As part of Industry Insider — California’s ongoing efforts to inform readers about state agencies, their IT plans and initiatives, here’s the latest in our periodic series of interviews with departmental IT leaders.
Nina D’Amato is chief information officer at Santa Clara County, a role she has had since February. D’Amato’s time at the county dates to November 2019, when she joined as director of information technology in the Office of the CIO, a role she had for more than two years. D’Amato then served as associate CIO for business services for a year before being named CIO. Before joining the county, D’Amato was chief of staff in the Department of Technology at the consolidated city-county of San Francisco for nearly four years. Her career also includes four years as intelligence program officer with the U.S. Marines, followed by nearly two years as director, education portfolio for the Marines Southwest Regional Command, International Security Assistance Force Afghanistan; and more than a year as a U.S. Congressional Fellow for Pennsylvania Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey.
D’Amato has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington, a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and she is a Master’s of Business Administration candidate at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Her professional licenses and certifications include being Scrum Master Certified by the Scrum Alliance and being certified in Strategic Management and Innovation by Coursera.
Industry Insider — California: As CIO at your organization, how do you describe your role? How have your role and responsibilities changed in recent years in terms of their intersection with IT and innovation?
D’Amato: Santa Clara County’s a large county. This particular IT department supports three hospitals and around 60-plus business lines. The IT department is consolidated, so it’s about 950 employees. We have the business side and we have the technology side, and our budget’s around $480 million for operations and the projects [budget] is like $110 million. It’s a great team, super-talented employees that come from all over the Bay Area to work here. Which is Silicon Valley, of course. Our real focus here is to ensure the county executive can modernize the whole county. I mean, that’s really what we’re doing here. That means modern business systems with modern practices underriding them. It means digital services for the residents. And we’re going live with our new .gov website next week, so that’s wonderful. We just did a go-live in the last 10 days. We put in a new 911 system. Immediately when he [the county executive] took the leadership role, he just started executing on a variety of projects that were in the queue. So, that’s been great. He and the chief operating officer really focused on that. That’s wonderful for this role because it’s a lot of support. Consistent with the industry, we’re also focused, because of just the costs, with inflation and all that, we’re also focused on streamlining operations. Really a focus on the business systems themselves and ensuring that the core business systems are resilient, future-proofed. And all in the cloud. That’s really the focus under this role. But it’s also fun ’cause it’s a great group. The leadership team’s great. And then the employees are just very dedicated. They definitely have chosen purpose, so they’re excited to offer the residents of the county and the departments that support those residents just anything and everything. They’re 24/7 types. Mission-focused. So, it’s fun to come to work every day, that’s for sure. That’s really our external focus. Internally, we’re really focused on our customers. The county has about 26,000 employees, so we’re very focused on ensuring we do the core competencies and services right and correctly and smooth it out for the customers. We’re also focused on enterprise governance internally, to make sure that we fund the right priorities. And I think in a county this size, it could be easy to get distracted ’cause there’s so many cool technologies out there. But really before we get too cool, we’ve got to get to the fundamentals. And fundamentals need to be best-in-class. So, governance is the key here in something this large. And then there’s the people, like focusing on that workforce and ensuring they’re trained up, they get lots of opportunities to go to conferences and trainings. We’ve invested in open online course platforms, so we really have expanded our ability for learning. We always say, like, one, you should be going to at least one conference a year, hopefully two. And then, the stretch goal is, you should be speaking at some of these conferences. That’s a stretch goal, but we always sort of celebrate it when people do that. And, like I said, we have our three hospitals. We have a very active chief healthcare technology officer who is sought after and speaks at several conferences. We have an expert in data centers running operations, which is the largest portfolio. We have a very capable CTO and another associate CIO that runs the business side and the delivery side. I’m just so thankful for a great team.
IICA: Does your organization have a strategic plan, and may we hyperlink to it? How big a role do you personally play in writing that strategic plan?
D’Amato: Yes, it’s a three-year strategic plan, and we developed it over the last six years. The shift this time was, start with the customers and what are their priorities. That’s the major input. Then, we start to synthesize all that data and create goals for each area of the business. And then we have our technology goals as well, like hybrid environment. We want to ensure that anything that can go to the cloud will go to the cloud; invest in our architecture functions so we understand the road maps. We understand what we’re sitting on because we’ve consolidated, inherited a lot of applications, some custom, some not. But a lot. So, prioritizing that cleaning up, because a lot of those applications aren’t necessarily relevant anymore, or they have one user. But anytime you add new stuff, it increases the complexity of the landscape. The CTO is really focused on that. I think what was the most fun about the strategic plan is the values and the guiding principles. We have a real focus on the customer. That is where the rubber meets the road for the residents. We need to ensure that our customers have very solid ways to deliver the services, from their workstations all the way to the actual services they deliver to the residents themselves. So that’s a big focus for us. Simplicity in practice. We can complicate everything if we want to, for everybody. We try to keep it very simple. It’s about comprehension for the customers. It’s about them agreeing with us that, indeed, the IT department knows what they’re talking about, because they have conveyed to us in very simple terms, as simple as possible, what the options are. We try to work very closely with the business on that. That’s a challenge, actually.
Editor’s note: Find the county of Santa Clara’s FY24-26 IT Strategic Plan here.
IICA: What big 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?
D’Amato: One of our major focuses is the business system. That’s the whole [enterprise resource planning] ERP portfolio. And that’s really focused on modernization, upgrades, new software systems that reflect a more modern work environment. And, really, working with the business to modernize the workflows. The CEO and the team is very focused on that. The other areas that we’re very focused on are implementing the new regulations around [California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal] CalAIM which, for our hospitals, really kind of smooths out how we deliver services and how we leverage our core system in the hospital called HealthLink. And we serve about 3.4 million patients, so that’s a priority for the county. Another area we’re really investing in is public health. And ensuring they have the right kind of platform to get the data they need to make decisions about a multitude of questions that come up around public health. And this is in light of COVID-19. I think that makes a lot of sense, but that’s been newer for us ’cause we have been building this new data lake for them in partnership with a vendor. Another area that comes to mind is public safety and justice. We’re implementing a new jail management system, a new probation system. All of that is sort of queued up and we’ve been working on developing this for a few years, but now we’re ready to start executing. But as far as like new RFPs, modernizing business systems, that’s a key one. Public health. Back to the ERPs, supply chain, that’s huge for us. And I think underriding all of that is really this idea that we’ve got to ensure that we can maintain resiliency in these systems, because for us, COVID was such a wake-up call. Another fun one we have going is, ensuring that we understand a way to safely integrate generative AI into all the software systems. Because all the ubiquitous software that’s floating around the county, it’s getting baked into the software, so it’s everywhere. We have an AI work group and the county executive and the chief operating officer are heavily engaged in that. We’re very interested in where it could take us as a county. So that’s been fun, to watch it come up. We do a lot of testing and testing environments and it’s just really exciting to see. We’re waiting to see where that goes.
IICA: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?
D’Amato: I think just [being] really focused on service, digitizing services to the residents, is what the residents want and need. They want a hybrid exchange with their local government. That’s really one of our major focuses this decade. And with the .gov website launch next week, that’s the beginning of that journey for us. We certainly have some services online, but we have a lot more growing to do in that area. IT service management, that’s another area we’re looking at really investing in. In the next five years. We run about 225,000 service tickets a year, so we are a core service to the county. And as such, we we need to invest in our own operations.
Editor’s note: Santa Clara County’s new website launched Sept. 26.
IICA: How do you define “digital transformation?” How far along is your organization in that process, and how will you know when it’s finished?
D’Amato: It’ll never get done. But honestly, I think off-the-shelf software at this point is so sophisticated and it’s becoming more sophisticated with generative AI that it actually forces business practices to modernize. And so, I think that is a gift for an organization as complex as this. Because we have a lot of custom-built software that is actually quite sophisticated as well, but maintaining that has become very challenging. And ensuring that we can keep up with the requests from the customers, it becomes — it’s not sustainable. I think as we look at new software coming out in the marketplace, we like to think about how the business can shift its practices to meet the cloud-[software as a service] SaaS products that we’re being introduced to. And I think generative AI has shifted it significantly, so it’ll be exciting to see what comes in the next five years.
IICA: Approximately how much of your organization is now in the cloud?
D’Amato: Well, we have three data centers, so that’s great. And they’re very solid. I would say it’s like 30 percent in the cloud at this point. You always have to evaluate what makes sense with these applications. I think there certainly is a lot of appetite to invest in [disaster recovery] DR. That’s another area that we’re heavily investing in and we work closely with the CISO on that. Our major applications are all resilient, so that’s helpful. But you can always get better.
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?
D’Amato: Well, certainly review the strategic plan. It’s our priorities, so don’t come sell us drones. LinkedIn’s great. Or they can email with me. We’re always interested in talking to people that have products that meet our needs. We set aside time for it actually, like quarterly. And there’s hundreds [of tech companies] in Silicon Valley. There’s over 6,000 tech companies here.
IICA: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
D’Amato: I think what I’m most proud of is being focused on developing a culture that can meet the demands of accounting. That is by far the most important piece. I have very capable leads that can implement any project, but it’s really about the culture of the organization and ensuring that we’re customer-focused, meeting the demands of the business smartly, with all our expertise in technology. So we ensure that we get this organization ready for the next 15 years. I think that’s what I’m most proud of. But I’m still learning, so I don’t want to think that I’ve accomplished that for anything. It’s just a journey. Developing leadership, management, it’s all incredibly important in ensuring that the people feel like they can contribute at every level.
IICA: What has surprised you most this year in government technology?
D’Amato: I think it’s interesting how fast generative AI is shifting the landscape. That’s exciting. But it needs to be done carefully, especially with the businesses that we’re involved with, like health care, public safety and justice. There’s so much data in the county, and so we have to ensure we’re just careful with how we integrate it into the systems. And the acquisitions that have gone on in the industry. Usually these companies don’t move that fast, but they’ve been moving very fast. That’s exciting, but also a little nerve-wracking.
IICA: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?
D’Amato: I’m a big fan of [the TLDR newsletter] TLDR. I read the CIO Journal [from The Wall Street Journal], I read GovTech*. I think those are my top three. I read the blogs.
IICA: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?
D’Amato: I like spending time with my family and friends. I’m also an MBA candidate at Haas, at Berkeley. I haven’t graduated yet, but I spend a lot of time reading — well, I have this great class on AI coming up, so I’m excited about that.
*Government Technology magazine is a publication of e.Republic, which also produces Industry Insider — California.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
County CIO: ‘We Try to Keep It Very Simple’
