In a fast-paced Bay Area Market Update webinar last week, Phil Bertolini, senior vice president of e.Republic,* led a trio of Bay Area technology leaders through a rundown of their top priorities for the rest of 2024 and beyond.
Sharing insights in last week’s virtual event were Liza Massey, CIO of Marin County; Jon Gjestvang, CIO of Napa County; and Mario Vallejo, director of IT and chief technology officer for Union City. Responding to Bertolini’s prompts, here are highlights from each of the three leaders’ perspectives:
Gjestvang: I'd like to talk about four initiatives that are important to me, especially in this year, 2024: The first is a data initiative. This is a countywide initiative that we’re working on and encompasses a lot. The first part of it was we implemented an enterprise data management system last spring and in 2023. And we did that starting out with three departments — Adult Probation, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Homeless Services. And that was kind of to get us going. … We’re going to add another department or another source system here pretty soon. A big part of that is not just the technology, but the culture around data and how that’s done. We’re also looking at enterprise retention, beginning with data classification, email, retention on projects that we’ll move forward with. … We’re also taking on that further understanding and starting smaller AI-related projects. And part of that work is understanding the data and making sure that it’s clean.
The other initiative is cybersecurity. We’re continuing with projects to further secure our security posture; we will continue our ongoing research to understand the current threat landscape and use solutions to help with this.
The other area is improving public user experience by increasing digital services and making those digital services helpful. This includes additional online services, improved access to information and documentation … and looking to additional language access protocols. As an example, in our planning and building department, we have online permitting and business expansion projects that are out there. We need the public and businesses to be able to easily apply for permits and projects online.
And then finally, we are working with the ... grant funding that’s out there with broadband, we are very deep into broadband projects or initiatives. In our county, we have identified 13 areas within our county that are either underserved or unserved with broadband activity. So as a county, we feel responsible for assisting residents in getting access to broadband, especially since we are rolling out more digital services and also during natural disasters, when communication to residents is just extremely important.
One is really upgrading our ERP platforms, ensuring our software’s providing better workflow automation, (allowing) our employees to be the most productive and effective. But also, as Liza mentioned, to really be able to provide information to our community and be more interactive, so we can provide better services.
No. 2 is really security. It’s a big one for us. Not only are we continuously trying to look to secure our environment, but we’ve also gotten a lot of new requirements that are … really pushing us in other areas and making sure those things are kept prioritized.
Third is infrastructure. We really need to make sure that we’re removing all of our aging equipment. One thing that we’re really trying to build is that security is always part of that infrastructure, and resiliency.
The last one is really going to be team building and employee development. I feel like we have an amazing team here in the city of Union City. And we want to make sure we’re continuing to develop in their growth, because without them, we can’t succeed in any of our strategies.
Bertolini: AI is all the rage; everybody’s talking about it. They’re wondering what governments are going to do with it. What are you looking at in regard to AI, and how is it changing the way you do business tomorrow?
Vallejo: AI is making great strides, and we’re really excited to see what it can do for employees, that they can be more effective, but also how we can better serve our community. … AI is great, but it’s kind of a minefield, and it’s an unknown environment. So the first thing we’ve done is really put a policy together for understanding and laying out how we’re going to introduce it to our city and use it. But the next is really training employees on the legality of using AI-generated content. How do you audit AI-generated content? And from the IT side, how do we vet companies … to make sure that the content we get from them is going to be able to (be used) in our environment?
Massey: For Marin County, we’re really just getting our toes in the water. … When generative AI came on the scene, it changed the narrative. Like Mario, we have guidelines in place, and they have been adopted some time ago. So now we’re really in the implementation phase, where we want to educate the whole organization. We are having pilot projects and use cases; we are doing an inventory, vetting products; we already have compliance reviews. So we’re adding the AI language to those reviews and our contracts. … We set up a division, I have a new assistant director over that. And we also identified someone on the team to be the AI person. They’re not doing it all, but that’s who is really tasked with seeing that some of these things happen, along with the division head. And we have a project that was already approved to create an enterprise data strategy, which again, will serve our AI initiatives.
Bertolini: Those emerging technologies, they pose other issues — the issue of adoption and usage and so on. But there’s also some security concerns there. So what security concerns are you worried about, and how are you managing those?
Massey: It’s been on our radar for a while, and it’s an everyday requirement with or without AI. If you think about it in the past, remember how security and privacy and risk — all those concerns — blew up with the advent of the Internet and connected everything with IoT. … The tools, though, and the approaches are evolving, and AI and some of the other new tech adoption just broaden the scope of what we have to do .… Frankly, it’s a cold war. The bad actors get new things, and we have to get new things. And so we really just continue to keep an eye out, be very intentional.
Bertolini: In an age of partnership and collaboration, and everything else that has come along with it, what can partners do? And what can they do to help you get where you want to go in 2024?
Vallejo: We cannot go it alone. From these partnerships, what we’re looking for is information collaboration with all of our products. Whereas before, we would get a product and we would release into our environment, and it was kind of our responsibility to secure it to make sure that it met our requirements. But now those products can be our vulnerability; (they) can be that entrance into our environment. So we need to make sure that they’re locking down their products, that they’re showing us how to secure them, how to make sure that we can be effective in deploying those products. We also need these partners to be leaders within their technology quadrant. … We just can’t stand by (partners) that aren’t going to continue to invest in their product. And so with that, we have a successful relationship; if they don’t, then we find somebody else who’s going to provide those services for us.
Gjestvang: I think the best way to engage is through coming to the Bay Area Digital Government Summit session that we’re going to be having here, or other types of associations, like the California County Information Services Directors Association. … We need to work with partners to help assist us in getting things done and getting what we need. … The other thing that we do as far as outreach is that we do requests for information, requests for quotes, requests for proposals.
Massey: We already partner with our private sector for our bread-and-butter applications. I mentioned that we really are trying to move to sustainable systems and applications, and so we are looking more and more to the vendor community to provide those. Also, as Mario mentioned, we really look to our vendors to partner upfront when we are looking at solutions. And particularly as we’re going through negotiations and contracting, we have a robust governance process that includes compliance reviews and contract language. And so it definitely is for security. But we also have digital accessibility, the ADA requirements, architecture and now data and AI. So it’s a very robust process. And when the vendors partner with us, it makes it easier. When they don’t partner with us, like Mario, we have to move on.
The thing that comes to my mind, though, is real breakthroughs and innovation — not just replacing systems or adding something new, but real innovation. For instance, we have an innovation team challenge every year, where people from across the county make teams and they kind of do a Shark Tank; they get funding outside of the regular project process. And we really want to expand that to include our vendor partners so that these innovations grow. Here, we have a county where experimentation is encouraged. And what that really means is failures, OK, but we need to fail forward. Some things won’t scale; some things won’t work out. But we’re really starting to look to our third-party vendors to help us with those innovative ideas.
*e.Republic is Industry Insider — California's parent company.
