A ‘Dirt and Rocks’ Guy on Monterey County’s High-Tech Future

As part of Industry Insider — California’s ongoing efforts to inform readers about state and local agencies, their IT plans and initiatives, here’s the latest in our periodic series of interviews with IT leaders. Responses have been lightly edited.

Eric A. Chatham is the chief information officer for the Monterey County government. He joined the county in 2016, bringing more than three decades of IT experience from the public sector, where he held leadership roles with companies including C&R Partners, Intuit, Oracle and Lockheed Martin, among others. Chatham holds a bachelor of science degree in business administration with a computer concentration from Humboldt State University.

Industry Insider — California: Tell us about your background and how it prepared you for your current role. As CIO at your organization, how do you describe your role?

Chatham: After a 30-plus-year career leading IT organizations in the private sector, I took a role in the public sector as the CIO for the county of Monterey. I graduated with a bachelor of science degree in business administration with a computer concentration from Humboldt State University. I have held leadership positions with increasing responsibility and oversight throughout my career. I’ve been fortunate to work for corporations that were very dynamic, fast-paced, high growth, profit driven and that had an extreme focus on delivering solutions that solve customer needs.

The private sector taught me to be agile, have deep customer empathy that creates customer delight, and most importantly, deliver results. Coming into a public-sector organization, I had to quickly learn internal processes, how the various funding models and funding sources worked, and the formal process of approvals by leadership and the Board of Supervisors. Once you know the rules of the game it becomes a planning and project management process. After assessing the single points of failure with people, process and technology and stabilizing core technologies, we built our one-year, three-to-five year and horizon-thinking plans — then we began to execute.

As the CIO, my role is to deliver strategic information technology solutions to support internal county operations and business activities. We develop secure, sustainable, customer-focused systems that enhance and improve the quality of technology services used by county departments for the benefit of all Monterey County residents, businesses and visitors.

IICA: What big IT initiatives or projects are coming up? What sorts of developing opportunities and RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months?

Chatham: We recently completed an RFP to replace our legacy ERP system. Our implementation began approximately six months ago. We will be rolling out the product in three phases: the budgeting module in late 2024, the financial module in mid-2025 and the HR module in summer 2025. We have put in place a rigorous project management practice to ensure customer requirements are being met, keeping sprints and tasks on track and monitoring budget. Maintaining daily communications with our implementation partner, internal business owners and product owner is crucial to successfully delivering the modules on time and within budget.

The Paperless Office (SharePoint Document Management System) is another large project launched this fiscal year to eliminate the endless reams of paper being stored in our warehouse and on shared drives. Being able to access and search for documents will significantly increase the speed and accuracy of retrieving and replying to inquiries regarding internal projects and public inquiries.

We also look for every opportunity to expand broadband access for our constituents. We have leveraged funding for public-private partnerships to expand broadband in areas that have little or no coverage. We have done significant outreach to our constituents to bring awareness to programs for equipment and Internet service rebates for qualifying households. We have partnered with ISPs to expand services throughout the county.

IICA: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?

Chatham: Local government should be moving rapidly to cloud-based technologies so that they can leverage application, data and knowledge sharing across departments. Many of the existing systems are built on legacy technologies and siloed within individual departments.

I believe everyone should be able to work from anywhere at any time on any device. To do this you must be able to leverage cloud-based and SaaS technologies. I have been fortunate to have a progressive leadership team that has allowed the IT organization to deliver cloud-based systems throughout the county.

IICA: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget and is there a strategic plan we may hyperlink to?

The ITD budget for FY23/24 is around $32 million. We have a staff of 110 people that provide services across four operating divisions — applications and customer support; infrastructure and operations; information security; and business operations. You can find details about the Information Technology Department (ITD) at https://www.co.monterey.ca.us/government/departments-i-z/information-technology.

IICA: How do you prefer to be contacted by vendors, including via social media such as LinkedIn? How might vendors best educate themselves before meeting with you?

Chatham: I prefer to be contacted via phone or email, but if you want a call back or email reply, please do your homework first. Go to the county of Monterey website and understand the county, what ITD does and the products we use. The first thing I look for from any vendor is products or services that have a compelling reason to change from what we currently have in place. There’s a significant cost to transitioning to new technologies in both time and money. Clearly showing your product or solution benefits over competing offerings, its overall value in both cost competitiveness and ease of implementation, will get my attention. And then there’s timing. Budgets are created six months prior to approval for the upcoming fiscal year.

Once budgets are approved, it’s difficult to get additional allocations to support new projects. You end up waiting for the next budget cycle.

IICA: Which IT project or implementation do you consider the most influential, in this role or in a previous position?

Chatham: Our digital transformation. We went from legacy on-premise applications and systems to modern cloud-based technologies that modernized the way we work. We completed most of the heavy lifting over the first four years by completing the implementation of a state-of-the-art secure network infrastructure, enterprise Wi-Fi, Office 365, server virtualization, leveraging infrastructure as a service for storage, and delivering collaboration platforms Teams and Zoom. We were perfectly prepared for one of the most disruptive events in history — the COVID-19 pandemic. Since we had already standardized on mobile devices if you didn’t physically need to be in the office, you could work from anywhere there was an Internet connection. We leveraged Zoom technology in our Board Chambers to hold public meetings and engage with constituents. Today, this technology is used heavily to increase constituent engagement and maintain services in a hybrid working environment.

IICA: What has surprised you most in government technology during the past 12 months?

Chatham: I have been surprised by the amount of federal funds being allocated to broadband. The pandemic brought to light the inequities in access and speed to the Internet and the need for “broadband for all.” Internet access to educational, medical, social, media, banking, etc., are basic necessities for everyday life. ITD is leading this effort for the county to ensure we maximize the funding for middle-mile and last-mile broadband buildouts.

IICA: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?

Chatham: After hours I’m a “dirt and rocks” guy. I have a passion for the outdoors, including activities such as hiking, fishing and off-roading. It’s great to spend time with my children and grandchildren away from the highly digital world we live in. Slow it down and take a walk through the woods, drop a line in the water or take a ride down an old dirt road.

I read books on everything from early American history to books on self-awareness and leadership. A couple of recent reads include American Buffalo by Steven Rinella and Green Lights by Mathew McConaughey.

IICA: What is most important for readers to know about the county’s technology profile, such as being cloud-first or taking steps toward the use of generative artificial intelligence?

Chatham: In my very first meeting addressing the ITD staff, I challenged everyone to “think mobile first, think cloud first and think automation.” If you can’t do it from your phone, most people aren’t interested. Monterey County is leveraging state-of-the-art technologies in all areas of IT. Most of our services are hosted in the cloud or offered as SaaS. Some of the examples include Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Zoom for Video Conferencing and Contact Center, DocuSign, ERP, ArcGIS, Intune, Granicus CMS, and Azure Web Services.

We are also exploring different use cases of generative AI for internal use. Our developers are already leveraging GitHub Copilot for code generation. We will be deploying a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to answer commonly asked questions in several departments to ease our way into leveraging AI technology. Many of our vendor partner systems already are embedding AI technology into their platforms.