Commission Hears What’s ‘Dumb,’ ‘Sucks’ and ‘Needs to Die’ in California IT

On Thursday, the Little Hoover Commission asked experts from in and outside government how California can better handle the process of buying, building and managing IT, avoiding the slow, costly and ultimately unsuccessful megaprojects that have become commonplace.

The answer they got, in so many words, was fundamental overhaul.

“There’s a lot that is going on in this space in reform of government IT generally, and I’ve come to the conclusion that most of what happens is actually extending the life of a system — and I mean a system, broadly, I don’t mean a particular IT system — but a way, a framework in which we build and buy technology, that just needs to die,” said Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America and one of the commission’s witnesses. “It needs to go away, it needs to be replaced by something new.”

In other words, to truly improve IT, the witnesses said California will need buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders, including elected officials. And it will need that change to be comprehensive, not piecemeal.

Pahlka has spoken in the past about shifting IT to a "product operating model" as opposed to a project-focused model.

This is the second of three hearings the commission has held on the subject, with last month’s echoing some of these ideas while delving into specific changes the state could make.

Aside from Pahlka, the commission heard from:

• Jeffery Marino, director of the Office of Data and Innovation (ODI)
• Anne Crew-Renzo, ODI’s deputy director for government affairs and innovation training
• Mary Ann Bates, executive director of the California Cradle-to-Career Data System
• Jennifer Saha, CEO of Golden Bridge Strategies

Pahlka warned against small changes that make only part of the process better, saying they keep the state from engaging in the hard work of fundamental reform. And some people will have incentives to keep the system complex because they benefit from that complexity and cost.

“In order to change how we work, we have to align how these projects are funded, how they are staffed, the team structures, the roles … what kinds of people are they hiring for, what authority to make decisions do they have, is somebody accountable, how do they do their road mapping and prioritization practices, what kind of metrics of success they’re held to and what the oversight looks like on the back end,” she said.

Therefore, said Saha, real change will need the support of many people who can create cover for each other and recognize the needs of different stakeholders — or risk failure.

“Vendors just want predictability and access. Oversight entities want control, departments want speed [and] flexibility, and policymakers want accountability,” Saha said. “Durable reform has to reconcile all those pressures.”

Funding is a big piece of that, with a long budget cycle and entrenched processes at the state’s financial oversight bodies favoring big, slow-moving projects over faster, more iterative work. Not to mention resources that constrain the ability of projects to scale.

"The budget situation really sucks," Marino said.

So one piece of reform, Marino and Saha suggested, could be simply removing much of the IT work from the state’s most stringent oversight apparatuses — or even avoiding a technology component in the first place. Saha praised the state’s recent change allowing higher thresholds for formal procurement.

David Beier, who sits on the commission, suggested more work could be done on procurement thresholds.

“We have a one-size-fits-all procedural labyrinth that agencies and vendors have to go through whether it’s $5 million or $500 million. That seems dumb,” he said.

Marino gave examples of his department’s work in avoiding IT. He told the story of an agency that asked ODI to build an application, to which ODI responded by asking whether an application was really necessary — and in the end assisted the agency in changing its processes instead.

While the overall message of the day was fundamental reform, Marino suggested that smaller successes and storytelling will help create the buy-in necessary for bigger movement.

“None of them want to fail. None of them want to spend 10 years or a billion dollars on something that’s not going to provide outcomes for Californians,” he said. “But ultimately it’s that partnership-building that the Governor’s Innovation Fellows has really allowed us to supercharge, because they’ve been able to come in with a beginner’s mindset, with a non-threatening approach and with an internal-to-government subject matter expertise, but with a charge to innovate and partner with departments to find alternative solutions to the status quo.”

The commission plans to hold its third and most likely final hearing on this subject on June 25, with a focus on state officials.