That said, the crisis, now more than two months old, has illustrated several points to CIOs and technology leaders, several current and former state and local officials told Techwire recently. (Find Part 1 here.) They highlighted trends and offered several ideas to IT officials as the pandemic wears on:
• The economic impact of COVID-19 has been deeper so far than the Great Recession, said Joe Morris, e.Republic* vice president of research, but agencies should be able to draw on lessons learned then. State and local governments typically cut education, health care and social services during an event like this, but “we’ll also begin to see reductions in workforce and changes to workforce benefits,” Morris said via email. On the IT front, refresh rates could be prolonged, IT projects could be re-prioritized or eliminated and contract terms might be renegotiated.
“That said, IT projects (will) still move forward but they must be mission-critical,” Morris said, noting that creative IT leaders and their industry partners will seek federal grants and other funding for new tech implementations. The Great Recession, he pointed out, created pent-up demand for IT modernization and was a catalyst for innovation that helped drive mobility and cloud adoption — and the same may happen here.
• Exact results may vary, but telework is here to stay. Ron Hughes, president of RLH Consulting Group and a 22-year state official who retired from the California Department of Technology in 2014 as chief deputy chief information officer (CIO), said via email that he believes the idea of “forcing everyone to drive downtown every day” should be reviewed, pointing out that reducing the number of commuters even by half could solve multiple issues — among them, congestion, pollution and climate woes — simultaneously.
“I personally think they should make some dramatic changes and that nothing should be off the table. Working remotely hasn’t been a technology issue for years; it’s a management issue. Now that the state workforce has proven they can work remotely, how do you put the genie back in the bottle?” said Hughes, who spent nearly two years as director of the state Office of Technology Services.
Teri Takai, now co-director of the Center for Digital Government* (CDG), was state chief information officer (CIO) from November 2007 through November 2010, and agreed telework is valuable. But she thinks the end result may be a hybrid of remote work and returning to the office to complete tasks best done face-to-face. She said we’ll all need to sustain those remote-work skills, and shifts will have to “manage differently” around tracking and managing, so “there’s still a lot to be learned around how to make remote work really work.”
• Those larger modernization projects to update larger, legacy systems haven’t gone away. CIOs, said Takai, will face many tasks, with one being the need to remediate “things that they did in the short term. As they’re moving into whatever this next normal is going to be.” But this could also be a good time to drill down on those monolithic systems like unemployment insurance (UI) or health and human services, which are vital during crises but are potential pain points as well. Now may not be the time to embark on a complex, expensive multi-year project, but several states have taken less-dramatic steps to partner in UI systems, and still others have stood up call centers to improve the connection with their citizens, Takai said.
“So, I think it’s time to get creative about what the solutions to these older systems might be. Rather than saying ‘We have to have some huge project that is risky and takes a lot of money in order to do the replacement,” Takai told Techwire.
• Partnerships may not always be directly focused on gov tech, but can still be key for state and local governments and those they work with. Shell Culp, senior adviser with Public Consulting Group and former CDG senior fellow, told Techwire via email that creating stronger partnerships with the line-of-business leadership and adding value to their business operations, including to business architecture and processes, may not be tech-focused but “will help IT build and maintain better solutions” and could build confidence in IT’s ability to meet tech challenges. Like Takai, Culp suggested finding out how your counterparts elsewhere have solved similar problems, and she suggested approaching your innovation leaders and “other crowdsourcing avenues” for help — while making them aware of “any requirements for systems sustainability.”
“Look for opportunities to use ‘We’re in this together’ to create one team and get a bigger bang for our buck on initiatives. I would also use this as a way to share technical resources where we can,” said Culp, who was CIO at the California Department of Toxic Substances Control from April 2006 through May 2009.
W. Harold Tuck, CIO for San Diego County from 2008 to 2012, and one of Government Technology magazine’s** Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers of 2011, told Techwire that partnering with private-sector representatives, including insurance and communication companies and utilities, enabled his agency to have them meet directly with residents after wildfires that swept through the region in 2007. Their work wasn’t all IT-related, but grappling with such a large event made San Diego County more prepared for the Great Recession and subsequent wildfires in 2011.
• “This,” said Paul Benedetto, former undersecretary of operations at the California Technology Agency (CTA) — CDT precursor — from September 2011 through October 2013, “is the best time to use technology just to help us do business differently.” Benedetto, now principal at PMB Consulting Services LLC, credited Gov. Gavin Newsom for ensuring the state works closely with technology companies on solutions during the pandemic.
Hughes suggested moving “most, if not all” California Department of Motor Vehicles transactions online, and said via email that the state has “only scratched the surface on what could be achieved by moving workloads to the cloud.” With the exceptions of “specialized workloads” and possibly mainframe, he said, doing so would be much more efficient.
And Joe Panora, CEO of Panora Associates Inc. and agency CIO with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) from January 2008 through December 2014, recommended business process re-engineering and streamlining business processes as musts. Organization change management, he said, “is an essential activity of any true transformation in order to have sustainable success.” A robust governance process is crucial as well, he said, to ensure that business peers are at the table, that decisions are recorded, and that there’s “full disclosure” of IT cost and spend.
“This crisis most likely exposed departments where their disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans need to be updated, properly funded and periodically tested to reflect the new way of doing business going forward,” Panora, a CDG senior fellow, said via email.
• Don’t be afraid to wield power and take charge. During that first round of wildfires, Tuck said, he “had to literally sell to my business peers the efficacy of telecommuting and teleworking,” and “instill confidence in the general public that they would be as protected as we can and their government is not going to disappear or burn out, pun intended.”
The fires were tragic, he said, “but from a government perspective, we responded to the emergency, we recovered from the emergency and we had the technology in place that allowed us to inform the public what was going on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Takai agreed, pointing out that the pandemic has elevated many CIOs into a “front-row seat,” where they’ve performed well to get things up and running.
“And they need to not kind of drop back to that role that they had before. Which was backroom. But they need to be standing up as full business partners. And talking with name your tune, the mayor’s office, the budget office, the county executive, the governor’s office. And making sure that they don’t end up getting relegated back into that old role with the budget crisis. They need to be able to form new relationships or strengthen relationships,” she said.
In a statement provided by email, California CIO Amy Tong told Techwire technology has played a “key role in the state’s response to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.”
“The state of California and its technology partners have been working nonstop to develop digital tools that align statewide efforts and provide residents and local governments with constantly updated information,” Tong said. “The state’s technology workforce continues to work on multiple priority projects to help ensure the safety of California residents, while continuing to improve the delivery of government services.”
*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, parent company of Techwire.
**Government Technology magazine is a publication of e.Republic, which also produces Techwire.
