CIO of Sprawling Agency Ramps Up Social Media Presence

Los Angeles County’s chief information officer, Bill Kehoe, may be increasingly showing up in your LinkedIn and Twitter feeds, and that’s no accident. The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), his domain, is deliberately raising its visibility.

“We jump-started our social media journey about a month ago,” explained Sylvia Boyadzhyan, communications manager for OCIO. “The goal of the social media and the blog at this point is to give the public and county departments transparent information and real-time information about what we’re doing at OCIO.”

In addition to the posts and tweets, Kehoe and his staff — along with chief information officers, chief technology officers and other IT executives from L.A. County government — have begun holding quarterly briefings for vendors. And this week they held a “Reverse Vendors Day,” in which vendors took turns presenting their products and solutions to a room full of government procurement officials. (The typical model for vendor forums is to have one or several CIOs present their needs to a roomful of vendors.)

“#CIOdoings” is the name of an informal blog that Kehoe’s office maintains, and so far its primary use is for internal communications within L.A. County government — the largest county in the nation in terms of population as well as IT spend.

But members of the public are beginning to sign on, as well. The easiest way to find it is to log into Twitter or LinkedIn and search for #CIOdoings.

The OCIO has about 245 followers on LinkedIn — a small number, but it’s just coming out of beta mode. On Twitter, the office has a few dozen followers, and those numbers are expected to continue growing.

“The management staff gets it — the Technology Management Council, the Business Management Council — and we’re hoping that from there, it filters down to staff,” Boyadzhyan told Techwire in an interview. “We’re hoping that by this time next year, we’ll have a website up. We’re hoping for more engagement. We’re trying to use social media kind of like our niche for everyday business. And we’re taking questions to the next level.

“It’s a good way to keep everyone in the know on what we’re doing in the OCIO.”  

Internally, with as many agencies and departments as L.A. County government has, the social media outreach “really shows the different departments how they can reach out to the CIO and what we can help them with,” Boyadzhyan said.