Digital Services Innovation Academy to Graduate First Class

The California Department of Technology's Digital Services Innovation Academy graduates its first class on Friday.

The department's Office of Professional Development, led by Deputy Director Gretchen Williams, runs several academies a year to build skills for public servants who are nominated by their department.

"The intent of a leadership academy is really a blended approach," Williams told Techwire in an interview. "We are identifying within the community a need to invest within these particular disciplines."

The CDT's academies focus on leadership, security, digital services and project management.

"The beauty of the academy is it allows us to bring a combination of skills that are specific to that particular discipline," Williams said.

Williams tapped the state's Chief Digital Innovation Officer Scott Gregory to help start and lead the academy.

"The idea around it was to pull together a way in which we could take a small cohort ... from varying backgrounds, through a training regime that exposed them to different kinds of learning opportunities — learning opportunities around user experience and user design, data analytics, internal consulting, change management," Gregory said in an interview with Techwire. 

Members of the academy are grouped according to their technical and soft skills to work on projects that could be scaled up for large-scale proofs of concept.

"We wanted to bring together people from different disciplines but they're allied," Gregory said. "Each team was intentionally developed to include developers, graphic designers, program managers, business analysts, communication professionals, because those are the kinds of allied disciplines that are present in really well designed digital services. We wanted to mimic that in a controlled environment."  

Some of the projects could be used as "mainstays within the state of California and how we deliver services to citizens," Gregory said. The projects will be presented at the graduation and include solutions for internal use and options for citizen services.

After the graduation, Williams, Gregory and other leaders look back at ways to improve the program, based on feedback from instructors, students and industry participants. The governance board then helps plan any curriculum challenges for the next year.

Since this is the innovation academy, the forward-looking curriculum focuses on technology such as:

• AI
• Data analytics
• Use of data lakes and visualizations 
• Blockchain
• Chatbots
• Chat-based services

"Change will occur," Gregory said. "It has to, for us to continue to stay relevant with the innovation academy. For government, those are emerging technologies that we want to socialize in the academy."

The Office of Professional Development will launch an Information Security Leadership Academy Aug. 9. Applications are closed.