Iwasaki retired in December after nearly 11 years as executive director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA). Previously, he had spent 27 years with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), a career that took him from civil engineer to chief deputy director and director of transportation. Among CCTA’s initiatives during his tenure was managing a pioneering secure proving ground for autonomous technology, the 2,100-acre GoMentum Station. Among his endeavors at Caltrans, Iwasaki led the state’s effort to update its infrastructure through integrating with intelligent transportation systems (ITS), to reduce traffic, lower emissions and improve efficiency and safety. In 2009, he was named one of Government Technology’s* Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers for work here and in areas including traffic signal optimization, smart transit systems and active traffic management and incident response systems. Iwasaski talked to Techwire about his time at Caltrans and CCTA, and his new position at AWS.
Techwire: Talk about your role at Contra Costa and how that provided a segue — or not — into what you are doing now?
Iwasaki: Caltrans, when I started back in 1983, they had a great foundation building rotation program. And so when you were hired … when you were an entry-level engineer coming into Caltrans, you had to go on a rotation program. You had to go through highway design, you had to go through construction, inspection and then you got to choose some of what I call electives. They taught me how to … balance projects, how the alignment is important, and how to walk a project to see how it’s going to fit into the overall … community and the area. When I became the deputy director for maintenance and operations, I had traffic operations, I had maintenance, I had research and innovation and I had the equipment shop underneath me. Caltrans was a great foundation for me. I spent 27 years there. I started as a junior civil engineer, and I left as a director in 2010 and transitioned over to a local agency, a special district (CCTA).
At CCTA I went from 22,000 employees at Caltrans to 18. And it’s a local agency, you’re more directly connected to your customer in that case. I didn’t have any owner-operator responsibilities, but we did construction, so unlike a lot of counties in California, we oversaw or we oversee construction on the state highway system, interstate system, so you have the Caldecott Tunnel, you have the modernization of State Route 4, all the way out from the city of Pittsburg … around the corner there to Brentwood to Balfour. All the things that I learned growing under Caltrans, I was able to apply in a one-county situation versus the whole state for Contra Costa County. And one of the things that came up over and over again early on was we don’t have redundancy in our information side of the house, our electronic information.
So we went to the cloud, and then later on, we made a couple of innovation grant applications. One was … an innovation grant by USDOT. And we … made an application to build a mobility on demand platform. It takes all of your transit options into a platform and it analyzes them for trip planner, scheduling, uniform payment, rewards, incentives and connection protection and others. It’s got to store all this data, and so we enlisted Amazon Web Services as part of the team to store that data because Amazon has a very secure, cyber-protected system that could help protect clients’ … sensitive data. Then, we made another application and I think this was even better. It was the Automated Driving System Grant. We listed Amazon Web Services and the Verizon team to … we’re going to start collecting data from these vehicles. Ultimately, we were notified we won that grant in 2019 as well. And so that kind of, I guess, intrigued the company, and they have a transportation division that had one person in it, looking at eight verticals … . That’s when they started talking to me about would I be interested in the opportunity to come to work at AWS. There’s a lot of pluses why we chose to go with Amazon Web Services, and I didn’t know that much about them but just the data protection and the commitment to partnering. … It’s kind of like our same thing at CCTA. I think that’s what helped us innovate and I think that’s what helps Amazon Web Services innovate.
Techwire: When did you start at AWS — when was your first day; and was that in the works when you left Contra Costa last year?
Iwasaki: I started Jan. 4. I’m onboarding right now, but I accepted the job back in September, but I was retiring, so I retired on Dec. 26. … I got a week off, maybe 10 days off at Christmas, and it’s probably the longest vacation I’ve had in 10 years. But it’s kind of nice.
Part of our success at CCTA was to hire people that have kind of four criteria: passion for their work, entrepreneurial spirit, can deal with risk and can make a decision. I think if you look at all the wonderful things that we accomplished together at CCTA over the last decade, it’s because people have passion for their work. I think that’s one of the things that I noticed at Amazon. At Amazon Web Services, a lot of people have really a passion for their work.
Techwire: To the extent that you’re able, can you talk a bit about your duties as leader of state and local transportation at Amazon Web Services?
Iwasaki: So, we’re, as I mentioned, eight verticals. We’re trying to develop strategies, determine the clients that can best benefit from the technology. … In my case, I’m going to lead the division into fulfilling the implementation and conversion of these various agencies and consulting firms that are applicable to and amenable to going into cloud services. And … it ranges from ‘We’re going to cautiously approach using cloud services’ to they do a wholesale backroom customer service revamp of their operations from on-premise kinds of storage to cloud storage and data analytics. They get rid of the infrastructure that they typically have in the backroom, and they focus their attention on the data analytics on how to provide better services.
During the pandemic you’ve had more and more unemployment requests … come in through the states. There are a few examples of states converting their call centers completely to the cloud. Instead of doing it by people, they’re ending up doing it through data analytics and … the stories that I’ve heard are just fantastic and so you think about backroom operations, call centers. You’re going to store the data from vehicles and analyze it to provide better through-put, more safer transport systems. That’s one of the things that we’re going to focus on.
I was working with Amazon Web Services on those grants but on the second grant … one of the things that we’re working on that we proposed to USDOT was coming up with proactive safety measures. Currently if you ask … somebody in transportation, and they’ll tell you ‘Well, last year, over 36,000 were killed on our roadways in the United States.’ … That information can be collected, stored in the cloud, analytics can be done, it could be analyzed, sent to the owner … . And then the other metric that we’re looking at is what we call close calls. The cars are getting smarter, they’re getting more adapted to safety, and yet the largest percentage-wise increase in the United States is pedestrians. Either the drivers are not as good as they used to be, which I doubt, or there’s distraction on the pedestrian side as well as the driver’s side. With the sensors, you’ve got more sensors in vehicles that can sense that, and so where you see a lot of close calls between bicycle interaction and car, pedestrians and cars, let’s send somebody out and take a look at that before somebody’s hurt or, God forbid, killed. The public, that’s what they expect out of their government people, is to find ways of making their jobs more efficient, more effective and make our infrastructure safer. That’s what I was taught and that’s what I continue to try to do.
Techwire: Take us through a bit of how interactions between AWS and government can happen?
Iwasaki: Normally what happens is, there’s a direct sale through Amazon Web Services for cloud and that’s one way. Another way is going through when you have an ITS (intelligent transportation systems) spender coming in and they want to develop a new traffic operations strategy, they’ll bring cloud storage with them. They’ll integrate that in, into the DOT or the city and that’s another way. And I think that a lot of agencies like mine, CCTA, 95 percent of our work was done by consultants. That’s another way that Amazon Web Services will come in, with a preferred provider, if you will … for a strategy. What I’ve learned very, very quickly is Amazon doesn’t come in and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a solution, where’s your problem?’ What they do is, they want to know what your problems are and if you’ve got problems that they can help you with, they’ll help you. If you have problems that they can’t help you with, then they’re just going to say, ‘Hey, we can’t help you.’ But it’s … almost like … they’re customer-obsessed. This is what I used to say all the time: ‘If our customers are taken care of, then that’s our job.’ Amazon Web Services, the culture is similar.
Techwire: How was your previous agency able to make use of technology to enable data visibility and analytics, and drive efficiency?
Iwasaki: We try to get the right vendors for the right projects, we tell our consultants and our vendors and our contractors, ‘You’re an extension of us, you’re an extension of our staff. We have this entrepreneurial spirit, we have this passion for our work, we expect you to do the same.’ We asked our … construction management firms to go paperless. And in order to do that you’re going to store your data in the cloud. What that does is, that allows the owner to see the same data, it allows the contractor to see the same data, it allows the construction management firm to see the same data. These are kind of groundbreaking uses of software and cloud services to expedite. We ended up getting probably … three times the amount of data using this software package called Headlight. Because instead of writing it down … these guys are walking around with iPads. … And they’re taking pictures and they’re identifying it and indexing it. All of the data is indexed, it’s tagged and it’s sent to the cloud. One of the things that happened during the pandemic is they said, ‘Well, Randy, if you’re on a construction project, you need to have a sign-in sheet.’ I said, ‘We have certified payroll.’ And so, technology helped us deal with some minor aspects of the pandemic, but very important, because they want to know who’s on the project just in case we have to do contact tracing and things like that. We implemented what we call POP at CCTA, Progress on Paperless, it was to save money on paper and to get rid of the paper packets. … The software package actually tracks when they submitted and how they submitted, and it gives them error messages and things like that. So, then we went with our e-construction program where all the data is stored in the cloud. It’s not just automobiles but agencies that are going to move from paper and pen and binders and paper storage to paperless programs they’re going the cloud. They just don’t know it yet or they haven’t made that jump. But if a small agency like ours can do it, it seems like the bigger agencies ought to be able to do that. And the magnitude of savings is going to be even more for them than it was for a little agency like ours.
Techwire: What do you hope to accomplish or change as you have joined AWS or if you have a particular goal or goal set in mind?
Iwasaki: At Amazon Web Services, … if we can play to the agencies that we helped convert that are having much success with whatever applications and whoever they choose to … go with as far as cloud storage and those kinds of things, I think that for me, that’s really going to be a great time. I think about CCTA and the transformation over the past decade and the people and the pride that they have in their work. That really makes me feel very, very proud of the time I spent there, and I think if we can accomplish where we educate people about cybersecurity and the advantages of being in the cloud, and we can educate people about how to streamline their operations, how to make them more secure, I think it’s going to be for me just fantastic. I’ll love to get up and do an interview with you in a year or a year and a half from now and tell you, ‘Here are the success stories … .’ Because this is what the agency did, this is the risk that they took. Because as I mentioned early on, government isn’t set up to take risk. Everyone knows it but nobody does anything about it. And so, in our case, we’ve taken a lot of risk over the years, and the risks have paid off. We’re just trying to say, ‘Hey, it can be done. Here’s the art of the possible.’ I think that’s maybe one of the reasons why I was hired is because I have the experience of implementing a few of these strategies in my career.
Techwire: It sometimes seems as if we are seeing a high number of highly skilled veteran public servants leaving the public sector right now as the pandemic wears on. Do you agree and why do you think that is?
Iwasaki: There’s a formula that public servants get, and I think part of the reason more people retire at the end of the year is because it’s … the way the formula is set up. Year One is last year, Year Two is this year and then your COLAs kick in, your cost of living increases … . That’s one of the reasons why I think a lot of people choose to go at the end of the year. And under normal times, when you work eight hours, you have, let’s say, 10 meetings. But you typically have breaks between the meetings. … Now what happens is, with the electronic systems that we have in place, you can go from meeting to meeting to meeting and you don’t have any breaks. So, that’s one issue. I told our people, ‘Listen, don’t schedule your meetings back to back to back.’ Schedule your meetings with a 15-minute break or a 10-minute break, get up from your desk, walk around the block or around the house, get away from your office, go out and have the sun shine on your face. And then come back and hopefully you’ll be more refreshed.
The other piece we’re losing … we started out with three staff meetings a week, which was too many but, I think, necessary. We ended up with two a week, one on Monday, one on Friday. And that was just to have that camaraderie, how was the weekend, what’d you do? … You don’t hear that anymore and I think that burnout may be another reason why. If you’re going to get close to retirement and you don’t have other options, you’re going to retire. And I think a lot of times what happens — in the public sector, the most valuable asset is your people. I think for all industries. But for the public sector … when you have 20, 30 years of experience, that institutional knowledge is very important. When I was at CCTA we tried to create what we called being an ‘owner of choice’ for our contractors and our consultants. But for our employees, we try to be an employer of choice. I think in our case, the onboarding process was very important. We wanted to make sure that you felt like you were a valued member of the organization, we just hired you, we’re going to spend money training you and all those good things and we’re going to let you get to be an expert, we’re going to tell you how you relate, how you fit into the organization. … I think some of that is lacking now because you just don’t have that person-to-person contact, and that could be another reason why people are leaving the public sector and retiring.
Techwire: What’s your perspective on what state and local governments are experiencing now, and whether there is opportunity in this crisis?
Iwasaki: I think that there’s some opportunity now to innovate. For example, on the transit side, the ridership is way down, so if you’re going to put a new system in place, probably now is the time to do it. The problem with the transit organizations is their revenue stream is way down as well. … Call centers are being revamped for unemployment benefits. Why? Because they just can’t take using the normal process. Airports, the security systems were revamped based on 9/11. Now with the pandemic, people don’t want you touching their bags … and so there may be opportunity. Toll roads, for example, the amount of people driving is down, so your number of transactions is lower. So, is now the right time to make a change in your backroom operations versus when the economy is smoking hot and people are driving and you’ve got hours of congestion on the roadways?
Techwire: What lessons learned from the pandemic come to mind?
Iwasaki: I think … as you look at ITS, intelligent transportation systems vendors, IT vendors, what holds a lot of them back is our procurement processes. They’re designed for brick and mortar, not designed for technology. … There might be Version 2, Version 4 already out but because the procurement process takes so long, that you don’t get to test the latest technology. … The pandemic has caused (CCTA) some revenue issues, it’s caused us some spacing issues on our transit systems, ferry service systems, but … the pandemic has shown that you can work from home and be productive. As long as you have the support. So, maybe, broadband more broadly rolled out around our rural areas (of the state). There’s an opportunity on our projects to make sure that we have … ducting for fiber available for future broadband hookup. Overall, it’s really kind of shown where we’ve done well, if we have broadband, if we have cloud storage, we can work from home.
*Government Technology magazine is a publication of e.Republic, which also produces Techwire.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for style and brevity.
