Often when legislators and other government officials in California ask why the state’s technology infrastructure struggles with so many failed IT projects, they are perplexed. In the home of Silicon Valley, why can’t we do better? After all, the Golden State is the birthplace of the modern computer industry and home to Hewlett-Packard, Google, Apple and so on.
In 2010, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa spoke at a state-sponsored conference in Sacramento and then published an article on TechCrunch.com comparing the modernization of state technology systems to the impossible task of “teaching a dinosaur to fly.”
“Perhaps what is needed is to let the dinosaurs become extinct and be replaced by swift birds and mammals,” Wadhwa wrote. He predicted that if Silicon Valley coders were let loose on California government, they could do their “magic” and turn a $50 million upgrade to the state’s unemployment insurance system into a solution that costs less than $5 million.
The magic never happened that year, but Wadhwa may have been right about coding a totally new system from scratch for a tenth of the cost. However, perhaps it was not realistic that migrating from the old program, including the vast amounts of data and various statutory and other changing requirements, would remain that simple. And while you’re modernizing the system and deep into the program’s business and workflow, why not re-engineer a few government processes that make sense?
It seems that innovating within government involves more people, rules, resources and culture than one Silicon Valley entrepreneur or coder might have expected. Years ago, it was difficult to imagine taking a benevolent coder from a high-energy tech startup and dropping them into a government agency. In more recent years, groups like Code for America have worked at the local and federal levels to create a new league of “civic hackers,” while innovation programs have recently started to sprout up across California state government.
While government innovation goes far beyond the technology involved, state leaders are on board with a new approach, whether the mentality of Silicon Valley is truly creeping into government or because there have been too many failed IT projects.
The spring issue of Techwire looked at cultural challenges as California embarks on its first major project using agile methodology that flies in the face of traditional “big-bang” development.
In this issue, our team dug further into the bureaucracy and talked with dozens of experts to examine the state of innovation throughout California government. I look forward to your feedback.
This commentary is published in the summer 2016 issue of Techwire magazine.
