Rob Lloyd, San Jose’s chief information officer and a leader in California government IT, on Friday outlined for his public- and private-sector peers five metrics for “response and recovery” that he said have worked for his city amid the current crisis. In a webinar under the auspices of the Alliance for Innovation, Lloyd — one of several participants — contrasted his city’s IT response after the region’s disastrous 2017 floods and now, amid the sheltering-in-place orders. Its 2017 response, Lloyd said, was graded an F by the city itself. The current response, according to Lloyd and some eternal evaluators, is A material.
The key, Lloyd said, is not just “going virtual” but also looking beyond the immediate response to the recovery phase. In a city as large and diverse as San Jose — the nation’s 10th most populous, with 1.1 million residents, 185 square miles, 85,000 businesses and 134 global corporate headquarters — that can be a stout order.
“It’s not a matter of operational pieces, of keeping certain things in government working,” Lloyd said in the webinar. “It’s actually a question of resilience. Can your people handle that transition in that moment, the response and recovery? You’re ready because you’ve practiced it and you’ve exercised it, so when the moment arrives, there’s no gap and daylight between what you said you were going to do and what you planned to do, and what the community really needs.”
In the aftermath of the 2017 floods, “we think we did an F,” Lloyd said. “We didn’t tell people fast enough, we didn’t communicate well enough, we didn’t activate quickly enough and people didn’t know what to do in the EOC [emergency operations center] in a fluid manner, so we’re going to grade ourselves an F and say, ‘We’re going to iterate to improve there.’”
This time around, Lloyd said, the city was better prepared to respond — and is doing well in the recovery phase.
“We had the ability to turn our organization of 7,000 people to a virtual one in the space of about a week. … We collaborated with others and have a lot of ability to do the national testing, response and data platform that AFI and Oracle have been a part of, as well as Splunk, Accenture and Adobe, so we can get to testing at scale nationwide. In terms of the city business, we are keeping the cash flow going.”
And the CIO also cautioned his peers not to let themselves off too easily: “Never measure yourself on how well you went virtual.” Shifting government operations to be fully digital, he said, is only the first step.
Herewith, in Lloyd's words, are the five levels of digital maturity in government:
- Zero-level maturity is when you can take your work and services online to support employees, residents and businesses.
- Level 1 maturity is when you can help 90 percent of your staff work from home, but can scramble and do basic EOC work. Think of this as core operations.
- Level 2 maturity is when you can move your services gracefully to online and remote work, e.g., electronic plan review, service request management, Zoom-based inspections, etc. How do we reorganize our service to be better in the moment and beyond? Think tactical.
- Level 3 maturity is when you are engaged with peer governments, the business community … partners, resident associations, etc., to perceive, prioritize and respond to needs that impact those groups. This is where governments are caring and restoring.
- Level 4 maturity is where we can perceive community equity, catching where there are needs that aren’t as readily apparent, and those things that make people and businesses strong through response and then recovery. Strategic level.
