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San Jose's CIO Discusses City's IT Goals and Challenges

The man in charge of technology for California's third-largest city, San Jose CIO Rob Lloyd, joined Techwire Wednesday for a "virtual briefing" forum. The conversation, led by Techwire's Joe Morris and open to subscribers, focused on San Jose’s current tech projects and goals.

The man in charge of technology for California's third-largest city, San Jose CIO Rob Lloyd, joined Techwire Wednesday for a "virtual briefing" forum. The conversation, led by Techwire's Joe Morris and open to subscribers, focused on San Jose’s current tech projects and goals. 

In this virtual briefing, Lloyd summed up San Jose by saying it is “large, very diverse, very techy and very costly.” He said that although San Jose has a population of about 1 million, has an IT staff of about 170 and a budget that is roughly equivalent to smaller cities like Eugene, Ore., or Albuquerque, N.M.

The city has more than 6,000 government employees and a total budget of $3.2 billion, of which nearly $20 million has been allocated to the IT department in the 2016-17 fiscal year. As the cultural and political center of Silicon Valley, it’s only fitting that San Jose is on its way to becoming a smart city.

With its budget limitations, Lloyd said, San Jose city leaders' IT vision is to be as innovative as the community they serve.

For the upcoming year, the IT department has about $23 million in straight funding and a bit less than $20 million in project funding.

Over the last year, San Jose has moved a lot of its operation into the cloud, which raises issues:

  1. At the operational level, how do you migrate people into using the cloud?
  2. Emphasis is on what service they are trying to create and what it takes to deliver it.
  3. Strategic planning is essential due to the small budget of San Jose’s IT department.
Lloyd placed a lot of emphasis on having a good relationship between the city and the vendors it works with.

“We want to be as good of a customer for you as we’re going to demand you’re going to be for us, because our community demands it — our community needs it,” Lloyd said.

The CIO spoke extensively about the importance of employee recruitment and retention. When he assumed the position, San Jose’s IT department had a vacancy rate of more than 36 percent for over four years. Since he took over about a year ago, the department has invested heavily in staffing, which Lloyd said has driven that vacancy rate down to single digits.

Furthermore, when Lloyd started, the city measured the statistics of recent projects and found that there had been a success rate of less than 5 percent, which he said has been increased to almost 50 percent at present. The department intends to increase this to 80 percent, he said — adding that a success rate much higher than that indicates the city set the bar for success too low.

All this was done, Lloyd noted, despite budget cuts of over $640 million in the past few years.

 

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Rob Lloyd Q&A: Excerpts from Briefing

Following are excerpts of the virtual briefing Wednesday by San Jose CIO Rob Lloyd and Techwire's Joe Morris: 

Joe Morris: Cities, right now, are issuing the largest number of technology-related procurements, and not only do they have the biggest volume, but the types of projects the cities are issuing tend to be more transformative. With that said, what are some of your top priorities right now?

Rob Lloyd: I agree with you. I think that matches America’s history, right? Local government has almost always been the laboratory for the nation, innovation, how we govern ourselves and democracy. A lot of that started with those local epicenters of government.

Circling back to your point about what are those priorities that we’re looking at, they speak to the long-term development of the normal priorities you see in local government. So we want to see people be safe; we want to see that they have a very user-friendly experience with their local government and more. We need to be very sustainable, especially when resources are lean.

For the IT Department, the things that we said we’re going to focus on, strategically [are]:

  1. Cybersecurity
  2. Customer Relationship Management  
  3. Infrastructure refresh
JM: Beyond what you mentioned in your priorities, are there two or three other projects you’re knee-deep in and working on that you want to share any kind of status update? 

RL: I mentioned two of the key procurements. One’s the infrastructure refresh; one’s the cybersecurity. Some other ones that I can mention is we want to do some procurement reform, and there’s some good options out there, we think, finally, about how we give ourselves the tools to get through that RFP process better and quicker. So we’re going to be investing in some kind of demonstration project or RFP around that one.

JM: How are the bulk of your IT procurements done now? Contract, RFP, a mix? 

RL: They’re mixed. We’re trying to get better about our use of cooperative contracts. Also supporting that, as the 10th-largest city in America, if we now start as a regular practice of including cooperative clause in our contracts, we can then be a platform for our peer governments to be able to use the things that we do, but also paying attention to those things so we can all share in the progress at work and not create procurements unnecessarily.

JM: Earlier you talked a little bit about cloud and the shift to cloud. If you were to look at your IT spending as a pie chart, how do you see those breakouts being between hardware, software, IT services and other telecom? And, more importantly, how do you see that shifting?

RL: Let me expand that beyond just cloud because there’s a lot of services that go along with that; a virtual security operations center is one prime example. Can we in government really compete for cybersecurity professionals? When I go to a meeting in the Bay Area and we adjourn, I see five people get into Teslas, one gets into a Lamborghini; I get into my Honda CRV, and so these services are those of the gap closures where you can get a lot of productive value very quickly rendered, and it’s some of the cost and pay differentials, because you might be in a high-rent district like New York. When talking with some peers, our CSOs make in the high $270,000 to the mid-$400,000, so cybersecurity’s a good industry to be in. But how can we get that same level of service without having to pay that same premium, and how do mitigate that risk in a more effective way?

To answer your question, though, cloud services, software as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, security as a service — those things are all going to be an increasing part of our mix. So I think in terms of our total spend, we’ll still see personnel be roughly 40 to 50 percent, and that will be that equilibrium we’re trying to find. And of that other 50 to 60 percent, it’s going to hit a 70/30 ratio, where so much of that 70 percent is really going on as a service-type play, and that 30 percent is just that baseline we try to marry it to kind of that hub that keeps everything connected.