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CIOs Urge Collaboration, Forward Thinking at Bay Area Summit

Alameda County CIO Tim Dupuis and San Jose CIO Rob Lloyd discussed “Managing Change Where It Matters Most” in a conversation with e.Republic Chief Innovation Officer Dustin Haisler, at the recent Bay Area Virtual Digital Government Summit.

State and local governments moved quickly and decisively this spring in adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic but more hard work lies ahead, two Silicon Valley chief information officers said during the recent Bay Area Virtual Digital Government Summit.

The event offered a chance for reflection on past performance and “how we’re going to do it going forward,” Jon Walton, CIO of San Mateo County, said in opening remarks. That’s what Alameda County CIO Tim Dupuis and San Jose CIO Rob Lloyd discussed in a conversation with e.Republic* Chief Innovation Officer Dustin Haisler on “Managing Change Where It Matters Most.” They offered ideas and best practices for how agencies can continue to adapt as they keep pace with ongoing, quickening change and ensure they’re doing the most and the best for residents and employees. Both CIOs are among Government Technology magazine’s* Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers -- Dupuis in 2019 and Lloyd as part of Team San Jose earlier this year. Among the takeaways:

• “Communicate, communicate, communicate,” Dupuis said on Thursday, explaining how change management practices were tested when county officials adjusted from the more naturally collaborative office environment to “manufacturing that virtually.” County officials began by treating COVID as an incident, Dupuis said, but he later characterized it as “a marathon, not a sprint.” Officials continue to work on preserving the personal connection missing since the move to telework, albeit virtually. To that end, officials have held town halls, sent out informational mailers, and created an employee area on their external web for staffers now working from home. The Information Technology Department’s recent move to new facilities in the former Crocker National Bank Building, Dupuis said, actually facilitated the rapid changes brought on by COVID.

“That early change management that we had gone through before really prepped the team to accept more change,” he said.

In San Jose, officials confronted the pandemic in two focuses, by protecting lives and protecting livelihoods, Lloyd said – working to help residents stay connected and collaborating with schools – and internally, convening bi-weekly all-hands meetings for IT, to “communicate clear priorities.” A key question in moving to a virtual organization was ensuring services were available virtually “on the outside,” but defining transformation re-engineering pieces was also key – and looking forward to identify new things that will be vital but which the organization had never done. Talking to residents about how IT can support this profound change is also key, the CIO said – joining conversations even on housing and equity, subjects in which IT may not previously have taken part, to map the next 12 to 18 months.

• The pandemic made very clear the value of technological initiatives, enabling and even pushing both IT organizations to get things done – and officials leaned into that. In Alameda County, officials had just finished moving to Microsoft Office 365 and were “trying to get traction around Teams,” Dupuis said. Once that happened, Teams participation leapt, and IT spun up hundreds of virtual desktop in the cloud, sending home laptops and deploying soft phones in the hundreds or possibly even thousands. Officials had been working to convert to digital signature – and COVID quickly proved the technology’s worth, driving the creation of hundreds of new DocuSign accounts. Like Alameda County, San Jose was already underway on empowering remote work – but, said Lloyd, “I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t been on that journey.” Because they were, officials were able to send their 311 call center staffers home in one day. The city’s ongoing efforts to close the digital divide by connecting 70,000 residents were on a roughly 14-month time-frame and had reached nearly 40,000 people – but since the pandemic, the San Jose City Council has called for that to happen faster and Lloyd said officials are pushing to make it happen by year’s end.

• More than five months in, it’s clear agencies should be thinking long-term about what initiatives and strategies have worked or may work going forward – because the landscape will likely continue to change. Dupuis said governments need to start thinking “virtual first,” about delivering services virtually to keep employees remote and safe. That may mean rethinking business processes quickly to maintain all-inclusive services. The technology aspects of this new world are difficult but may still be the easiest part, Lloyd said, compared to the prioritizations that may need to occur, the re-engineering of civic process and accounting for “human latency.” He said it’s important to focus on the “continuum” and ensure local governments are supporting their populations at key times such as when eviction moratoriums end – and for officials to stay connected to peers; and to city managers and finance leaders to keep them apprised of the resources needed.

“I think this is a moment where we CIOs are going to look back on in 10, 20 years at the end of our careers and go ‘That’s when we did the most good, connected with the most people to help the most people in our career in their moment of need,” Lloyd said.

• Connections to vendor partners, of course, are vital for the tools local governments need during times of unparalleled and back-to-back crises. Dupuis highlighted Microsoft, which provided the county with additional laptops from local stores “instantly” when the pandemic took hold. Lloyd namechecked AT&T, Sprint Mobility, Zoom and Microsoft; and SHI, Nutanix, Dell and VMware as being among the vendors that enabled an infrastructure refresh. The city, he said, is “completely eliminating” old servers and moving to a “software-defined, network-enabled, hyper-converged environment” which has enabled quick online inspections.

*e.Republic is the parent company of Techwire and Government Technology magazine.

Theo Douglas is Assistant Managing Editor of Industry Insider — California.