L.A. County CIO: A Year on the Job, and Big Plans Ahead

Los Angeles County CIO Bill Kehoe is turning the corner on his first year as CIO for the county and he still has big plans.

Kehoe is developing an IT enterprise strategic plan that coordinates with other departments within the county. The plan divides the county's needs into five clusters including public safety, community services, children and family services, and operations.

"We came away with an immense amount of data with each of the five workshops we put on that will drive our IT strategic goals and our plan ... moving forward," Kehoe told Techwire in an interview Wednesday.

Kehoe wants all future technology purchases to align with the department's and the county's strategic goals.

"We want to align that with our L.A. County (Board of Supervisors) priorities, our L.A. County strategic plan and the department business plan, so when IT investments come forward for consideration, we can show that alignment and really align our future investments to strategic goals," Kehoe said.

Key initiatives to come are:

• Enterprise identity and access management solution

"So we can get to one person with one account. Today, that is really not the case. We have customers that have to log in multiple times in multiple systems. Over time, we really want to have that single sign-on experience and do a much better job of onboarding and offboarding from a security perspective, as well," Kehoe said.

• Getting employees mobile; this includes changing from towers and desktops to laptops, wireless access and rolling out Skype for Business. 

"That involves a lot of technology components. One is the devices we provide to our staff," Kehoe said. "Another component is unified communications ... so we don't have to travel back and forth to meetings in L.A. traffic."

• Hybrid cloud architecture

"Also, (we're) working with our partners in ISD (Internal Services Department) to put together a hybrid cloud strategy, to take advantage of the public clouds like Amazon, Azure, Google and IBM," Kehoe said.

"In our office over the past year, I've tried to identify where we've had some functional gaps, and I'm trying to close those," he said.

Those include building up the cybersecurity team, hiring a security officer, a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) risk assessment, a program assessment and penetration test, improving the security governance model, and upgrading security and response policies. Security is a big focus over the next few months for Kehoe's office.

Kehoe inherited the management of the department's Data Hub, which tracks what county services each resident has received.

"We're starting to put applications to that data, so if case workers go out into the field, they have much better information about the clients they interact with. Ultimately, we're going to get a 360-degree view of the client, including some justice data, so we can better serve the client based on their history," Kehoe said.

The Hub uses an algorithm to clean and match data across departments, despite variances in names, to create a profile of each resident.

"We have a very high percentage of matching; I think we're in the 80th percentile on our matching," Kehoe said. "We have services that have been built so if there is a mobile application that needs to be built, they can access that information through the service architecture and provide that information to departments or case workers."

The county is looking to expand that program with more health and homelessness information, "to provide whole-person care."

As far as vendors are concerned, "the thing to recognize is our office does not have any operational authority. We partner with ISD, which has the operations, the shared services of the county, data center, network, some applications."

Interested vendors must register with the county and can find contracting information here.