It was a homecoming on Thursday for P.K. Agarwal, the former chief technology officer of California who left state government in 2010 to become CEO of Silicon Valley nonprofit TiE Global.
With his time at TiE now done, Agarwal returned to the public-sector stage yesterday in Sacramento to keynote the state Trending Technologies conference. As always, he shared some candid opinions about how the state government should deal with the pace of technological change and the growing innovation economy:
1. "Because of the complexity and what’s happening, you have to really get close to your customers and your vendor partners. The business about writing [project and contract] specifications is history. When you are in the unknown world, how can you write specs – whether for your vendors partner or for your customers?"
2. "If you’re a department and you still have your own data center, you’re not awake yet. You’re fooling. Because commodity – that kind of infrastructure business, email and all that – creates crisis. If crisis consumes your day, you’re not going to innovate, you’re not going to focus on value creation. Everything becomes commodity, and if you’re in a commodity business all you have is headaches and crises, one after the other. Cloud, email – all this stuff should be out of your business."
3. "I would highly, highly recommend that you develop a big data plan for your department. And not because you need a big data plan, but because you need to educate your stakeholders – you need to get them to see what the future looks like, and yes, there’s a completely new set of tools."
4. "Security is everybody’s business. You can only play defense. You need to have weekly briefings on security with your department directors. If your department director doesn’t [want to] hear it, leave the department, because that [security breach] is going to get you fired."
5. "Risk-taking. Whenever there’s a lot of unknowns, you have to take measured risks. There’s just no way around it. If I cannot look back over the last year during Christmastime and say, ‘Can I chalk up three or four failures?’ If I cannot, then I haven’t taken any risks yet."
Agarwal’s career has spanned various roles in the private and public sectors. He was a vice president at ACS, was an executive vice president and CIO for NIC Inc., was CIO of the California Franchise Tax Board and managed the Teale Data Center.
