“We have a global health pandemic,” said CIO Rob Lloyd, who heads IT for the Silicon Valley city, speaking last week in a webinar on how CIOs are adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We also have an economic recession that’s unlike any we’ve seen before; and last, we have the realities of equity and civil unrest that are causing us to have conversations that we haven’t had in the past.”
Lloyd, a frequent speaker and presenter at gov tech conferences, sees the turbulence that’s rocking IT and virtually every other industry as something that, if handled properly, could yield some positive long-term outcomes even as he acknowledged the tragedies of lost lives, occupations and economic well-being.
“It’s absurd how much we’ve changed in just a few months – but also impressive,” Lloyd said. Indeed, the metrics show some of San Jose’s pandemic-prompted gains in the use of government technology:
- From January to June, the city has had a 6,200 percent increase in the number of online meetings of the City Council and other municipal bodies. “We’ve multiplied how many people attend our meetings, how many e-comments we get, and how many people speak at public meetings,” Lloyd said. “We are better-prepared for this today than we’ve ever been before. We need to be very focused and very honest.”
- The number of city employees using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to log in for work has gone from 80 to almost 1,000 – an increase of about 1,200 percent.
- The number of city employees using Microsoft Teams for online video communications and meetings has gone from 400 to 1,100.
- And the city’s printing volume for municipal documents has dropped 72 percent.
“We have a data unit, we have daily scrums – we’ve become very Silicon Valley-ish in how we respond to and recover from the pandemic,” he said.
But while the pandemic has forced federal, state and local government to adopt new ways – working remotely, conducting more public business online and generating a faster pace of innovation – there’s a risk, he said.
“The catch is that we need to keep ourselves from getting exhausted.”
Looking ahead past the exhaustion, Lloyd said: “The first order of magnitude is that we have to transition to a virtual organization. Then we need to actually re-engineer and re-render services that are going to be more optimized for this new normal. But ultimately, we are going to test ourselves by saying, ‘How do we address the new needs that are out there?’ Those are the disasters that are hitting us.
“How is IT supporting those things, which actually are very unlike anything that we’ve dealt with as a city in the past? … This is a unique moment in time. It is the best of times, in the sense that people are stepping up, the resistance (to change) is low, and we’re changing at a pace that’s very rare. It’s also the worst of times, in that we have to remind ourselves that people are suffering. … IT has a chance to help in a more profound way than it usually does.”
Lloyd noted that there have been some silver linings – “some wins” – as a result of the city being forced to adapt to the pandemic and its ripple effects.
“We are closer to our departments and more unified about what we’re trying to do than we’ve ever been,” he said. “Part of that is IT stepping out of its normal boundaries, and because our departments have said, ‘We trust you and we need you,’ we’re all working toward these goals together. It is profoundly rewarding, but also we’re getting to do some fun, amazing things that are having a deep impact.
“We’re going to be banking on the credits that we’ve built with each other during this crisis for many years to come, and our relationships are stronger for it. These are the moments that matter. Later in our careers, we’re all going to look back on this and be very proud of the way people have stepped up – in our case, including our vendor partners.”
