the county administrator’s office has more time to perform thorough audits of submitted budgets.  

This sort of project is perhaps an excellent encapsulation of the IT work that took place in San Joaquin this past year: It’s steady and productive, if not as flashy or outward-facing as some of the larger jurisdictions in this year’s survey. There is also much cause to be optimistic about IT work in San Joaquin moving forward. In the spring, the county found a new CIO in Chris Cruz, an award-winning technologist who was most recently deputy state CIO and chief deputy director of the California Department of Technology. Cruz’s resume includes nearly three decades of experience in government and business IT.

Cruz succeeds Jerry Becker, the longtime CIO who’s now the county’s assistant chief administrator. Taken altogether, San Joaquin is on an upward trajectory when it comes to its IT posture.



Population 1 Million and up

Los Angeles County – 2nd Place

The nation’s most populous county improved its ranking from fourth place to second place this year through key practices and implementations that emphasize leading-edge technologies and initiatives designed to make life easier for more than 110,000 employees — and more than 10 million residents.

The IT agency has streamlined data access through implementation of a Countywide Master Data Management platform, aimed at better informing departments about their client needs. Similarly, a County Healthcare Integration Priority brings together all agency health services to provide an enhanced user experience; and Whole Person Care Los Angeles works to ensure that at-risk Medi-Cal recipients get the resources they need. Its homeless initiative, created by the Board of Supervisors, has convened public, private and academic partners. Their collaboration has yielded an RFI and an innovation forum, and now work on an RFP.

A cognitive chatbot implementation by the Registrar Recorder/County Clerk sends text messages to answer FAQs and enables 24/7 automation of online services while cutting operational costs. The District Attorney’s Office has begun using robotic process automation to process Notices of Intent to Destroy Exhibits from the court, resulting in a 25 percent time savings and a more than 35 percent increase in the availability of staff to do higher-value work.

The county has also taken significant steps to enhance cybersecurity, including updating enterprise information security policies; decommissioning more than 100 systems with legacy operating systems; deploying a new Information Event Monitoring solution; redesigning the Office of the CIO’s cybersecurity incident response plan; and, in the Assessor’s Office, standing up a system to identify and address cryptomining incidents. Officials are also onboarding additional agencies into the county’s enterprise security operations center.

Alameda County – 4th Place

The East Bay’s largest county, with a population of 1.7 million and encompassing Oakland and Berkeley, is in the third year of a 10-year strategic plan that not only tries to anticipate the county’s future needs but also stay abreast of dramatic technological change. To that end, the county’s 200+ IT workers and their leaders are focusing on building a safe and secure digital infrastructure and are undertaking numerous projects to meet that goal. At the same time, IT has become involved in one of the county’s most intractable problems: the lack of affordable housing and ever-growing rates of homelessness. To assist with this major policy issue, IT has helped the county launch a portal that provides information on its housing initiatives and has begun development of an app that the homeless can use to find immediate shelter.

The app is indicative of the county’s efforts to make itself more citizen-centric, and is doing this through a variety of efforts that range from a new elections website, social media, hackathons to develop APIs that run off the county’s open data and AC Care Connect, a multi-purpose project enabled by technology to bring together health care, mental health services, housing and other services to support the growing homeless population.

Alameda County is also focused on the nuts and bolts of having a modern IT environment. It has rolled out several enterprise applications, added analytical tools to help officials sift through information more quickly, resulting in better efficiencies and lower costs; it has launched a results-based accountability tool and tapped into cloud computing for new services. Finally, the county has added e-signatures to its operations, resulting in an 80 percent reduction in the time needed to process documents; and, it is researching how blockchain can be used to administer land and property records.

Sacramento County – 6th Place

Home to California’s capital, Sacramento County moved up one place in the largest population category in the Digital Counties Survey as it continues to make strong strides in both IT basics as well as innovative solutions to enhance the citizen experience. In April, the county Board of Supervisors approved a technology improvement plan for 2019-2020 that includes $11 million for updating the ERP systems, the Criminal Justice Jail System, the County Clerk Recording System and more.

In the last year, the Department of Technology (DTech) has implemented new 311 tech and an accompanying mobile app, which helps collect data that allows the Board of Supervisors and executives to make data-driven decisions about funding for initiatives, including the cleanup of illegal campsites. The new system also lets residents monitor the progress of their requests and allows county departments to communicate on those requests as needed. An online portal provides the public with 24/7 online access to more than 50 government services and saw more than 550,000 unique page views in the first quarter of 2019. New Service Center Dashboards completed in March use business intelligence and analytics to help county staff better access public assistance programs, and they can see all of a customer’s interactions with those services to avoid duplication while helping citizens get what they need more quickly.

Sacramento County cites cybersecurity as its No. 1 focus area for improvement and is formalizing a Strategic Cybersecurity Plan for next year that includes staff training, added a security operations center in late 2018, and is continuing to build out an Information Security Office. The county is putting in place new policies for incident response and more, and ongoing cyber-initiatives are planned through 2022.

Riverside County – 9th Place

Riverside County identified three top priorities for 2019 that its IT department is helping to achieve: public safety, fiscal strength and healthy communities. In the realm of public safety, the county is in the process of acquiring a new Emergency Operations Center (EOC). The new EOC will be in its own designated space — unlike the current setup in the basement of another office building — located only a few blocks away from the primary 911 dispatch center. In the interest of healthy communities, Riverside is gathering requirements for a new homeless management system, which it expects to procure in the next 12-18 months.

Riverside County recently implemented two major fiscal management systems. In October 2018, the county went live with a replacement of its property tax system from 1972. This 10-year-plus effort, known as the County of Riverside Enterprise Solutions for Property Taxation (CREST) project, required collaboration between the offices of the county Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder, Treasurer-Tax Collector and the Auditor Controller. Also new to Riverside County is RivcoPRO, a modernized procurement system currently in use by half of all county departments. The IT and Purchasing departments plan to roll the system out to the remaining county offices by the end of this year.

2020 marks the first digital census, and the nation’s 10th-largest county intends to be ready for it. Riverside County has partnered with neighboring San Bernardino County and the University of California at Riverside in an effort to reach residents and encourage them to participate next year. Additionally, Riverside County GIS is building a Community Asset Mapping and Survey tool, which will give the county a single location where it can look up public gathering places of traditionally hard-to-count groups as well as ways to reach out to them.

*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, Techwire's parent company.