In interviews with Industry Insider as part of its weekly One-on-One series, CIOs and IT leaders at every level highlighted a few common themes that came to resonate throughout the year. How these are viewed will change over time but during 2023, these were trending topics of conversation in California government IT:
- Artificial intelligence was top of mind this year for many state and local government leaders. Ed Clark, CIO for the Office of the Chancellor at California State University, said Feb. 10 that he’d been using OpenAI “for various things for a while now” and called it “an exciting tool,” adding, “I think it’s something that will eventually be seen as a tool that is super useful for specific things.” Chad Crowe, CIO at the California Department of Social Services, said April 14 that he wasn’t surprised by AI’s swift rise — but was “very interested” in how government was starting to use it, adding, “I’m particularly interested to see how we will leverage ChatGPT in government. I have seen several use cases for IT when writing code, writing database scripts, and taking mounds of free-form text and bucketing them into categories for easier consumption.” Abdul Rahim Shaik, deputy executive officer for technology and CIO at the California Victim Compensation Board, said June 23 that organizations “should also be leveraging new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to automate manual processes and procedures, consequently facilitating the redirection of the staff working on these manual processes to more fulfilling and analytical jobs, leading to improved staff morale and job satisfaction.” Enrique Parker, CIO at the California Department of Human Resources, said he sees the technology as having “similar disruption capabilities to the Internet in the 1980s, or what the smartphone has brought in,” and he’s glad to see a genuine interest among his peers. And Jacob “Jake” Johnson, CIO and deputy director for IT Services at the California Department of Rehabilitation, admired its ability to help those with special needs and said, “Just as assistive technologies like screen readers and video relay services enabled blind and deaf people to participate more fully in work and life, artificial intelligence and virtual/augmented reality may open doors that we’re not even thinking about yet.”
- Billions of federal and state dollars have been committed and spent on broadband during the past few years, and IT leaders continue working to improve connectivity in their communities. Ed Miranda, the city of Newark’s inaugural CIO/IT director, said June 16 that his city is using American Rescue Plan Act funding and state funding from Assembly Bill 179 to improve high-speed Internet in unserved and underserved areas. Newark IT and city Public Works and Economic Development will collaborate on a Broadband Master Plan to prioritize fund usage. Terence Davis, CIO at the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, said July 21 that Wi-Fi access is a primary component in Parks’ digital transformation. The department recently deployed Wi-Fi to all 42 L.A. County pools and is underway on a roughly two-year process of expanding coverage at 36 parks in high- or very high-need locations. “For some park patrons, the park Wi-Fi is their most reliable Internet connection — it is these situations that really make an impact on the digital transformation,” Davis said. The city of San Luis Obispo is at work on a broadband initiative and has sought federal grant funding, its outgoing IT Manager Miguel Guardado, said Sept. 29. On Oct. 2, Guardado joined the city of Manhattan Beach as its director of IT. Broadband permeates San Mateo County’s (SMC) work in innovation, its inaugural Innovation Program Manager Julie Goebel said Dec. 15, from its Smart City IoT Innovation Zone along a section of Middlefield Road in Redwood City to planned deployments of SMC Public Wi-Fi, smart parking, connected streetlights, digital signage and kiosks, smart trash bins and benches, as well as traffic monitoring with pedestrian analytics.
- Governments vary in their approaches to the cloud; as Tonya Digiorno, director of Information Technologies at El Dorado County, said Oct. 27, “Cloud and hybrid environments have added a twist to data security approaches.” At the California Department of Child Support Services, Infrastructure and Operations Branch Chief Cheryl Carlson said March 30 that the department has its child support enforcement application in the Microsoft Azure cloud and continues to mature its cloud capabilities and drive a cloud-first strategy. “We recently took advantage of other disaster recovery features offered in the cloud by successfully implementing a geographically redundant DR framework,” she said. At the California Air Resources Board, CIO Rachel White said on June 30 that her priorities include modernizing and securing legacy systems, and continuing moving to the cloud. And at Kern County, Chief Information Technology Officer Mark Buonauro said Sept. 15 that the organization replaced a “very old ticketing system” by implementing a new ServiceDesk application in the cloud.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are notable, potentially challenging implementations, but several One-on-One subjects said their local governments were in various stages of doing just that. Jack Ciulla, chief technology innovations officer at the city of Santa Ana, said Feb. 17 that his municipality planned to issue RFPs or requests for bids to upgrade its ERP, implement a Wi-Fi network downtown and upgrade city wireless. KC Roestenberg, Orange County CIO, said March 10 that an ERP RFP would be going out for responses, noting the application portion of the project would be done by the county auditor-controller, not by central IT. And Chris Chirgwin, Santa Barbara County CIO, said March 17 that the local government was about one-third complete with a new ERP implementation via Workday, adding, “This is a significant undertaking, requiring numerous staffing resources.” (Outside the One-on-One series, Nevada County on Monday issued a request for proposals for ERP software and a system integrator.)
- In cybersecurity, too, approaches vary, although officials continue to harden their organizations against bad actors. As Liana Bailey-Crimmins, state CIO and director of the California Department of Technology, said March 3, “When it comes to cybersecurity, as the threat continually evolves, we are looking for opportunities to continue to mature security operations with each of the departments and ensuring that we are applying the right practices.” Cal-Secure, the state CIO added, “is a big part of that, so that as people continue to mature their organizations, leveraging the best practices of a Cal-Secure workforce, we want to make sure that we’re recruiting the next generation of technology experts and leaders.” At the University of California, CIO and Vice President of Information Technology Van Williams said Jan. 27 that officials are looking to build out the first digital risk management program they’re aware of. “The goal here is to move away from only cybersecurity, but recognizing that if you’re going to be managing digital risk, you’re going to have to actually be as proactive as you are reactive,” he said. California State Water Resources Control Board Information Security Officer Dan Falzarano said May 19 that zero-day threats requiring specific tools to combat them can put the public sector “behind the eight ball” on funding. “And I understand, you’ve got a budget for everything, but we do need a little bit of flexibility and availability to expedite some of these tools or resources that we need,” Falzarano said. And at Los Angeles County, CISO Jeffrey Aguilar said Sept. 22 that the organization will be implementing a Managed Security Services Provider to deliver a fully managed 24/7/365 Cybersecurity Operations Center; Security Information and Event Management solution; Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) services; and a Cybersecurity Incident Response Retainer. “One other key project we will be moving forward with is the implementation of a countywide GRC (governance, risk and compliance) tool for all departments’ use,” Aguilar said, adding: “We spent the last year standardizing the county cyber-risk framework. We are now ready to procure and operationalize a GRC and associated platforms for trending threat data, hot spots and KPI/KRI pairings. This extends well beyond the typical reporting of compliance metrics.”
